More specifically, my web hosting service DreamHost was hacked and Oddhead Blog was hijacked. Someone stole a bunch of passwords and methodically replaced index.* files, including the index.php file in my wordpress directory. If you visited this blog yesterday, this is what you saw.
The strange part about both incidents is that neither attack has an obvious motive. I don’t see any blatant ads or links or any real benefit that the attacker gained. Probably SEO related, but I just don’t see it.
I was previously publishing the wrong RSS feed URL, which was truncating posts. If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, the correct RSS feed URL, with unabridged posts, is: http://blog.oddhead.com/feed/
I’m trying out a new wordpress theme: “Tiga”. So far I am very happy with it: easy to customize, clean, bug free, etc.
One among several bugs in my previous theme was that comments were broken. Comments now seem to be working fine.
So now it’s my turn to jump on the web log bandwagon. I hope I can add something valuable to the collective conversation. This blog is intended to provide an outlet for ideas, commentary, challenges, and questions related to my professional life. This blog will span a number of topics, though with heavy emphasis on prediction markets, an area of particular interest to me. For more on the intended scope of the blog and on my background, see the about page.
Why the name oddhead? I originally acquired the domain name as a good name for an odds aggregator like oddschecker or other gambling related portal or site. Then, in contemplating starting up a blog of my own, and keeping in mind this “mad scientist” photo my wife took of me, suddenly the “oddhead” name seemed a perfect fit for an “absent minded professor” type blogging about prediction markets and gambling. I’ve located the blog at blog.oddhead.com, still reserving *.oddhead.com for future unspecified uses which may never materialize — perhaps a central index of prediction market probabilities (tagline: “what are the odds?”).
As I go, I welcome comments, suggestions, and questions, either via this blog or by more conventional means.
Musings of a computer scientist on predictions, odds, and markets
