Google Analytics

I got the first inkling that something might be wrong when I looked at my Google Analytics stats noticed that I had received traffic for some keywords that were definitely not content on my site: porn and warez in other words. I couldn’t make head or tail of this since I had just  double checked the comments module to make sure that no spam had managed to slip through.

When I searched for some of these keywords my site did indeed come up a couple of times, but since the keywords weren’t on the pages when I checked, I filed it as a problem to be investigated later.

I can see something that you can’t

That changed when a former colleague of mine contacted me and said he could see some weird stuff on my site. He then shared his screen with my through Skype and I was able to verify that the code he got when visiting my site was different from the code I got when looking at my blog.

Now I got really alarmed. After all, I’m using my blog to share my expertise and to acquire customers. If they looked at my blog and saw porn and warez it was unlikely they’d hire me.

Fixing the problem

Big thanks go to Frederic Vuong who supplied a lot of useful links and tips to help me. However, in the end it was slightly more complicated then I was prepared to deal with. So I contacted a WordPress agency that I had worked with in the past. However, their quote of 400 USD and approx three days of work didn’t exactly make my heart sing.

In the end I found “Sucuri Security” through the WordPress forums. For 90 USD they took care of the problem in a matter of hours and I now have a one year subscription with them so that I could go back to them if there was a new infection. In addition, they have supplied me with a WordPress Plugin that helps to increase WordPress security.

Lessons learned

According to Sucuri, one of the vulnerabilities I have had on my site was a theme that I wasn’t even using. It’s a theme I had downloaded two years ago and which I kept in my theme folder but never used and of course never updated. I had no idea that this was a security risk. I have now:

- removed all themes and plugins that I’m not actually using

- installed the lockdown plugin which limits the number of false login attempts

- installed the Sucuri plugin

I’ll also include the lockdown plugin and the Sucuri service to the list of things I’ll recommend to non-profits who are building their own WordPress based websites.

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And while the game as such still makes me  uncomfortable, I find their approach to solving the problem quite interesting.

Kim Stephens from idisaster 2.0 wrote a great blog post about how the winning team did it:

• The Social Media Tag Challenge: Crowdscanner describes how they won

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Google glasses - design study. Source: Google

Google has presented “Project Glass” last week, a project to build augmented reality glasses “that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back into the moment.” When I heard about this first, I felt strangely reminded of the dystopian books written by Charles Stross.

Anything you say may be replayed in a court of law

I see the first practical application of “Googly Eyes” (which is what I decided to call it) in law enforcement. At first, they will be used to record all aspects of police action, from the time a police car leaves the car-pool to when a suspect has been arrested. Contrary to what you might think, this is not even a violation of your Miranda Rights since anything a person says to an officer of the law before being in police custody can already be used against him.  However, the ability to rewind, replay and amplify voices and actions will certainly increase the extend to which pre-arrest questioning will be used.

Face recognition and license plate readers

The next step will be to link Googly Eyes with databases that store license plates and mugshots. While driving or walking around, computers in the cloud will process what the officers see. Mobile license plate readers  for police cars already exist and with advances in facial recognition software it is conceivable that police officers would see a visual overlay of previous arrests, convictions, outstanding parking tickets etc. when looking at a group of people. Obviously they could then also query all other information that is available about whoever they are looking at.

Not having a mobile phone might make you look suspicious

Things become really interesting when you combine this technology with the fact that almost everybody is carrying mobile phone today. With the help of GPS, RFID tags and information obtained from mobile phone providers you could even scan a crowd of people and identify most of them without needing to see their faces, simply by inferring their identify from the phone they are carrying. People carrying no mobile phone or disposable phones could then be highlighted on the HUD and subjected to additional scrutiny or strip-searches, because obviously you have something to hide if you aren’t carrying a trackable phone.

Dangerous in the hands of unpleasant people

Of course, if law and order is your thing, then you probably think this is a good thing. But even if you don’t value your privacy, the thought of this kind of technology being applied in countries that persecute people based on their beliefs, political affiliation or sexual orientation should make you feel uncomfortable. After all, people who are “guilty” of belonging to a trade union, working for human rights or being gay could be highlighted on the glasses just as easily as drug lords.

Obviously, no technology is good or bad in itself. As the Google video (below) shows, there are many useful applications. But it still makes my skin crawl.

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Officially, there is of course no mention of terrorism on the website of “Tag Challenge“, but there can be little doubt that the game is more than an event “conducted in a spirit of fun and curiosity”.

From the FAQ:

“Our goal is to determine whether and how social media can be used to accomplish a realistic, time-sensitive, international law enforcement goal.”

And – why not? TV shows like “America’s Most Wanted” in the US or “Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst” in Germany, Austria and Switzerland have for many years been relying on the public to help solve crimes and catch criminals. Using social media for the same purpose is in many ways only logical.

Then, how come this makes me feel deeply uneasy? I narrowed it down to three issues:

• While the TV-programmes that I am familiar with want people to report sightings of wanted persons, they do not encourage anyone to actively go and look for them. You can of course argue that the “criminals” in the game are not dangerous and that this is therefore acceptable, but I think there can be little doubt that the goal of this exercise is to see how to use social media to find the kind of people who have prices on their heads.
• The organizers encourage the participants to build “networks of spotters and teammates”, which to me is a little too similar to asking people to form a mob.
• While I have no problem with children playing “catch” or “hide and seek” turning a manhunt into a game just feels wrong. It reminds me of a movie I have seen many years ago (it might have been “Fahrenheit 451″, but I’m not sure) where a dissident is fleeing from the government and everybody is asked to step out of their houses and stand on the street, because if everybody was still and watching, nobody could run in anonymity. In short, it feels a little dystopic.

Like any other technology, social media can be used for all kinds of purposes and this “game” makes me deeply uncomfortable.

What are your thought? Please leave a comment below.

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I have licensed this theme from him two years ago for 50 USD. Since then I had problems twice – once after a WordPress update and then again when I noticed that some things didn’t properly work in Internet Explorer 9.0. Neither issue was the fault of the designer, since both products were not on the market when I bought the theme. In both cases I got a fix within 24 hours of sending an email to Web2Feel. That is what customer service should look like!

So if you run a WordPress site and are looking for a good theme, check out Web2Feel.

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