Grrrr. How utterly annoying. I really do not understand why
scurrilous individuals with
misleadingly innocuous names like
spammers and hackers exist. Seriously. Like terrorists, these people obviously get off on knowing they're startling and maybe even scaring people. They really need to get lives. I mean, if they're so all-fired up and dying to intrude on
everyone's life, and since they're
demonstrably clever and creative, why the heck don't they put their
intelligence and energy to good use like, oh I don't know, solving the mysteries of the universe or at least eliminating hunger and war.
Anyway, if you're still being held hostage, this post won't help and you are still seeing a great big black message from "the anti-sec movement." And if you were, you've already solved it if you're reading this. For me, after rebooting and clearing all kinds of caches, to no avail, I spent a (perhaps dangerous) moment reading the apparently harmless message in the big back blob. Then I went to Bing and was grateful for its accurate short list results and mouse-hovering summary trick because I quickly found out that the problem was an
ImageShack hack and that one needed to remove whatever was hosted by them. Puzzled because I did not knowingly know what
ImageShack was, I went to the Blogger forum in Google Groups' - a resource that's answered questions and rescued me several times - whence I learned that I should copy my template into
WordPad, find the offending image, and delete it. Indeed there was an up-arrow image there hosted by them although I don't think I ever used an up-arrow. I deleted it, saved the template back into blogger and, voila! Since all my other images are hosted by
PhotoBucket, it seems unlikely that I would have one random image hosted by someone else, especially an image I don't use. Plus, these brilliant idiots (that is not an oxymoron) clearly could have hack-dropped an image along with the black blob, right? Who knows. Anyway, the nasty business is over, it seems, and I hope very few or maybe no rare readers got snagged by these ridiculous people.
While I was at it, I downloaded Opera. I remember liking its interface years ago although I found the features limited at the time, but that was when it was a new and somewhat outsider kid on the browser block. Now it has serious fans and tons of interesting and slick features and choices. It has a reputation as much less hackable, too. We shall see.
Labels: blogs (mine), web tools
