modern times…

Posted on Thursday 21 July 2016

So Charlie Chaplin tried to warn us about technology in his 1936 classic, Modern Times. The french philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merlau-Ponty even named their journal, Les Temps modernes, after the film. But neither Chaplin nor the Existentialists warned us about this…

While the site was operating normally, this message appeared on a Google search of 1boringoldman.com. I contacted my hosting service as soon as I was informed. They ran a scan and found malware so they shut the site down on discovery. A quickscan of my computer came up clean, but a full scan found this:

which I removed:

For a fee, my hoster professionally scrubbed my site on the server and it’s back on-line now. The four posts marked as suspicious have been deleted [all ancient history], and my most recent post. Apparently, the hacker attacked my site through an unused website [8 years obsolete!] that had an old version of WordPress. All WordPress versions are now updated and the unused sites deleted.  I’m currently involved in getting Google to recrawl the site [which ain’t easy]. Insofar as I know, I’m squeaky clean, but I’m not going to post anything until Google’s crawler wanders through and the This site may be hacked message disappears.

I would suggest a full scan of your computer. I am profoundly sorry if this bit of modern times affected you too…
  1.  
    Bernard Carroll
    July 21, 2016 | 3:01 PM
     

    Thank you for the heads up. I ran a full scan with Norton and it came back clean. Hope everybody else is as fortunate.

  2.  
    July 21, 2016 | 4:06 PM
     
    Thanks,

    I’ve heard from multiple others by email that they scanned clean too. So I’m apparently not Typhoid Mary. I’m having trouble figuring out how to get Google to recrawl the site. I’m sure Tom Insel is behind my difficulties [just kidding]. But their fix-it stuff is pretty unintelligible. We shall overcome plays as an ear-worm as I page through Google, ever hopeful that there will be a page that makes sense. Meanwhile, I feel as if I’m wearing a Scarlet A like Hester Prynne…

  3.  
    Bernard Carroll
    July 21, 2016 | 7:38 PM
     

    My computer became infected one time 15 years ago and the virus went out to a lot of people along with fragments of the files on my hard drive… so I know the feeling! My friends ribbed me about it until they (and I) got tired of it.

  4.  
    July 21, 2016 | 9:54 PM
     

    It’s interesting to think one would go after you Dr. Nardo. Just goes to show you, there’s so many nasty, vindictive, vicious trolls out there who even if you say the mildest thing that does not go along with their attitudes Hook Line & Sinker, their responses are just basically “destroy destroy destroy.”

    Technology brings out the Id in people, and it is pretty damn ugly how people can inherently be these days…

    Perhaps not the best aside, but we’ll see where Pokemon takes people, it’s already gotten people off cliffs, getting shot at, crashing cars, I’m just waiting for someone to rob a bank and claim the Pokemon did it.

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