beforeyoukillyourcomputer.com Saving computers one at a time from their owners

It looks like torrents isn’t the only business the Pirate Bay is concerning itself with. First there was image hosting and now there’s blogging. BayWords is the site’s foray into the world of blogging services, aiming to provide a service that does not want to restrict “uncomfortable thoughts and ideas” and let people say and link to what they want (as long as it complies with Swedish law).

Apparently one of the Pirate Bay captains, Brokep, had a friend who’s blog was shut down by linking to copyrighted material. This inspired him to offer this alternative, which runs on a customized version of a multi user install of Wordpress. The site plans to continue adding features, updates, and themes, and encourages users to “blog your heart out.”

If you’ve been looking for a place to take your blog, BayWords might offer a nice home, as long as you don’t mind having “myname.baywords.com” as your address. Or maybe you just want to be able to tell people that your blog is hosted by Swedish pirates. Or something like that. Unfortunately, it does look like ads will be implemented eventually to cover expenses, but information on bandwidth or other stats are not available at this point.

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A new bot can crack defenses erected by Microsoft to keep spammers from creating large numbers of accounts on its Live Hotmail service within seconds, a security researcher said Friday.

Dan Hubbard, vice president of security research at Websense, said the bot broke Live Hotmail’s CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) within six seconds, on average. CAPTCHA is the name given to the distorted, scrambled characters that many Web services require users to decipher and type in to create a new account; the tests are meant to block automated account registration by spammers and malware authors.

The bot, Hubbard acknowledged, is similar to one Websense uncovered in February.

“In the past, though, it was kind of questionable whether the CAPTCHA breaking was automated,” Hubbard said Friday, noting that there had been some evidence that spammers were paying people to decode and type in the CAPTCHA characters. “But the bot’s breaking [CAPTCHA] in six seconds, so it’s definitely automated.”

In a long post to the Websense blog Thursday, Sumeet Prasad — “our CAPTCHA expert,” said Hubbard — provided technical details of how the bot automatically registers Live Hotmail accounts and then immediately begins using those accounts to spew spam.

The bot’s total response time — how long it takes the program to grab a CAPTCHA image, analyze it and return with the correct code — is considerably shorter than that of earlier such bots, said Prasad in the blog.

One in every eight to 10 attempts to create a Live Hotmail account is successful, added Prasad, meaning that the success rate is 10% to 15%.

Today we have two security-related releases available for both users of our main 2.2 branch and the legacy 2.0 branch. As these releases include only security and minor bugfixes they should not cause any plugin or theme compatibility issues, so you have no good excuse not to upgrade.

On our Trac you can see the bugs closed for 2.2.2 and 2.0.11 to get more details about the problems fixed. With a little more Trac magic you can see all the changed files for 2.2.2 or 2.0.11.

Our download page is always the best place to get the latest release, and our legacy page now has the latest in the 2.0 branch.

As always, we have upgrade instructions available and an extended upgrade guide.

Thanks to Alex C. and Benjamin Flesch for help with this release.

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