Michael Geist has written a good article on the BBC news site about the ‘walled gardens’ of social network sites such as MySpace which at the moment means that to have a complete social network you’ve probably got identities on several of these sites which need maintaining, rather than one which can be linked or shared with the other services.  The full article is here : BBC NEWS – Technology – Pull down the walled gardens.

In addition to Michael’s point about interoperability is the information about which sites are most populate in different parts of the world.  For example Facebook is the leading site in the UK, but Bebo is in Ireland and New Zealand.

I’ve been having to sort out some websites after some ‘script kiddies’ attacked it.  My own fault really for not acting upon vulnerability announcements quickly enough (having been too occupied with other demands). Although to be honest I didn’t expect these sites to warrant such attention.

Up until now I’ve looked at hackers as at worst a mild pain (same as spammers) – when compared to say, virus writers.  If they get into your site, and make it clear to you that they can get in, you really can’t complain too much.  What really is annoying is when they destroy all your content, and then get their scripts to keep hitting you when you’re trying to identify and fix the vulnerability and restore things.

For me the worst aspect of it is that I’ve had to take sites down for a day or so, as I can only sort things out in my spare time. This means that mean time the innocent victims are the users can’t make use of the resource. Like many, aside from my own domain,  the other domains I run are done as a charitable thing, and I’d rather they didn’t lose out.