So I got an email today from an awesome reader of the blog. Just read…

Hi guys, just thought I would let you know about this. I recently saw someone placing my own site design in their personal portfolio as something they made and in the comments section of my blog entry on the subject someone noted that one of your designs is in there as well.

You can find the link and details on my blog entry, http://joshuabryant.com/asinne

First of all, we just want to say thanks to josh for taking the time to warn us of this INSANELY BLATANT copy of our work. It’s really cool to know that designers will actually take care of one another and not allow shady wanna-bes to steal their work without asking. It fact, it was really nice to find out from josh, simply because we think his site and work is bad ass and had not seen it before his email. I guess some good can come out of this right?

In the end though what is a designer to do? Well, it looks like someone (probably josh) sent them over some emails letting them know that stealing wasn’t cool. Now when you head over to http://inclinationstudio.com/ (the people that ripped off our work) all you get is a coming soon. So let that be a lesson to all you fakers, thieves, and con artist. Eventually we are going to find our own work and if not, another designer will. The design community knows how to watch the backs of it’s fellow members. So just do what we did. Work hard, and come up with your own ideas and skills. Your client will thank you.

thanks josh.

As a software developer I’m constantly challenged with avoiding annoying spammers. I easily spend 30% of my time working against people that serve no purpose but to bother me. The challenge isn’t simply blocking bots and spammers on development projects, it’s balancing the blockage with the loss of real users.

A good test case, the techdiversions.com mailing list. The concept is simple, a side-panel area where visitors can sign up for our mailing list to receive industry news, video game promotions and game release dates. The mailing list, from a business perspective, keeps users remembering who you are so they come back next time to buy from you and not your competition.

Enter the spam bot. This little bot comes along each day and causes endless headaches for my wife, the store owner, when she wants to manage her mailing list and user-base. This bot, for whatever reason, signs up for the mailing list with bogus e-mail addresses five times a day with ten new sign-ups each vist. Thats around 50 new sign-ups a day!

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Recently, the “digg clone” CMS Pligg was informed of a security attack that can compromise the entire management system by a hacker.

It’s only a matter of time before a hacker exploits the vulnerability because this is an open sourced project and anyone can see the code changes, thus a hacker with some coding knowledge should be able to reverse engineer (quickly) the code and begin writing an exploit.

I’ve contacted one of the Pligg folks to get more information on the situation so that we at Media Crumb want to know the in’s and out’s of the problem spot and work our clients through the solution. For Pligg projects that do not alter the sources or have not altered the login sources, its a snap to update.

For those that have manually altered the sources, the diff’s are a bit more complex. Make sure, however, you get the update installed. You can find more on Pliggs forum here and get the updates you need a.s.a.p!