generatekindness.org

the world would suck.

Should mention that we’re finally back online. We’ve had quite a bit of unwelcome interference in our work with some hackers who diverted GenerateKindness traffic to an affiliate site. Thanks to the quick work of Stefano Ivan Stinga, an Italian WordPress security expert we found on oDesk, Generate Kindness has been restored and re-secured. So hopefully things from here on out will be smoother and we can get to the development of some new features at GenerateKindness which we think will help create a sustainable source of income to support the printing and distribution of stickers.

There were strategic GK drops at the 12th Annual Non Profit Technology Conference in San Francisco (which was the city that gave birth to GenerateKindness). It was a delight to watch the geeks for good grabing up from piles dropped at some of the many parties held over the three day conference. Sadly, no pictures. We know that in order to generate pictures, we have to be the change we want to see.

We love this video!

Man! That was a nasty bug. Someone from an un-named country *cough*russia*cough* hijacked the GK site and was sending all our traffic to a random search site in Russia. We thought we’d eliminated the problem a few weeks ago, then it returned and wouldn’t go away.

Well, we basically wiped everything out and reinstalled WordPress, the Bueno WP theme and that seems to have resolved the problem. Such a colossal waste of time, too. At least 12 hours of time that could have been spent improving the GK site, sending out stickers, etc., instead spent wrestling with server configuration files, and other command line !fun.

The result was severe health warnings for anyone who tried to come to GK, consequently severely impacting our traffic.

Anyway, apologies again, on behalf of our Anonymous Russian hacker.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled exploration of compassion in action.

Be kind, people.

“Pay It Forward,” “Generate Kindness” – there are lots of ways to talk about Kindness in Action. “Life Vest Inside” has created a music video that illustrates the principle of Kindness and interconnectedness in a really beautiful way. Worth checking out!

Well, it appears that the hack attack we were hit with has been resolved. If you are seeing this blog without a nasty Google malware intercept page (it still kinda freaks us out that Google can do that), then all is back to well and right with GenerateKindness.org.

We moved to WordPress and apparently used a plugin that had a trojan horse script in it that placed a website redirect instruction on the webserver, which took all traffic to a Russian affiliate link site. Google doesn’t like it when that happens, so they threw a glaring red warning page.

Anyway, it appears that the blog is back. Sorry to have freaked anyone out. The worst part of this was all the wasted time. We spent hours working on finding the source to this problem (our fingers are still crossed that the problem, has, in fact, been permanently fixed). It was like being on a treadmill that got us nowhere. A total waste of time. Thanks, unkind Russian hackers.

Well, thanks for daring to move beyond the GoogleWall of Shame. Still trying to track down the source of this problem. So far, no luck

This is the smallie.

So GK got hacked. Not exactly sure the point of entry, but the hack is injecting .htaccess redirects to some Russian site. This means that when someone comes to GenerateKindness.org (if they’re not deterred by Google’s Malware warning page*) that they’ll find their browser whisked off to some random website. (That’s the extent of the malware as far as I can tell).

Anyway, I’ve deleted the .htaccess and am going to disable a bunch of plugins on the theory that that’s how they’re hitting me.

Sorry to all who thought they’ve been hoodwinked by a sticker.

* and does it bother anyone that google can just automatically insert a page into your browsing at any point? I’m really glad they do it for this reason, but I don’t think I signed up for any “Google Protection” service. kinda spooky.