The Wall Street Journal interviews Annise Parker on Houston and calls it “The Modern American Boomtown”. I think Houston is the most under-appreciated city in North America, as anyone who’s hung out with me for more than a few hours has heard me preach.
Wired has a great cover story on Audrey portfolio company SmartThings: In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will Act as One.
Four Little Numbers, Joen Asmussen talks about working on this year’s new default theme for WordPress, which also just launched on WordPress.com.
Dave Winer tweeted this on Saturday:
I have a little spare time today so I decided to start on River3. It’ll be much much smaller and more focused than River2.
— Dave Winer ? (@davewiner) April 13, 2013
One of the things I love and admire about him is that many, many years after he doesn’t have to anymore he’s still learning, hacking, and taking free time on a weeknd to make something new.
Almost 3 years ago we released a version of WordPress (3.0) that allowed you to pick a custom username on installation, which largely ended people using “admin” as their default username. Right now there’s a botnet going around all of the WordPresses it can find trying to login with the “admin” username and a bunch of common passwords, and it has turned into a news story (especially from companies that sell “solutions” to the problem).
Here’s what I would recommend: If you still use “admin” as a username on your blog, change it, use a strong password, if you’re on WP.com turn on two-factor authentication, and of course make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest version of WordPress. Do this and you’ll be ahead of 99% of sites out there and probably never have a problem. Most other advice isn’t great — supposedly this botnet has over 90,000 IP addresses, so an IP limiting or login throttling plugin isn’t going to be great (they could try from a different IP a second for 24 hours).
On (Un)organized Consumption by Automattician Cheri Lucas. “I stopped using Instapaper. Early on, I relied on it as a space to store ideas and information I could draw from, but it quickly became my intellectual limbo: the unfortunate vault of forgotten stories and Twitter residue.”