Good heavens… only half an hour to sort out this time. It seems there’s was another Base64 section in functions.php in this free theme – and the Antivirus plugin didn’t pick it up. I have now checked the whole theme by hand and removed the offending code.
For most people the threat of hacking is simply a threat. It’s a risk anyone with a website lives with, but until it happens, most of us give it little thought.
So I was surprised to notice on my way to bed last night that the front page of my blog had been replaced with this screen which reads “Hacked by Amin Safi”:
How could this have happened? Had my passwords been discovered through a brute force attack? Would the blog I’d recently migrated have to be recreated from scratch? Was my entire material wealth currently being sucked from my grasp by some enormous virtual vacuum cleaner?
When I’d calmed down, I set about finding out how to repair the damage and prevent it happening again. Naturally there is a lot of information available on-line.
First, it’s not an uncommon experience: this cyber crime site lists a number of similar violations. And there are no teams of pale, dark-eyed teenagers. It’s mostly done by code which exploits vulnerabilities in WordPress, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.
The damage was relatively minor: I couldn’t log in to WordPress, so first I had to go in via CPanel and reset the user passwords. This allowed me to enter the dashboard and select the default WordPress theme, which restored my blog to functionality, if not to its former glory.
The following day I returned to understand more fully how my blog had been compromised.
I deleted the hacked index.php file, then reinstalled the theme I had been using, Stripe, which I had found on the web.
I then installed Antivirus and scanned the theme. Antivirus pointed out the footer was encoded in Base64 and decoding the characters in the footer, I found some code which displays an advertisement for acne medication.
I also installed Exploit Scanner, but there doesn’t seem to be anything else to worry about, so having removed the dubious code and replaced the Base64 encoded section with regular, the theme is up and running again.
The following pages all helped me:
Daniel Tammet uses examples linked to his experience of synesthesia to explain how our perception creates knowledge: ”Aesthetic judgements rather than abstract reasoning guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.”
Being just around the corner from The London School of Economics, I signed up quickly when this event popped up in David Gurteen’s events feed.
Hosted by Prof. Eve Mitleton-Kelly who founded the LSE’s complexity Research programme, the afternoon featured presentations from Prof. Sue Richards and Lynne Sedgemore. I’d expected to see more familiar faces, though I recognised Ed Rosen from South Bank University from Gurteen Knowledge Cafés.
Prof. Richards spoke about her experiences of UK public administration, the changing relationships between central and local government. The UK ”tightened up the mechanism of the central state” since 1979, but is now experiencing diminishing returns and needs “leaders… to work more effectively in complex adaptive systems.” This, she said, could result from greater diversity in Whitehall, the “burning platform of public expenditure…” and supported by the experience of the Civil Service which helped set up the Coalition.
Prof. Richards’ final slide was a summary of the traits she felt were required of modern leaders:
Lynne Sedgemore of 157 group then took to the floor, every inch the modern leader. A self-confessed “personal development addict”, she talked about herself and shared her passion for leadership and learning. The scope of her passion is broad – even spiral dynamics was name-checked - and testament to the need for constant experimentation.
I spoke briefly to Prof. Richards about the challenges of helping leaders educated better understand complexity during the refreshment break, after which the group reconvened to discuss the same point. Vinay Gupta‘s comment stuck in my mind as he recommended Cynefin, then suggested the four (five, I think!) domains needed to be simplified or renamed (!!) to aid understanding.
I didn’t stay afterwards, so look forward to the next session on 29th June: “Inner Complexity – an introduction to the Landscape of the Mind”; I’ll be keeping mine open as Lynne Hopkinson shows excerpts from a film about the development tool she has created: ”Interviews with individuals talking about their experiences of using LoM are complemented by the results of an fMRI brain scanning study.”
I made it along to the fourth Cognitive Edge European Network meetup this afternoon at Middlesex University and in common with the two previous sessions I’ve made it to, it was completely different.
Friday’s Cognitive Edge network meetup saw practitioners from around Europe, most of whom I hadn’t met before, descend on A La Bécasse to share experiences and work on a Sensemaker project about sensemaking.
