Dave Winer tweeted this on Saturday:
I have a little spare time today so I decided to start on River3. It’ll be much much smaller and more focused than River2.
— Dave Winer ? (@davewiner) April 13, 2013
One of the things I love and admire about him is that many, many years after he doesn’t have to anymore he’s still learning, hacking, and taking free time on a weeknd to make something new. ∞
Almost 3 years ago we released a version of WordPress (3.0) that allowed you to pick a custom username on installation, which largely ended people using “admin” as their default username. Right now there’s a botnet going around all of the WordPresses it can find trying to login with the “admin” username and a bunch of common passwords, and it has turned into a news story (especially from companies that sell “solutions” to the problem).
Here’s what I would recommend: If you still use “admin” as a username on your blog, change it, use a strong password, if you’re on WP.com turn on two-factor authentication, and of course make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest version of WordPress. Do this and you’ll be ahead of 99% of sites out there and probably never have a problem. Most other advice isn’t great — supposedly this botnet has over 90,000 IP addresses, so an IP limiting or login throttling plugin isn’t going to be great (they could try from a different IP a second for 24 hours). ∞
On (Un)organized Consumption by Automattician Cheri Lucas. “I stopped using Instapaper. Early on, I relied on it as a space to store ideas and information I could draw from, but it quickly became my intellectual limbo: the unfortunate vault of forgotten stories and Twitter residue.” ∞
Filed under: tech
There have been three excellent writings on the effects and consequences of the latest boom on the Bay Area, each long but worth reading.
The East Bay Express, with a permalink I’m sure won’t work a decade from now, brings us The Bacon-Wrapped Economy:
The arts economy, already unstable, has been forced to contend with the twin challenges of changing tastes and new funding models. Entire industries that didn’t exist ten years ago are either thriving on venture capital, or thriving on companies that are thriving on it. It is now possible to find a $6 bottle of Miller High Life, a $48 plate of fried chicken, or a $20 BLT in parts of the city that used to be known for their dive bars and taco stands. If, after all, money has always been a means of effecting the world we want to bring about, when a region is flooded with uncommonly rich and uncommonly young people, that world begins to look very different. And we’re all living in it, whether we like it or not.
SFGate has The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley’s big talk on innovation:
“[I]nnovation” is something of a magic word around here, shape-shifting to fit the speaker’s immediate needs. So long as semiconductors and coding are involved, people will staple it to anything from flying cars to the iFart app.Other times it’s just code for “jobs,” used to justify asking for government favors one day and scolding them for meddling in the free market the next.
“Lower our payroll taxes because … innovation.”
“Drop that antitrust inquiry because … innovation.”But for all the funding announcements, product launches, media attention and wealth creation, most of Silicon Valley doesn’t concern itself with aiming “almost ridiculously high.” It concerns itself primarily with getting people to click on ads or buy slightly better gadgets than the ones they got last year.
The final comes from Rebecca Solnit, who I’ve quoted before, writes a diary for the London Review of Books.
I weathered the dot-com boom of the late 1990s as an observer, but I sold my apartment to a Google engineer last year and ventured out into both the rental market (for the short term) and home buying market (for the long term) with confidence that my long standing in this city and respectable finances would open a path.
TechCrunch writes WordPress.com Has Imported 15M Posts In The Last 30 Days, Remains A Top Safe Haven For Nomad Bloggers. I’m very proud of the 8+ years we’ve been a home for, and protected, our users blogs. Protection covers many aspects: backups, scalability, security, speed, permalinks, mobile versions, forward-compatible markup, clean exports… the list goes on. We’ve done the same with other internet-scale services, like Akismet, Gravatar, and Jetpack, and I hope to earn the same trust in the coming decade with VaultPress and Simperium. ∞
No to NoUI by Timo Arnall is one of the better pieces I’ve read on design and interfaces, and is also chock-full of links that will keep you busy for hours. ∞
I got this email today:
Hi Matt,I apologize for the cold email. I was researching Automattic , Inc. and wanted to ask you if there was any gaps/pains within your CMS and website. I work for the “Redhat of Drupal”, (Acquia) and we have seen an explosion of Drupal use in the Media, News, and Entertainment Industry.
Some companies using Drupal/Acquia include Warner Music, Maxim, NBC Universal, and NPR.
If you are evaluating your current system or are looking into new web projects, I would love to connect and discuss Drupal as an option.Would it make sense to connect on this? If there is someone better at Automattic , Inc. to speak with, perhaps you could point me in the right direction?
Cheers,
–
Dillon J. ********
Enterprise Drupal Solutions
Direct: (781) 238-****http://www.acquia.com
Acquia, 25 Corporate Drive Fourth Floor
Burlington, MA 01803Acquia ranked #1 Software Vendor on the 2012 Inc 500
Hmmm, maybe I’ve been doing it wrong all these years… Dillon, I’ll be in touch! ∞