Sharon Machlis on a Pioneer announcement about its new dashboard system that aims to keep drivers connected to their social networks… while driving:

I have a simple rule when it comes to what’s OK to do while driving: If you wouldn’t want your surgeon doing it while operating on your brain, don’t do it behind the wheel.

Pioneer’s take:

By providing a larger touchscreen unit installed in the dash that features a user interface specifically designed for the automotive environment and complemented by voice control features, we reduce the risk of distraction while driving.

People are already distracted enough when driving, with in-car radios, sat-navs, and hands-free kits for mobile phones (when they bother to use them), let alone other activities, such as eating and putting on make-up. But, hey, I’m sure Pioneer must have done plenty of work on this, rather than irresponsibly shoving a piece of unnecessary and dangerous technology on to the market. Because, clearly, people won’t be further distracted from not hitting things on or near the road when they’re being piped the latest Facebook and Twitter updates that couldn’t possibly wait until they’ve finished guiding several tons of metal at high speed. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

(Hat tip: Ian Betteridge.)

Top Tory Toff David Cameron revealed earlier today what “we’re all in this together” really means:

• The VAT hike, which hits poorest people worst (since they spend a larger proportion of their incomes on goods that have VAT), will stay.
• Cameron hopes the 50% tax rate, which only affects top earners, will be scrapped.

Hey, Tories, why not just allow the richest in the country not not pay any tax at all? (Oh, you already did that.)

After a late night of cleaning up the blog, I hope everything’s back to normal now. As noted last night, my primary source regarding removing the hack the blog suffered was Personified. If you run a WordPress blog, I urge you to read through the linked post and check your blog’s database and files thoroughly, just in case. Pharma hacks can hang around for months before activation, and there’s still confusion regarding how they get in. (Note that shared hosting isn’t necessarily to blame—Pearson notes he was hacked while on an $800/month dedicated box.)

For the record, the hack here was pretty textbook: two plug-ins had compromised files with very sneaky names, and a new file showed up in the root. Since I lack encyclopaedic knowledge of the names of every file on my server, it took file-count comparisons with clean downloads to find the bad files. I also had several counts of malicious code in the database, along the lines of those outlined in Pearson’s piece.

iOS dev Bob Koon was also on hand last night, providing further helpful tips, and so Revert to Saved now has a seriously beefed up .htaccess, along with a slew of new plug-ins that lock down various elements of WordPress and inform me when any changes to files are made. (Obviously, I also changed all my passwords too.) CloakingDetector seems to think compromised pages are no longer seen any differently by users and GoogleBot, so I’m hopeful that over the coming weeks Google will respider the site and things will be back to normal.

Only time will tell if everything’s fine, though, because these hacks have a tendency to reappear at random if every little last bit hasn’t been cleaned out.

I don’t tend to look at Revert to Saved in search engines much, but perhaps I should have done more vanity searches, because it appears this site has been hacked, with some variant of the pharma hack. (Search for ‘reverttosaved’ on Google and you get lots of lovely bullshit about drugs being for sale here. Great.) I’m currently lucky in that the site’s not yet been blacklisted, but that luck may not last.

What the incident has done is utterly demolish the momentum I’d been building up posting as of the New Year (something regular visitors might have noticed/been shocked by); however, until I can figure out how to deal with the exploit and fix everything, RTS is on hold.

(Note: if anyone reading this is some kind of demon when it comes to cleaning up this kind of crap, please get in touch. Unless you hate me, in which case feel free to laugh heartily.)

UPDATE: Props to Chris Pearson for some tips that have got me some way to (I hope) fixing this mess.

I have the utmost respect for indie developers, especially those who do really good work. For example, without the fantastic Scrivener and WriteRoom, my writing experience when working for magazines would be much less pleasant.

Something that’s pretty common among indie devs is reasonable price-tags. Instead of charging HUGE PILES OF CASH for even a tiny upgrade, you’ll find fantastic apps for bugger-all, with free upgrades for quite some time. This is something the Mac App Store should assist with further when it comes to indies, providing potential exposure, robust hosting and upgrades, and a simple payment mechanism.

Sometimes, though, people are dicks and don’t get the challenges indie devs face. Over at Sophiestication, evil indie dev Sophia has—like some other devs—announced that one of her apps will now be Mac App Store only. The thing is, she’d previously promised free upgrades until version 3, and this new version is 2.5. THE HORROR.

Clearly, Sophia should personally go round to every prior purchaser’s house, apologise profusely and perhaps offer to, say, do their shopping for a week, for free. Never mind that the new Mac App Store price for the app is $4.99 rather than $19.95 (i.e. effectively a tiny upgrade price and about the same cost as a couple of cups of coffee). Never mind that if you love the app you probably got more than $19.95 of value out of it anyway. Never mind that Sophia could have labelled the new version 3.0 and gotten away with it, despite her thinking that doing so would have been dishonest. No, bitch away at being ‘ripped off’ by an indie dev who creates polished, accessible, affordable software, who’s had to make a really tough business decision.

All you people moaning about how terribly disappointed you are, get over your fucking selves. It’s five bucks. If you like the software, support it. If not, just sod off and stop bitching about the amount of money you probably piss away daily (and literally) at Starbucks.