According to Jim

Email service providers should kill off the bitcoin extortion scam

Like everyone else with an email address, I’ve been receiving these bitcoin extortion messages for months. I’ve also observed with ever greater dissatisfaction as scammers raked in tens of bitcoins within a week. What especially annoys me is not so much that people are falling for this scam, but that email service providers are simply looking the other way.

Abandoning the Gutenberg ship

Even though I really enjoy the new Gutenberg experience from a content creator’s point of view, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the right editor for me. My dear Gutenberg, it’s not you, it’s me.

Rickrolled by Google Search Console

So I noticed this new “Recrawl now” link that had suddenly appeared in Google Search Console (beta edition) and was immediately enticed. The result however was not what I had in mind. I can deal with being fooled on April Fool’s day, but getting Rickrolled in 2018… now that’s just pure evil. Anyhow, enjoy an animated gif of Google’s trolling below.

macOS Sierra review - Behind enemy lines

I’ve never owned a single Apple product but lately I’ve been wondering how good a real UNIX certified operating system might actually be. To get my feet wet, I decided to try out macOS Sierra in a VirtualBox session on a Linux host. I’m aware that much of the Apple experience is closely connected to the hardware, but personally I was more interested in the isolated OS experience.

Season's greetings from the Chaos Computer Club

So the 34. Chaos Communication Congress is currently in progress and the boys (and girls) attending were kind enough to send some thoughtful wishes to working sysadmins around the globe. The following entry appeared in my server log earlier today:

Wordfence warns against a massive brute-force attack campaign

On the 18th of December Wordfence posted the following entry describing an ongoing distributed brute force-attack campaign targeting WordPress installations. It was accompanied by a dramatic chart highlighting the number of attacks per hour. According to Wordfence, it was the most aggressive campaign they’ve seen so far. However, as a WordPress hosting provider I’ve found no data to support these claims. I’ve not experienced any increase in dictionary attacks or other malicious traffic against WordPress installations on our web hosting platform.