Battleangel | Personal

As I mentioned here, my hosting company was subject to a massive intrusion a few weeks ago. But that wasn’t the last of it unfortunately. I ran into something really awkward the other day as posts were being denied on Silent Nation. I couldn’t figure it out because I had no idea what to look for. After extensive trial and error I find out that the hosting company has taken “precautions” and added a blacklist of words of some sort that is supposed to ward off hackers. I mean, supposedly this was only going to be used for blocking file creation and not form posting and other operations. The words I’ve found so far were “bush” and “curl.” Try running a political site without using the word “bush.” You’d think they’d have figured that out themselves and thought twice about setting up such crude measures.

I must admit I find the whole incident a little awkward. Not just the heavy handed handling of the hacking matter and the clumsy security precautions but the “accidental” adding of certain words. It did feel like a conspiracy at least for a while there. Imagine that you had a site critical to the US and you all of a sudden found that “bush” had been put on an internal list of disallowed words. It does seem a little too convenient doesn’t it.