Technology

Yesterday, at 7.13pm, the Drupal Security Team issued a public service announcement: Drupal 7 and 8 core highly critical release on March 28th, 2018 PSA-2018-001.

This needs a bit of background to understand.

How Drupal Core Updates Normally Work

Updates to Drupal Core fall into one of new kinds.

There are many scams doing the rounds. People must fall for them often enough to make it worth the criminals' time to keep trying. Here's one which you'll likely meet if you ever register a domain name. If you've just registered your first domain name, there's a risk that your lack of experience will make you vulnerable to panic and respond. So I'll post this to unpick how this works, and to put your mind at ease that you can safely ignore these emails.

I run various websites, and I keep a distant eye on which bits of them are popular and things like that. I'm always on the look out for anything that's not right, or any errors. I'd want to fix them; if you're going to have a website it needs to work properly so that people can use it, otherwise why bother?

For years, I've been a fan of the internet filtering software Net Nanny. I'll explain why in a moment.

However I've just had to uninstall it, and I'm now looking for an alternative. (If you, personally, use something similar, please comment below with any recommendations of products to try or to avoid).

A friend recently asked on Facebook about whether to use a Facebook Page or a Facebook Group for his newest project — or indeed whether to run both.

For what it's worth, here was my advice (now elaborated upon):

General Rule of Thumb: Choose

My general rule of thumb (which may be flawed) is that groups and pages have different pros and cons.

Almost every Windows user is familiar with the problem. You have an external hard drive, or a pen drive, attached to your computer. You know the correct way to eject the device: Don't just yank out the lead, because it could corrupt data if the computer was in mid-write at the time. Instead, use the "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" tool in the notification area of the taskbar.

But then comes the problem:

Spam is a problem that never goes away. Email spam. Comment spam.

This site has long used Mollom to protect the comment section and the contact form. They're closing down on 2nd April 2018, so lots of webmasters will be looking for alternatives.

I'd like to introduce you to Project Honey Pot.

The week before last, tragic events unfolded in London. It seems that a man drove a car at nearly 70 mph into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge before stabbing a policeman on duty at the entry to the Parliamentary Estate. 5 people died, including the attacker.

Not long after the event, Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary said this:

It is completely unacceptable, there should be no place for terrorists to hide.

I'll put this here, in case it helps anyone else.

I'm owning up to Drupal Schoolboy Error #1.

I was writing a very simple module. It did so little, that I wanted to keep things as simple as possible — just a .info file, and a .module file.