Tanktastic
This is a tank in Downtown Dekalb.
After installing WordPress here on the previously redirected nic.dreamhost.com, I had been considering trying to use it to run the blog at http://fancruft.com, which is really just an ugly way of displaying some entries from my Lavos MySQL database.
I suppose I’m glad I didn’t even have a chance to start. Today, just about everyone with WordPress 2.1.1 was scrambling to upgrade it after it was revealed that intentionally malicious code had been placed in it. I’d encourage people to read the original announcement.
I like the WordPress front-end. It shows that someone understands how people want to interact with software. But, after a problem this sever in the underlying PHP, how can you take Automattic’s (not so) subtle dig at PHPBB: “Have you ever been frustrated with forum or bulletin board software that was slow, bloated, and always got your server hacked?”
Why, yes, I think I’d like to NOT have my sites owned by the mob’s spam division very much, thank you.
I recognize that the fact that this was discovered in days, rather than months, is a testament to the “many eyes” theory of Open Source, but an intentional backdoor placed in software by a third party is about as bad as it gets.