Hello once again.

As usual, the summer months have been fairly quiet. And, as usual, we consider that to be a good thing. Personally, I figure that the less you hear from us, the better things are.

There’s been a couple upgrades and tweaks going on behind the scenes which you might want to be aware of. First of all, Plesk as been upgraded again, and that means that some of the items in the Application Vault have been upgraded as well. It doesn’t look like there are any new applications, however.

In regards to applications and upgrades: An unfortunate aspect of the internet is the evolution of annoyance. There are a lot of people out there who are too smart and too bored for their own good. They spend their days thinking up new ways to attack websites and the servers that host them. And once they find a way, they tell their friends… and pretty soon it’s out in the wild for any punk with a computer to try out. This means that applications which were perfectly secure a year ago are now wide open to serious attacks. Those attacks affect everyone on the server. While we’re continually vigilant about what’s happening, we can’t be everywhere at once. As owner of a website, it’s partly your responsibility to keep your applications up-to-date.

Right now, our biggest dangers are Gallery and phpBB. If you aren’t running the latest version of either of these, I strongly encourage you to upgrade. If we find that one of your applications is presenting a security risk to the server, we may have to delete it. We really don’t want to do that. Just go to the website of the application, download the latest copy, and follow the instructions. Usually, it only involves uploading the new files over the top of the old ones and then clicking a couple buttons.

As part of our recent security upgrades, we’ve setup some new “rules” for the servers to follow. This could possibly affect some of the applications you’re running. If you notice any problems with any of your applications, let us know and we’ll tweak things to make it work.

Other than that, I hope your summer is going well.

See you next month.

—
M Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc