Wow - annihilated!
Wednesday, 13. August 2008, 18:23:55
Yesterday I accidentally obliterated not only my old blog (which nobody can now access or view) and files (which I now can't reach, unless I know the filename) - but all traces of myself on the Opera forums - not just for me, but for everyone: and what's worse, with a lot of collateral damage. Every page on which I have a post now comes up blank - for all users.
I was adding something to my sig, pushing limits I guess, and happened to hit the magic self-destruct button. I just now went to Google, hoping I might salvage something from their cached snapshots - but they'd already updated - so what I saw is what anyone who tries to go to my blog sees:
It could be fixed if I could just get someone with access to clean out the killer sig, but I'm cut off from doing so and realistically I'm not sure anyone will bother - if not, hundreds of threads, thousands of posts (700 of mine, but taking out whole pages each time), are lost for everyone.
Here's the thread about this.
I'm off to think about salvage...
As to what causes the failure,
Thursday: well, after after several hours of trial and error, several annihilated MyOpera user identities, and for each of them a thread gone blank in the Test forum, I figured it out. It's not size or escaping (which had seemed the most likely factors initially), and it's not any error on my part. A random little vulnerablity, a quirk that might never have been encountered. I won't go into detail, since it could be used maliciously, but I've informed Opera, and hopefully they'll patch it. And, on general grounds, it seems pretty certain that the posts we're not seeing are safe and intact on the servers. After all, MyOpera is a sea of indviual posts, not a set of pages: pages are assembled on demand. Strange enough that this quirk can disrupt page assembly - but it's very unlikely to be reaching backwards to harm the source material.
Friday: this was pretty nice to wake up to:
All of which makes a pretty good set up for the button I was adding to my sig. Oh, wait! Are we sure the forum bug has been fully fixed? We'll know that's been done when this page comes back:
a page voided by one of my alter-egos (sig still holds trigger for forum bug)...
Oh, what the heck - give it a try! Mystery Button
And I guess this will be a one-post blog, as I can now go back to being plain old bpm.
See you at the old digs. It's been a slice!
I was adding something to my sig, pushing limits I guess, and happened to hit the magic self-destruct button. I just now went to Google, hoping I might salvage something from their cached snapshots - but they'd already updated - so what I saw is what anyone who tries to go to my blog sees:
It could be fixed if I could just get someone with access to clean out the killer sig, but I'm cut off from doing so and realistically I'm not sure anyone will bother - if not, hundreds of threads, thousands of posts (700 of mine, but taking out whole pages each time), are lost for everyone.
Here's the thread about this.
I'm off to think about salvage...
As to what causes the failure,
Thursday: well, after after several hours of trial and error, several annihilated MyOpera user identities, and for each of them a thread gone blank in the Test forum, I figured it out. It's not size or escaping (which had seemed the most likely factors initially), and it's not any error on my part. A random little vulnerablity, a quirk that might never have been encountered. I won't go into detail, since it could be used maliciously, but I've informed Opera, and hopefully they'll patch it. And, on general grounds, it seems pretty certain that the posts we're not seeing are safe and intact on the servers. After all, MyOpera is a sea of indviual posts, not a set of pages: pages are assembled on demand. Strange enough that this quirk can disrupt page assembly - but it's very unlikely to be reaching backwards to harm the source material.
Friday: this was pretty nice to wake up to:
All of which makes a pretty good set up for the button I was adding to my sig. Oh, wait! Are we sure the forum bug has been fully fixed? We'll know that's been done when this page comes back:
a page voided by one of my alter-egos (sig still holds trigger for forum bug)...
Oh, what the heck - give it a try! Mystery Button
And I guess this will be a one-post blog, as I can now go back to being plain old bpm.
See you at the old digs. It's been a slice!
WIDGETIZE