Tony showed some of the findings from the Mexico leg of Children Of World in an informal session full of practical insight. The advice to introduce a client gradually via high level summaries before delving into the detail of individual stories was particularly useful.
After lunch and a quick stroll around the Grand Place, the group started developing signifiers for sensemaking. Two anecdote circles gave us a set of meanings which the group clustered and then started to create triads, diads (duads?) and prompts. This experience was invaluable to me -working with experts enables so much more focus on the task. I even picked up a couple of valuable insights to help future CommunityBuilder sessions.
The next meeting is scheduled for Amsterdam in December.
An important new resource – David Gurteen has added a page to his site
which collects Dilbert comic strips about KM:
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/media-player?open&g=Dilbert+Comic+Strips&mf=L004967
Most organisations seem to have adopted intranets for communication and collaboration, but how should an organisation’s intranet support its knowledge management activities?
From communities of practice to blogging and ultimately internal social networking, it’s something I’ve grappled with over the past eight years – trying, failing and hopefully learning at each stage of development.
It’s a journey I reflected on in a recent article for Inside Knowledge Magazine.
I’ve been surprised recently to see an online community which I created several years ago – and which, I believed, had lain dormant since – suddenly spark into life.
I originally created the group in 2005 in response to some requests for help which weren’t reaching the correct audience. Apart from one response a year later saying what a great idea this was, there had been little activity – or so I thought.
During the interim period, the membership had been growing steadily. All it took was one request for help in improving the operation of a factory machine. Quickly there was a response from another part of the world suggesting a modification they had used. This included a description, pictures and even blueprints!
This led to a flurry of other requests and responses and although the requests died down after a while, I believe it has helped the community see the tool as a way of connecting with expertise around the world.
Ironically, if we’d upgraded the tool in line with our IT team’s recommendations, this would never have happened as part of that would have meant removing “inactive” communities.
Last time I was in Portland Place the roads were closed, 5,000 people were on the street, Bono had scaled Broadcasting House and seemed about to plant a flag to commemorate U2′s takeover of the BBC. Happily, my return finds he’s been coaxed down, the roads are once more full of traffic.
I’m going to RIBA to see another terrible Celt, the rather more sedentary Dave Snowden, who is equally proudly but rather less bombastically unveiling version 3.0 of Cognitive Edge‘s Sensemaker software suite.
Dave kicks off by showing recent projects which demonstrate the latest additions to the software. There are more triangles in the signification part of the input process in these examples. Dave explains using triangles places a greater cognitive load on the brain during signification, resulting in a more meaningful result. Formulating appropriate triangles in an exercise during the accreditation programme certainly taxed my meagre intelligence, though I’m sure it’s something one develops with practice. At least I have first hand experience of their superiorityover the slider mechanism.
I was initially disappointed to hear the triangular interface element had been patented, which seems to preclude the possiblity of data collection through another tool. Much of my previous work has involved skunkworks-style prototyping of new tools, usually in Lotus Notes/Domino.
As it slowly dawned on me that attempting to demonstrate software designed to make sense of the results of complex mass-consultation exercises is unlikely to impress a handful of early adopters by merely reflecting their own responses back to them without demonstrating the formation of observable patterns, I realised a different approach is needed this time. Stories must be identified and narrative employed.
The best stories I’ve heard about SenseMaker centre on weak signal detection. During SenseMarker training, we were given test data which included a study of news stories in Iranian media. Signifying the stories against pre-determinted criteria and plotting against three axes creates a three-dimensional plane like that in the diagram.
Signifying new stories over time (yellow dots) and comparing them to the existing landscape can indicate the emergence of new beliefs. The cluster to the lower left of this diagram could provide early indications of new types of extremism.
In other examples, a drinks manufacturer and a Liverpool museum both use SenseMaker to obtain instant feedback on consumer experiences. This enables them to respond more quickly if action is required.
Lastly, Dave introduced an open project about gardens which anyone ca participate in here.
I’m going spend some time sitting in mine, thinking about projects where I can see SenseMaker contributing to better understanding – I’ve come up with about five already.