Blogging at Work

Posted on 2012/12/06 by thinkict

Although I love WordPress for blogging, I finally managed to create a blog at work that I like using Blogger. Having Google Apps in Education (GAFE) as our primary tool for email and general productivity, it made more sense to use Blogger. I’ve invited other ConVal staff in the library & technology department to be guest bloggers, as well. So have a seat and browse through the ConVal LITS department blog!

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Strange Things Happen When Blogs are Hacked

Posted on 2012/06/10 by thinkict

My ThinkICT blog about all things ICT got hacked a few weeks ago. Because of that and the fact that I didn’t have an ideal backup copy (yeah, we all know we are supposed to backup regularly) it took me a little time to get things straightened out. One casualty of the fix is that I lost the original dates on all of my old blog posts so I had to do a “best guess” to edit them. Any blog posts before June of 2012 will likely be dated for the 10th day of some month in the past. It annoys me that I don’t have exact dates on archived posts, but at least it’s not critically important.

The timing of this very rude hack job couldn’t have been worse. I was setting up an extra blog area to use for my trip to China (the next day!) when I discovered the hack which caused all of my blog links when clicked to divert to a strange URL with a Russian (ru) address. So much for blogging while travelling!

While the site still looked great, any time I clicked a link within the site, it took me to a site that was already pulled offline. At least that was good, but the fact that no visitor could get to my posts and pages really bugged me. At least I’ve cleaned things up now. Lessons learned, for example, add as much security to your site as is reasonable.

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Network Security

Posted on 2012/04/09 by thinkict

When I worked as the State Educational Technology Director, I paid general attention to issues of network security but didn’t have to be directly involved in the geeky details. Now that I’m a tech director at the district level, I find myself looking more closely at such information.

Pwn Plug is “a tiny computer that comes preloaded with an arsenal of hacking tools… can be quickly plugged into any computer network and then used to access it remotely… comes with “stealthy decal stickers”—including a little green flowerbud with the word “fresh” underneath it, that makes the device look like an air freshener…”

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