Halleynet Headspace

As I have so many clients now running wordpress as a back end sooner or later problems are going to occur when the site going through a seemingly innocuous plugin update  becomes stuck in maintenance mode. The cause might be accidental, unwittingly self caused, network or server related. But fundamentally whats happened is you kicked off an update and probably clicked away or  were disconnected from the page where the update was taking place.

When you try to access the site you get a site down for maintenance message, come back in a few minutes, but it never clears! Don’t Panic, thats OK as you know the admin and user sections are independent….. you can login there ……..but it still shows the maintenance message. Now Panic!

OK stop panicking and go open up an ftp client and login to your site. Look in the directory where WordPress is hosted- the top level directory of the wordpress installation. Look for a file called .maintenance and delete it.

Now refresh the site in your browser, all should now be well, and you should be able to login again. I recommend you either redo the plugin update correctly this time or if in doubt, do the update manually, usually just a case of uploading the new plugin files over ftp.

Hope this helps

I don’t think this is in anyway new but its the first time I have personally come across it. I received an email from someone calling themselves Avery claiming to represent the Asian Domain Registration Service and claiming that a domain name I own here in .co.uk format was being registered as a brand in asia under a number of far eastern tlds. The mail appears to give the impression of being that of a public service format, ie they are giving you fair warning that someone is registering your brand name in remote domain areas. The scam here is I suspect that they get you to purchase domains through them that no one is interested in but under the pretext that they are. The give away for me is the crap English and the fact they clearly have not done their research on my “Company”…. the site in question isn’t a company!

Here is the mail I received:

(If you are not in charge of this please transfer this email to your President or appropriate person, thanks)

Dear President,

We are the department of Asian Domain registration service in china, have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on March 28, 2012. One company which self-styled “Sherl Industrial Co. Ltd” were applying to register “xxxxxxxxxxxxxx” as Network Brand and following domain names:

 xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.asia xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.cn  xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com.cn  xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com.tw  xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.hk  xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.in  xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.net.cn  xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.org.cn xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.tw

After our initial checking, we found the name were similar to your company’s, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized this, we will finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we will handle this issue better. Out of the time limit we will unconditionally finish the registration for “Sherl Industrial Co. Ltd”.

Best Regards,                                     Avery Yang

Registration Dept.

Tel: +862885915586  ||  Fax: +862885912116

Address:8/F XiYu building No,52 JinDun Road,QingYang District,Chengdu City,China.

I also found this useful post which mentions a number of the domains involved in this racket and you can see the ever so slightly varying format of the emails.

Feel free to fire it in your e-trash!

The concept of the chain letter has moved I notice these days from annoying emails that insist you pass them on or suffer your head falling off, your family dying horribly or spending the rest of your life in a gutter, to spam posts on Facebook that the gullible blindly repost. Two minutes to check a story is all it takes and you don’t need a degree in computer science to do this!

Subjects are legion and quite what the motivation is to launch these things I am not always sure but God do they do the rounds and people blindly repost. “DON’T CHANGE THIS SETTING IN FACEBOOK IT WILL STEAL ALL YOUR INFORMATION AND INFECT YOUR PC!”, “John suffered horrific injuries in a bike accident, in this his hour of need pray for him and repost on your facebook status”. And you know people blindly do, accepting the word because a “friend” told them. And so they propogate the garbage….

The one about the bike accident, and the wording here is not correct but the idea is, had been going round for 6 years in various ways ( not solely in facebook as far as I can tell). Its so old there is no one who can tell you if it ever started as a genuine post or was ever simply contrived. But in short the rule is- unless you 100% know for yourself that something is genuine and factual, you would do better to simply delete the request to repost as a waste of bandwidth.

In truth its too late there are too many of the gullible out there and these things have gained traction.

How to spot this stuff:

• Always mistrust anything thats asks to be reposted!
• Anything that says you will catch a virus from changing a setting on a Social Networking site- why worry- you have Anti Virus right?
• you won’t catch a virus- more like someone wants you to retain some setting thats actually benefitting them by way of seeing what your up to on fB than locking it down
• If you are worried, set all your settings in fB to the most Private and then undo the ones you decide are safe.
• If you are worried about your posts being seen on the wider web, DO NOT POST THEM ON FACEBOOK!!!!! There are no secrets on the web.
• When you get a repost request, take some of the key text- no more than 10 words, but something key to the post and paste it into Google. You will be surprised how much has been written on many of these posts.
• Subscribe to the HOAX-SLAYER list on Facebook. This guy really knows his stuff, I beleive he is a fB employee and posts on all the crap going round.
• This list is not definitive.
• and remember just because you got it from a friend does not mean its true!

Be safe.

Unsolicited calls are being received by some web users from a company that call themselves techaviators, they have a number of websites with both .co.uk and .com tlds which you can look up yourself if you are interested.

The calls are made on the premise that your pc is generating some sort of error which has been picked up on the internet either by the IP carriers generally or your isp. They point you to your pc event log and point out these “errors”. if you have a pc and look in your event log you will always see errors in there and while not ideal , in general they are in no way indicative of serious problems or internet detectable issues.

They then get you to download remote access software and login to do their mischief on your pc. At best they point you to a number of bogus issues on your PC which they then charge you some sort of mtce contract to resolve/maintain. I have heard though that they can  install some sort of malware with which they can effectively format your disk if you don’t pay up or co operate. This allegation is unverified by me.

The phone numbers they present are bogus ( the calls originate in Asia- most likely India) Also you will find they present themselves with very European names like “Claire Smith”, “Roger Jones” but have a very distinct Indian accent- the names are obviously bogus.

If they call- tell them you don’t have a pc or better still hang up.

On no account allow them to access your PC, install software or give them Credit Card details. If you have given over access or details I strongly urge you to change passwords on all sites you use (especially those with financial liabilities- online banking, PayPal, stockbrokers, gambling, or e- retailers that retain payment info like Amazon or Google). When changing passwords use something unique on each site and at least 8 characters including one non alpha numeric wherever possible like a “@” or ! character.

If you need more advice on setting secure passwords, get in touch.