Deviant Abstraction

Directly from the mind of Bruce Sterling

Link (via Core77)

I am in Paris from Thursday afternoon to Monday. So if you are in the neighborhood and want to see me, fire me an email.

I am looking forward to it.

(Nice pic from K R Fulton, click on it to see more of his work)

I was in the middle of my migration from Dedibox to Dreamhost. I did it for cost and time reasons (this time the server is shared so I just have to update my applications not the system). I backup my files, save them locally…

While uploading them to my new hosts, I see some weird htaccess files owned by root in the transfer log. I never wrote them. Weird, let us see what they are maybe they are written by my webapplications…

A htaccess file can redirect all web requests to another server. Root is the user on *nix system with all the rights.

After reading those files, I was sure I never set them up. They were redirecting every visitor coming from a search engine to a porn site (I simplify a little bit).

This means my webserver had been compromised. The hacker had all full control of my server so he could have deployed new PHP scripts in the middle of my applications. The new hypothetical scripts could give him access to my new system. For instance, my new hosting provider. I had to review every line I imported to my new hoster to make sure I did not import a backdoor.

I imported the bare minimal system (in this blog case: database export and skins) and reinstalled everything from scratch. This took me only a week (well I have a real job also)

Of course, some friends (Luc and Fred) warn me about weird redirection… But I was in the middle of my DNS redirection and they were using Google and Firefox (which often redirect by itself using the first result of Google).

The lesson of all that: listen to your friends…

I am back. Please accept my apologies for the interruption of service. I will explain later what happened. Please contact me in case of any weird things you see.

Thanks

My blog is moving from one host to another for cost reasons. If you see any issue, please report them to me.

Thanks

Telecommuting is the new way of working. It suits better employees since they can spend more time at home. It suits better employers since they pay for a result and not anymore for a specific slice of time. Employers and employees spare money since one pays less office space and the others spare commuting costs. It can be partial (only a few days) to complete (”irl” meeting happens only a few times a year).

Telecommuting does not enforce a new organisation. Usually it is the same, a little bit more rigourous and supported by tons of low cost IT (e.g. VPN, Intranet). There is only one to three days a week in the workplace; the others are at home. Meetings and main communication happen during those workplace time. ((A totally telecommuting organisation requires a deeper organisational shift.)) This kind of telecommutign is widely accepted and practiced from center operators to executives.

To my surprise, some companies (luckily not mine) refuse to allow telecommuting at all. What I do not understand in this case is why they hire people since they obviously do not trust them. I even do not understand why employee now accept such a disrespectful policies.