TVNL Editor's Comments:  Outsmarting the Hackers! - An Eventful Week at 
TvNewsLIES.org

For those of you who have subscribed to this newsletter during the past 
few days…while I was not sending out newsletters…please forgive this 
commentary. Normally the commentary in the daily newsletter relates to 
current events in one way or another. For the rest of you…here is an 
update on what took place.

As I mentioned in my announcement the TvNewsLIES.org web site received 
multiple attacks this week. With one or two exceptions I do not think 
the attacks were related to any political reasons. So for those 
interested…here is the rundown…

Pornacopia: Someone used a security flaw on our news page to upload a 
tree of directories containing porn. You would not believe the topics 
that were included in this variety pack! I immediately deleted the 
files, closed the security hole and then I used this to our advantage! 
Thousands of people have been coming to these nonexistent directories 
because the content got into major search engines. So I took advantage 
of the situation! The porn connoisseurs who are looking for, well, you 
know, link to the now missing porn directory on the TvNewsLIES.org but 
they now end up on an error page. Well, I modified that error page in 
several ways. I placed an advertisement on the page so that we get a few 
pennies every time it is presented. I placed a link on the error page 
saying “Click Here to Find Out What Dick Cheney has to do With 9/11” 
which takes people to our 9/11 page. And I placed the on-line video 
presentation of Loose Change (9/11 documentary) right in the middle of 
the page for all to see! This way we may wake up a few extra people 
around the world to the anomalies of 9/11.  I would say that’s making 
the best of a bad situation. Wouldn’t you?

SPAM-ALAMA-DING-DONG: Apparently spambots were using the “tell a friend” 
mechanism in our shopping cart to send spam to people. The messages were 
the usual Viagra and stock tip messages that we all see. I removed the 
“tell a friend” feature until I can apply the available patches (lots of 
coding work…but I’ll get to it!)

TvNewsLIES Potatogate: Someone replaced our home page with an Idaho 
potato grower’s page. I have no idea what that was about…but we changed 
all of our passwords just in case.

Blog Fog: The administrative login files for our blog page were modified 
so that I could not log in. Hmmm…I fixed this, applied the security 
patches and updates to the blog software package and it seems fine.

Newsletter News: After upgrading to the latest version of our mailing 
list software the formatting of the newsletter was still problematic. If 
this message is formatted correctly the problem is with our new 
OpenOffice template that I created. If this newsletter is in plain 
text…I have more research to do!

  Anyway…I would like to thank those of you who have sent me kind 
supportive e-mail messages in response to the announcement. There were 
too many for me to reply to each one of them. Unfortunately we have had 
a large number of people unsubscribe this week but this comes after a 
rather long period where we have had many new subscribers and few people 
unsubscribe. If they plan on stopping me…they better try harder. 
Regardless, I would never taunt them into trying by saying something 
stupid…like “bring-em-on!”  Think about it! – Jesse, Editor,