Hackers

I am frequently asked if this blog has ever been hacked.  The answer is, Yes.  In the last five years, it has been hacked twice.  Both hacks were by people concerned that I might be publishing pirated material.  (For the record, I do not knowingly pirate material.  Ever.)  In the first case, I was able to ID the hacker and sent him an email politely explaining that I had not tabbed his published recording, which he would have known right away if he had bothered to look at the tab, or had read the posting in which I lamented that my arrangement was not as good as his!  I had published a link to his recording, but unknown to me, the link led to a pirate site.  It looked legit to me, but I immediately took down the link, and have not used that site since.

The other time, I was not able to ID the hacker, so I had to hack his hack to get my message back to him.  This was a person who thought I must be ripping off copyrighted material belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  In my reverse hack, I pointed out that I have received written permission to use the Church's material (under the proper conditions), and offered to show it to him.  He emailed me and apologized.

Both cases could have been avoided if the hacker had bothered to read the material they were so concerned about.  But I also learned an important lesson:  there is no way to know for sure that a private website is not engaging in piracy.  That's why there are so few links to other sites here.