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This is a scrambled (family friendly) version of what appeared on the front page of the Browse results section of Buy It Like You Mean It yesterday. The hacker responsible only changed one company’s description: alerting us to a security hole without causing real damage.

The problem is now fixed. We treat our website’s security seriously. This is an inclusive community that believes in the power of people. But it will not be the last time that we have to think about security. Pranks like yesterday’s are no big deal. But our users may eventually offend larger corporate marketing interests who might have other, more clever, ways of changing the information presented in our system. User involvement will continue to be the most important tool in our security tool box. So email us at GetInvolved@bilumi.org if you see something odd or have a suggestion.

Did you notice the curious text of the blog post about our 1,000th commit? Oddly enough, Lucy’s celebrated commit number 1,000 was the fix for the a bug in our system that allowed hackers to change the text of company descriptions without logging in or making a record of their activity.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 4:35 pm by Clay and is filed under Technology. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.