Windows Live Account – Reset Password
Posted on 21. Nov, 2008 by Cameron in General
WTF? I rarely use my Windows Live account. Today I tried to login but couldn’t remember my user ID or my password. Tried a couple of things but they didn’t work. So I went into the “reset your password” option. They give you two options – answer some questions about your location and your “secret question” or we’ll send you an email. As I can’t remember my bloody Hotmail password, the latter option is obviously no use, so I went for the first option – however, as you can see in the screenshot, that option is actually “temporarily unavailable” because i got my password wrong on the previous screen! No shit Sherlock! What kind of morons came up with this system?
G’Day World #354 – Nanette Burstein (Director of “American Teen”)
Posted on 19. Nov, 2008 by Cameron in movies, Podcast
American Teen is a terrific documentary about 5 high school seniors in a small American town struggling with their last year of school and figuring out who they are and what they want to do with their lives.
On today’s show I chat with the director of American Teen, Academy Award nominee Nanette Burstein.
Getting Delisted By Google
Posted on 18. Nov, 2008 by Cameron in TPN
A few weeks ago, Google decided to drop TPN from its index. Why? They apparently think we’re lowly spammers. I need your help.
First, a little history –
As some of you may recall, back in March, on the day I was leaving Melbourne to relocate to Brisbane, I found out that TPN had been massively hacked. We’d parted ways with out IT partner a few months prior and had spent that time waiting for our new IT partner, a large firm in Melbourne, to get their act together and provide us with a contract to begin work. In the meantime, our servers weren’t upgraded with the latest patches, someone got in through a security hole and went to town exploiting the hell out of our backend. Almost every one of TPN’s 100+ sub-domains had hidden pharmaceutical spam all over it, our email server was sending out spam, there were even a couple of banking phishing sites.
So I spent the first week waiting for the new IT partner to help us out. As it turned out, they were useless and did nothing. So I started looking for a NEW partner. As you know, TPN runs on the smell of an oily rag, so finding a new IT partner wasn’t going to be easy. I can’t just call up IBM Global Services and offer them $1 trillion to create miracles.
However, after I called for help on Twitter, the guys from Pollenizer quickly introduced me to a firm in India called XMinds. Xminds jumped straight into our system and started cleaning it up and re-building it. They were Oscar Goldman and TPN’s servers were their Steve Austin (but they didn’t cost anywhere near six million dollars).
We cleaned out our servers (or so we thought) and re-built and re-launched. The process took about 3 weeks.
Fast forward to Nov 5 when I was notified by a few people that TPN wasn’t listed in Google’s index. I jumped into my Google web account where I found a notification from them saying they had discovered pharamaceutical spam on one of our old, long-dead sub-domains and, as a result, had delisted our ENTIRE site from their index. Not just the one sub-domain, our ENTIRE site. No warning. No communication. Just delisted us, a war of shock and awe launched on our site.
I immediately had XMinds delete the old sub-domain completely and then I re-submitted TPN into the Google index. That was 13 days ago. We’re still not listed.
I’ve asked around, trying to find someone at Google to talk to, and I’ve been told that I’m wasting my time, that the process will take 30+ days and even then there will probably be a penalty to our googlerank.
Now, I know TPN isn’t the biggest and most important site in the world. But, on the other hand, we’re not totally small fry either. We’ve got about 400,000 – 500,000 unique visitors a month and over 6 million page views a month. We’ve never done anything illegal or even dubious. I’ve always maintained a clean site. No gambling, no porn, nothing.
And, like many sites, a great deal of our traffic comes from Google. Fortunately, iTunes is probably a bigger referral of traffic, but Google is #2. And being dropped from their index is hurting us.
So… if anyone out there knows of anything we can do, or anyone we can talk to, to get TPN re-listed in Google’s index, I’d appreciate the help.
G’Day World #353 – Antony Loewenstein on Internet Censorship
Posted on 12. Nov, 2008 by Cameron in Australian politics, censorship, Podcast
Have you donated yet to the TPN Pledge Drive? Help support independent media!
My guest today on G’Day World is once again Australian journalist and author Antony Loewenstein. Antony was on a couple of months ago to discuss his excellent book “The Blogging Revolution” and today he has come back on to discuss Kevin Rudd’s desire to censor the internet and we discuss a range of things we can all do to try and stop it from happening.
Links to further reading:
Antony’s blogs:
Other articles: