MarkMaunder dot com

Time for a Linode downgrade

My credit card number was stolen a few days ago by someone in Palo Alto right after my site was on Hacker News’s home page. I’m going to choose to believe they are unrelated. Interesting though since I don’t live or work in California and this card has never visited there. On the positive side, […]

July 18, 2012 | Hacker News, Technology, Wordpress | No comments

Technical details and scripts of the WordPress Timthumb.php hack

Big News [April 24th, 2012]: I’ve launched Wordfence to permanently fix your WordPress site’s security issues. Read this now. UPDATE: WordThumb has now been merged into TimThumb and has become TimThumb 2.0. Please head over to the TimThumb site now for updates and to get the code. As I mentioned yesterday my WordPress blog was hacked. The security hole […]

August 2, 2011 | Hacker News, Security, TimThumb, Wordpress | 8 comments

Hacker News negativity finally hurts the program it supports

I’ve posted a couple of times about the negativity on Hacker News and why I no longer post there. Well the AirBnB fiasco has been seized by the HN “nancy grace” crowd with a vengance and they’re pounding their most successful startup ever into the dirt and promoting its competitors. While you may feel the AirBnB execs could have handled […]

July 31, 2011 | Hacker News | No comments

If you read hacker news I want you to do something for me…

I want you to do a little sanity check, because I’m worried it’s just me. Read the top moderated comment for the top items each day on HN and tell me if you’re also noticing that around 75% of them are posted by this guy:

July 28, 2011 | Hacker News | No comments

Disappeared from Hacker News … again. So I'm done.

I get wierded out when an opinion piece I posted about the impending debt default is on the home page of Hacker News for 20 minutes and climbing – and then gets disappeared. The article is still posted on HN, no message that it’s flagged as spam, no email. Just a little tweak that disappears me from everything […]

July 24, 2011 | Hacker News | No comments

When is the worst time to submit a story to Hacker News?

The worst time to submit a story to HN is right now. From about 2am to 10am Pacific time the ratio of votes to submissions is at it’s lowest:     This is from an app I whipped up yesterday that tracks stats for Hacker News continuously.

July 6, 2011 | Hacker News | No comments

MI6 to Rest of World: Cyber War is On. Anyone, Anywhere is Fair Game. Arm yourselves.

This incredibly disturbing story was posted on Hacker News 26 minutes ago. Summary: The London Daily Telegraph (via TheAge.com.au) is reporting that British Intelligence agents from MI6 and GCHQ hacked into an AlQueda online magazine and removed instructions for making a pipe bomb. They replaced the article with a cupcake recipe. A Pentagon operation was […]

June 5, 2011 | Hacker News, Law, networks, Security, Technology | 3 comments

What I love about the HN community

The smartest most helpful people hang out there. Thanks for the awesome theme Lucian!        

May 28, 2011 | Hacker News, Themes | No comments

My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.