Brandlink Communications, TheBloggess, PR Fails, and Fallout

Before reading the rest of this post, if you are not already an avid fan of TheBloggess, and have not read about the PR company vice president who called her a “fucking bitch” due to him being clueless who it was his company was pitching, then you should start here first: Brandlink Communications. Go ahead and read it now, I will wait.

[cue elevator music]

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I Finally Figured Out Who Jason Calacanis Reminds Me Of

In all of the discussions and posts about Jason Calacanis, whenever and wherever he replied to people calling him on his bullshit, it always had the same tired familiar ring to it. His statements have that tone that all scam artists and con men have utilized throughout the ages, professing their innocence despite the preponderance of evidence against them. Finally it hit me who it is that he sounds like when he is trying to defend his spammy sites…

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GoDaddy’s Suggestion For The Cause Of Their Hacks And Their Community Blog – Can You Smell The Irony?

Yesterday I blogged about the hacking situation with GoDaddy hosting and a customer service call I had with them concerning some evidence I had found. While it is true that as this has progressed GoDaddy has widened their scope in investigating what the underlying cause of these hacks are, initially they claimed that the issue was with their customers running outdated versions of WordPress. While being wrong about something like that is usually not that big of a deal, in this particular instance it proved to be beyond irksome, since a large portion of their customer base were told that it was their own fault that their sites got hacked (even in cases where the customer was up to date), and that GoDaddy was in no way to blame:

WordPress is a-ok. Go Daddy is rock solid. Neither were ‘hacked,’ as some have speculated.

After an extensive investigation, we can report there was a small group of customers negatively impacted. What happened? Those users had outdated versions of the popular blogging software, set up in a particular way. – Alicia from GoDaddy

From what I have read around the web customers were being told that it was not GoDaddy’s responsibility to fix the sites, that they only offered “limited support” in situations like this, leaving people with only the option of restoring from a backup (which would often not help even in outdated WordPress hack situations, since hacks can go undetected for months) or hiring outside help to clean things up.

You can see on the support page they have set up, What’s Up with Go Daddy, WordPress, PHP Exploits and Malware? that they still claim that outdated scripts are part of the problem. Going to that page and viewing the source reveals something almost unbelievable:

GoDaddy outdated software...?
(click to enlarge)

That’s right, in a classic “do as I say, not as I do” twist it seems that GoDaddy is in fact running an older version of WordPress (WordPress MU, based on the version number, which has the same security holes as regular WordPress) for their community blog that they are using to tell people to upgrade their WordPress versions.

To be fair, simply having an older version of WordPress does not mean that it is automatically insecure… the security fixes in the more recent versions may be minor and the known vulnerabilities might have been manually patched. I can’t know without actually digging deeper and looking if in fact the installation was vulnerable.

Then again… neither can GoDaddy in the case of their customers.

Jason Calacanis: Screw You Google, Now I’ll Sell Links Too

By now Google has to be getting more than a little embarrassed about the behavior of Mr. Jason Calacanis and his site, Mahalo.com. Aaron Wall did a very well written piece explaining how Mahalo Makes Black Look White and the spammy techniques they were employing. This isn’t the first time Aaron has blogged about Mahalo either, and talked about exactly how this makes Google look bad. For those who might not know, I have also been blogging about this recently.

While Google will ban smaller websites from their search results or from AdSense on a whim, usually it takes heavier coverage

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Scientology Suspended For “Strange Activity”

I don’t know about the rest of you, but for some reason I find this oddly poetic. 🙂

 

Scientology suspended for strange activity? Who would have thought! :)
(Click to enlarge.)

 

For those who can’t read it, it’s from http://twitter.com/scientology, and states:

Sorry, the profile you were trying to view has been suspended due to strange activity.

Yeah, like that’s a surprise!

On Freedom Of Speech And Social Media (A Quick Note To Anonymous Commenters)

I understand that on occasion people like to give fake emails when posting a comment. If you are using your real identity and just paranoid that I am going to spam you (which, by the way, I’m not) and leave a false email address, well… it’s not like I am going to verify it anyways. If it happens every so often so be it. I’d rather you use a real one, of course, but I get it.

I also understand that sometimes people don’t want to use their real names when having discussions on the web. Most, in fact, go by some handle or another the majority of the time. When they do they usually use it pretty much everywhere, but if they like to switch it up for some reason or another here and there

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Facebook / Twitter / Myspace Hacking: How To Keep It From Happening To You

Breaking into Facebook.Over the past few weeks I have noticed a sharp increase of scammers trying to get my Facebook password, and not too long ago a few people I know actually fell prey to it. Recently there was an outbreak of of similar activity on Twitter, where the attempts were being spread through direct messages, and Myspace has seen it’s share of woes with these issue as well. The methods being used to try and trick users into giving their passwords away are collectively known as phishing attempts, where the members of the site are sent a message, either through the site itself or in an email,

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