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Bloggone.


I woke this morning (blues riff) to an email telling me my blog had been deleted, because I was phishing through it.


It wasn’t the best way to start the day, particularly as I was busy sorting things for Mostly Comedy, and didn’t have the time to address the situation properly. You could argue it was ‘a fair cop’, as if I was up to something nefarious with my blog, I should expect a comeuppance...if it weren’t for the fact I had to look up 'phishing' to find out what it meant, learning that I clearly wasn’t doing a thing of the sort in the first place.


I’ve never used the blog to steal someone's credit card details, as I have a far more effective way of doing it. It’s not been used to purloin a person’s identity, except for one time in 1995 with Sandra Bullock. It hasn’t gleaned a single password, as it’s hard to do this just through having someone read it. I’ve not perfected the technology, but I’m working on it.

In truth, it left me perplexed, as a cursory glance of the content would reveal it wasn’t the case. I was irritated by the impersonal nature of the email, and by how difficult it was to speak to respond to them to question it (though I did send an angry email back). It also concerned me, as my blog is an invaluable resource for stand-up material and for my radio show; while most of it is backed up, there was always the chance something could have slipped through the net.

Thankfully, like many things in the 21st Century, Twitter came to my aid. A tweet I posted on the subject received a handful of replies from other people in the same situation, so it was clearly a fault with Blogger and not with me. Within a couple of hours, our blogs were back; “We all stand together,” “solidarity, brother,” and all that. 



Next, I'm going to try to hack into the Pentagon.

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