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You may find it sufficient to back up your data directories to an archive and post them to your site as a remote backup (although given that hosting accounts cean never be 100% hacker-proof, I would encrypt the archive before posting to ensure that even if your data is copied, only you can open it). Additionally, you can save all your downloaded application installers to a CD, and use it for quick reinstall if you ever have to reformat. This way, your most important info is backed up remotely without taking up too much space on your account.

If you're on a Mac, I know you can get some programs that can apply DSP effects to the signal as you import it (there might be something equivalent for windows as well). With that, you can de-noise, apply EQ, and even compression if you like, as you're importing the audio.

URL: idlecircuits.com Name: IdleCircuits.com Description: Writing, music, photos, scripting, and more. Nature: Personal, weblog+other sites Linkback: Link to TCH posted on introductory page.

Taco HTML Edit - it's tasty, and works in OSX! For scripting, I use that, or occasionally Rixstep's Rixedit for basic editing.

The issue is, a lot of the zombie boxes are completely unknown to the users. I traced one such comment spam thread back, and found proxies everywhere, from ecommerce sites in the EU, to reserach universities, to residential cable internet hookups. I think the best thing that can be done is encourage as many people as possible to secure their machines - or, depending on how extreme things get, have ISPs block uploads on certain connections when they detect that the computer is sending a huge amount of ptraffic on unusual ports with no reason to do so. This would certainly prevent a lot of worms, which themselves can make computers vulnerable to subsequent zombification. There's no perfect solution yet, but if you're determined enough, you can use a site like centralops.net (domain dossier) to find out info on the sites, and warn the users or ISPs that their computers may be infected, and doing quite a number of things that their owners don't want them to do...

Allowing an .htaccess file to have 777 permissions would allow anyone to edit it - meaning that they could circumvent the security it provides by editing the file to provide their own username/password combo. It may be that the program is writing to the .htaccess file and requires that access, though... there are some various workarounds with shell access, but otherwise, I'm not sure what to tell you. Personally, I'd be wary of a program using this kind of security as its only layer - if PHPNuke also has another layer of passwords to allow access to it, such as an SQL-based password list, you might still be okay. If you can, I'd try experimenting with some slightly lesser permissions (755? 775?) and see whether it complains, and only set it to 777 as a last resort.

This sounds like a couple of variants of adware I read about a while back... if they're yellow or green underlined links on various words that wouldn;t normally have links on them, it's probably one of those variants. I'd heard that there were occasional difficulties removing them, but most of the antispyware programs now have full signatures and removal for them, so far as I know.

Hmm... while I've had many discussions on the TCH forums about secure file transfer (one of which I belive resulted in the .zip via secure CPanel suggestion), I've been using TCH for a number of years now, without any security problems that I've come across so far. Ironically, I work on a site that's hosted through a different provider that does allow for secure SSH/SFTP transfers, and it was recently hacked due to a message board vulnerability - strangely enough, I had similar boards on my account here, and none of them got hit. While I still think SFTP is the best way to go, I've been using CPanel and FTP here for quite some time, and haven't had any major security issues so far. I would say that there is always some risk to FTP - but I'm not sure how severe the risk is unless you're being directly targeted. I would worry more about keyloggers or spyware on your computer, which SFTP does not protect against. And, for the record, I've been able to use the CPanel workaround with good success so far, without it causing too much inconvenience - and I use FTP for really large bulk uploads, and only as much as I absolutely have to.

If you're on a Mac, check out RBroswerLite - it's fast, versatile, has all of the major features, and best of all, it's free! On the PC side, I usually use FileZilla... although to be honest, I mostly use my PC for games...

Good points all around, thanks for the info. Sounds like it's not really necessary to have anyway, with the other installers already in place.

I've seen this program mentioned on occasion in relation to CPanel - apparently, it's some sort of automated script installer for a bunch of scripts. Does anyone have any more information about it, or know if it's any different from the script installs already present on TCH?

Is there any way to set up a subdomain or FTP account that has a limit on how much disks space it has available to it? I.E. is there a way to limit a particular subdomain to a certain percentage or amount of the total available disk space?

I guess I'll have to bug them, then... I just keep thinking that someone's got to be able to figure out a way to do something like FTP securely that doesn't require a shell-based login.

I just wanted to quickly comment on this as well. I would certainly like to have a way of securely uploading batches of multiple files to my account. Sending my full account password in the clear every single time I upload a file makes me just a bit worried that sooner or later, someone is going to compromise it. As an interim step, I now have each subdomain of my site use a different FTP account with a different passsword, so that if one one password is compromised the attacked doesn't gain control over my entire site - and, when I only have a few files, I usually log in through CPanel. I guess my question is, will TCH ever support some method for secure drag-and-drop uploading? Or are the current solutions as good as it's going to get?

To preface this, I'm a university student, and I'm currently working on a senior research project through my department. As part of this project, I'm running a photography contest, and the contest site is hosted on my TCH webspace. So, I thought I'd post it here in case anyone wanted to give it a try... To enter the contest, all you need to do is submit an original photograph of yours that you think is ironic (there are more specifics on how to enter on the site). Anyone can enter this contest, it's completely free to enter online. Cash prizes will be awarded to the winners. The site is located at ironyphoto.idlecircuits.com. Note: this project is entirely for the advancement of academic research, and does not benefit anyone commerically.