bl(e)nd|wire.net Blog

Here’s a fantastic free MMORPG for you, Sword of the New World, and a new expansion out later this month.

To get to the expansion pack the entire server has to collaborate to kill a Hill Giant that crushes individual players like fleas…neat concept.

Remember a few weeks ago there was all that noise about WordPress blogs getting hacked? Remember how everyone was urged to upgrade their blogs. You did upgrade didn’t you? No? It was inevitable that you’d be hacked. If you haven’t been hacked yet, it’s only a matter of time.

If you’re like the rest of those poor, lazy saps that got their Wordpress site hacked, it’s time to clean up and upgrade.  And if you don’t know if your site got hacked, before you read this article, read my earlier tip on how to tell using a text-based-browser.

I’m not going to repeat what Holy Shmoly! has already written.  But if you managed to find this article first, please (PLEASE!!!) head over to their blog and read the full article on how to protect your site from the scumbags…

If you’ve been hacked

1. Upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.
2. Make sure there are no backdoors or malicious code left on your system. This will be in the form of scripts left by the hacker, or modifications to existing files. Check your theme files too.
3. Change your passwords after upgrading and make sure the hacker didn’t create another user.

The Age of Conan review snippet:

Funcom succeeded on several fronts with their much-anticipated MMORPG. It’s got a different, enjoyable gameplay style, offers a free-for-all PVP experience that fits with Robert E. Howard’s fiction and boasts outstanding audio and graphical packages. It also offers fairly standard quest chains, a lackluster crafting system, and three weeks outside of launch still has plenty of technical issues, content either missing or unfinished, and is still in need of quite a bit of polish. Does Conan have the groundwork to eventually become a fantastic game all-around? Sure. Should you start playing right now? Personally, I’d hold off for a few months until more of the game is patched up.

Screenshot

The good news about this game is two-fold: First, it has awesome graphics, and second, it has a point and click combat system, making the melee feel all that much more realistic…

Meta Score

Home Page

So I’ve long been a fan of AVG’s free internet security.  It’s been fast, effective, and for those of you who don’t need it for “commercial” purposes, it’s been very, very free.  Everyone likes free.

Unfortunately, AVG’s latest update–it’s migration from version 7.5 to 8.0–has been a disaster of near-epic proportions.  Okay, epic might be a bit much.  But after one week with AVG 8 installed on my home PC, I’ve abandoned it altogether.  So, for someone with years of loyalty to the software, I guess epic might not be a huge stretch.

Why abandon the product?  Well, let’s just say that I prefer my internet to work.  After install we immediately noticed that the internet itself seemed to have slowed.  Pages were timing out right and left.  Both Firefox and IE7 were stalling, freezing, crashing (burning!)

I tested my internet connection.  It was absurdly slow as usual (but still faster than the performance I was getting in actuality).  One can’t help living where “broadband” (called Cheetah High Speed Internet) is not actually all that broad.  Nevertheless, I was used to a pretty good clip whilst browsing and suddenly said clip had disappeared.  Page after page came back with error messages.

I uninstalled AVG and replaced it with Avast! and to my relief the internet had returned to its former self.  I could browse at a reasonable pace.  I could check my email without having to refresh the page three times.

In fact, after my little week-long affair with AVG 8.0, I can safely say that the only thing good about the “update” is the much nicer icon that appears in your taskbar.  It’s much nicer than the previous icon….

So I downloaded Lynx browser and opened up one of my blogs in a text-only format and what do I find? It’s all spam! Spam and more spam! Apparently the site that I thought was about my personal life is actually (or was until I fixed it) about buying drugs. I was, inadvertently, helping people obtain black market viagra. Or cialis. Or some other pill. Somehow my Wordpress them had been hi-jacked. A clean install and some password shuffling, and all is well.

But it was scary, and probably was aversely effecting my search engine optimization.

Bummer.

So I recommend you download Lynx post-haste and open up your site. Another good idea is to use Google Webmaster Tools and see what their Googlebot is seeing. You might find that while your top keywords should be “computer” or “game” they are in fact “viagra” and “xanax” which might make your adsense show some pretty off-topic adds.

Wouldn’t want that, would you?