Andrew and Karla's Place

Yes the break is over for me anyway, not that Christmas was any real sort of rest for any of us.

The girls all enjoyed their presents, Jessie is claiming most of Sophie’s presents as well, but Sophie does a good job of grabbing dolls and toys back when she gets in to range.

We do need another house or build an extension on top just to house all of the kid stuff, it just doesn’t get any less of course.

We had the joy of the main kitchen tap springing a leak on Christmas eve at 11:45pm on the hot water hose, finally got that fixed properly on Sunday as no where was open Christmas day or Boxing day. So Sunday was the first chance I had to try and locate a replacement hose. Took a trip to three different places, in the end one of the places gave me a replacement hose for nothing, must have been Jessie’s tap dancing and finish?

Also managed to replace the temp folding table in the lounge room that was being used for the computer desk with the one we grabbed off of ebay a few weeks ago. That took most of Monday to do, so much stuff to connect and disconnect. I did this while Karla took Jessie to see the new Chipmunk movie at Parramatta, while I stayed home with Sophie. Jessie was not as good as she could have been, so it was not an enjoyable time for Karla.

If your off on holidays, We hope you have a great time, just be safe too many accidents on the roads this time of year. If your working like me, I hope your time is quiet and not too stressful.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Yes another one is here for us all to enjoy.

Not sure why our kitchen mixer tap decided at 11:45pm to start spraying water all under our sink. We’ve just finished cleaning and moping things up.

I’m trying to workout which part is the Christmas miricle part, the thing breaking or the fact it happened while we were still up and about. I’d hate to think what the kitchen would have looked like after several hours of water spraying everywhere.

Anyone know any plumbers who love to work over Christmas? So no water in the kitchen until atleast Saturday, I’m sure Bunnings will be open, wont they?

I’ve got the site back up and running, well it was up again yesterday, but only in a place holder sort of way.

I suppose now is a good time to look at the installation that I had and do a bit of a clean up, the installation was over 3 or 4 years old and over that time, I’ve installed a lot of stuff and removed it as well so it was starting to get a bit messy.

The exploit used should not have worked as I am always running the latest release of WP and I do run a checked on the site, it was this checker that alerted me to the problem, plus the fact that half of the database tables had been deleted. They were deleted a little while after.

Since then I’ve been going through the backups to see if I can retrieve my old posts for the site, not to worried about the Google News posts as these are just to keep the site fresh with news so search engines keep checking the site.

To restore the site I am getting new copies of all of the plugins I use and of course a clean copy of WordPress, this time I am also hardening the site as well. (I thought it was ok before, oh well.)

The Gallery was untouched along with the several other sites I have, the ones I don’t touch much I have removed for now. I’ve redone the subscriptions so hopefully everyone will now get this update as well.

Happy Christmas All.

Found that the site was hacked last night by the looks of it. So I have just done a fresh install and will look at bringing the site up again properly once I have had a chance to go through the back ups.

Seems have been an attack on WordPress sites lately, not sure how this one was hacked as I always update to the latest version asap.

Hope to be back up and running properly again soon.

I’m all for removing, reducing the risks faced by children on the internet. I have two little girls and the last thing I want them exposed to is child porn or predators on the internet.

As a parent it’s my job to see that they don’t have access to the computer alone or if they are on it that these sites aren’t accessible to them. The previous Howard government gave all parents, well anyone who wanted free filtering software for their home pc’s. The Rudd government stopped this and wants to filter the internet for everyone not just children.

The main issue is that for Australia the plan is to make this mandatory for all and the filtering list is anything that has been given a “Refused Classification”  status not just child pornography.

The RC classification is very broad in its coverage and can include anything the government wants it to. You want to find out about safe gay or even teenage sex then most likely your searches will be blocked.

The trial list also included items like the following showing how this secret list can be abused.

About half of the sites on the list were not related to child porn and included a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.

As Jessie is getting older I’ve started to look how I can stop her from being exposed to some of these things. So I’ve started by setting up a proxy server, which filters all our internet connections in the house. With this I can block images or sites I don’t want her to have access to and in the future this being a separate server she wont be able to change those settings to by pass it.

Not only does it filter what we don’t want getting in it also virus scans web sites before reaching our home machines, this has the added advantage of stopping a lot of viruses before it can get to us.

I think every adult has the right to find and search out whatever information that they want from the internet that is legal and not have their government decide this for them. If you agree with this, then please use the contact details of Senator Stephen Conroy below to voice your opinion.

Senator the Hon Stephen Conroy
Parliament Contact:
Phone: (02) 6277 7480
Fax: (02) 6273 4154
Email: senator.conroy@aph.gov.au

ps. You know that this site might also be blocked just for my use of words in this article.

Further Related Articles:

Letters 17/12: the net is tightening around your rights
At what point does internet filtering become censorship?
Internet filter laws need urgent public debate
Net censorship move a smokescreen: expert
Internet censorship plan gets the green light