Rubénerd!

Suzanne Tindal writing for ZDNet.com.au:

The Australian and Music Feeds this morning flagged a spreadsheet, containing around 1500 BigPond email addresses, postal addresses and telephone numbers, that was freely accessible online. [.. Telstra] believed that the spreadsheet had been created by a consultant to use in training, and not for a malicious purpose.

It's often the case privacy and security breaches occur as a result of unwitting users, rather than someone malicious on the outside. In any event, at least they didn't display cleartext passwords again, right?

Detailed information about Telstra's customer accounts - including usernames and passwords - has been found to be sitting on the open web for anyone to access via a Google search. ~ Sydney Morning Herald

Inexcusable. No database should be storing passwords as plaintext. If people forget their passwords, they should be reset.

No doubt we'll read a press release saying they've learned a lot from their mistake, and have changed their system. Here's hoping they do learn from it, and implement some basic security protocols. They can start by ditching their revised coloured logos and going back to their retro orange one. It looks more serious, and classy.

Not to mention thousands of users access their Gmail accounts every day, so you'd think Google engineers would proof read their comments before posting them ;).

I'd never be caughtMaking such an obvious mistake.

Goodbye HP, Sorry you don't want to be in PCs anymore..But we do more than ever. How would you say goodbye to HP? ~ Michael Dell

The same way you were ready to say goodbye to Apple? That company that has enough cash to buy yours now? Don't get too comfortable Mr Dell.

Patently Apple is reporting Apple is being sued for patent infringement with their new line of Macs. Specifically:

"A method for fast booting a computer system, comprising the steps of: A. performing a power on self test (POST) of basic input output system (BIOS) when the system is powered on or reset is requested; [..] C. storing the boot configuration information from execution of the POST operation before loading a graphic interface (GUI) program, based on the checking result; [..]"

Apple computers don't have a BIOS, and configuration data is stored after the GUI launches.

Apple has infringed many patents, but this should be dismissed on the grounds of dumbness. Is that an admissible legal defence?

Are you Alaskan and worried that your country's credit rating may spill over to you? Not to fear, according to the graphic above from CNN Money at 2:52 PM Eastern US time, you're still AAA! I'm still awaiting confirmation from Bloomberg and CNBC.

In other news, I love that Singapore is represented in "The AAA Club" with a single dark pixel. Very generous, considering its land area barely qualities it for a subpixel rendered on the edge of a glyph let alone an entire pixel. Must be all that land reclamation.

Latest WordPress problem: it has decided to ignore page templates. If I go to edit a page, change the template under "Page Attributes" and click Update, it reverts back to "Default Template" each time. As such, my tags, archive and links pages are useless.

I have assignments to do so I can't waste time messing around trying to fix this, but letting you know its on my do to list. This may be another occasion where I have to bypass the web UI and fix it in phpMyAdmin.

In 2005 I decided to move to WordPress and I reaffirmed my decision in 2009 because I couldn't justify the time to port stuff over. I'm hoping I didn't bet on the wrong horse.

Ichi. While messing around in MySQL this afternoon, I accidentally duplicated thirty blog entries which appeared in the RSS feed and spammed you all. This has been fixed. Thank you to Andrew Middleton and @edible_hat for telling me!

Zwei. I merged my fun little puzzles blog into Rubenerd.com to save me time, and redirected the RSS feed. You can view the entries in their new category here... if you really want to ;).

Tree. Despite missing two days this month due to technical issues, I'm still pressing on with my #PostADay2011 challenge! 363 days isn't as cool as 365, but I'm up for it :)

I updated WordPress to 3.1 last night and as usual it broke a bunch of things. This time it stopped my method for excluding Twitter backup posts from my RSS feed. I'm frightfully sorry, I didn't mean to spam you like that!

I frantically installed Advanced Category Excluder but its also horribly broken. Fortunately, the latest beta of RYO Category Visibility works a treat, and is far simpler than ACE.

Thank you for your patience ^__^.

From about 16:50 to 16:55 UTC+11, the site was down. My bad, all good now!