Deviant Abstraction

Normally I do not like reposting… But this one was just so great.

As usual the great XKCD.

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This is the view from my balcony.

As I think you all know I have moved from France to Austria. I kept my French phone line since I have this phone number since more than 10 years. I gave my new address to my operator, SFR, so they can send me the bill… In the process, the address turns out not to be correct (either my fault or their)….

Finding out about this (the bill probably bounced), SFR simply suppressed my phone line and billed me 100 euros. In parallel, I keep receiving on my email address their commercials and my correct address is in the white page.

No one at this company had the idea of sending me an email. I found this out by calling them since I was worried not to receive any bill from them (I called them one month after the bill was due).

Conclusion: never ever use SFR… The way they have managed me is simply unacceptable. I am a 10 years customer spending a lot of money at them every month. I have now brought my business to Orange.

An interesting interview from Jeff Bezos. He discusses Amazon strategical thinking and how it is linked to its corporate culture. I am a big fan of them, although I wonder how it is really inside. There is in this big organisation always a wide gap between exec levels and regular people.

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Directly from the mind of Bruce Sterling

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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…

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

Thanks

Find out which Transformer you are at LiquidGeneration!

Jealous? Take the test and enjoy the commercial for the US army (between they speak of army values… Where was the last time I heard the word value in France…).

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(From a Web based config)

An interesting report from the excellent Read/Write Web blog on an interesting conference.

Two different but interesting thread of ideas have emerged at this conference:

1) Future of Web

• Deportalization or SOA for consumer (remember the original Web services vision?)
• Personnalization (actually those two ideas are deeply coupled)

(source: Flickr)

2) European start-up

• Be ambitious
• Fail if needed
• Think big

(Same remarks those three ideas are corollaries of the think big meme)

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