RubenerdShow.com is no longer being blocked!
Software
It's official ladies and gents, the Rubenerd Show and Rubenerd Blog are no longer being blocked by The Cathay wireless system and Starhub Internet in Singapore for hosting malware. I appealed the filtering and stated that my shared webserver was the victim of a very brief internal lax group permission enforcement code injection attack and that I had swiftly cleaned my sites of the spam malware links.
I received a message back this evening stating that my appeal had been successful and I'm now typing this blog post without using a proxy server! Hallelujah! I suspect my traffic from Singapore may start crawling back to the highs it had in December last year again.
This by no means has deterred me from moving to a new web host though; I'm already in the process of moving archived Rubenerd Show files over to the Internet Archive (you can track my progress here) and am in the process of upgrading my Segment Publishing account so I can host this blog, my podcast, my pontifications and my anime blog on there instead of just my lightly used university blog whatsit. It's going to be a massive, all in one site with everything, I'm looking forward to it!
But being serious again for a second though, this whole experience has taught me a valuable lesson: the ramifications of hosting your media on a budget web host that doesn't enforce sufficient internal security (even more important than external security) is not worth any financial savings you may glean, no matter how significant. Thousands of gigabytes of capacity and transfer per month for less than $10 may sound like a better deal than a few gigabytes of capacity and transfer a month for a similar price, but as they always say: "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.".
If you're interested in these exploits, a quick search for "Servage Hacked" on Google or Yahoo will tell you all about it and give you an idea of the extent of the damage and fallout from their lax approach to security. Scary stuff.
In any event, I'm off to brew myself a cup of green tea in celebration :)
