kompromat (or: how I helped lose the election)

Today, as I’ve been relaunching my blog and migrating it from an Amazon EC2 cloud instance to a GoDaddy hosted wordpress account, I’ve been listening to the president elect hyperventilate over recent reports that Russia has compromising information on his business interests and peccadilloes, was at some point prepared to blackmail him, and had regular covert contact with his campaign. Crazy. Even crazier than the widespread reports that Russians used an army of hackers and trolls (especially Edward Snowden and Wikileaks) to help spread disinformation about the election and sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It’s like we’re living in a mashup of Bridge of Spies and Spies like Us.

But for me, the craziest thing of all is that I seem to have played a (tiny) role.

Let me share a bit more about why I’m moving the site. Recently my domain has been down, and I’d been struggling to figure out why, since the server seemed to be up and running. Worse, I couldn’t access WordPress or even ssh into the site, which meant I couldn’t check and see where the traffic was coming from and I couldn’t export my old posts for relaunch. Not being much of a tech wizard, I set the problem aside sometime over the summer.

Well, I finally gave up, and I’m now reconstructing the old posts by combing through the WP database backups that I was emailing to myself on a weekly basis (this is a PITA, by the way, and means I’m losing all images and documents hosted on the old site; but there’s a great tip on how to pull posts from a WordPress DB here).

Now that the site is up and running again, I thought I’d check in to Google Analytics. I hadn’t thought to look before because, since the site was down, I figured there wouldn’t be anything to track. This is what I found:

 

Check the nationality.

 

And check out the “language” used by my top visitors.

 

So the vast majority of visitors to the site were from Russia (and Kyrgyzstan). And their preferred language was either Russian or something called “Secret.google.com … Vote for Trump!” And the traffic spiked through election day and then collapsed in December.

Finally, if you look at the pages they were visiting, you see several pages that I never placed on the site:

 

 

Now I’m not sure what this all adds up to. They certainly couldn’t have secure shelled into the server itself (I’d done a lot to harden that). My guess is that they found some other way to exploit WordPress and take over the server, including creating content. But I am shocked. I’d be curious how much this tracks what other WordPress hosts saw over the same period. Certainly, it was the last thing I expected.

A few years ago I was complaining that maintaining your own server meant having to fend off increasingly severe and sophisticated attacks from hackers/bots located outside the US (something I’m not really equipped to do). Now it seems clear that this was more than just a hassle — it’s actually dangerous. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re basically opening up a channel for others to use against the world.

Sorry, democracy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Teaching with Omeka: Presenting the Peries Project

Yesterday the seminar I’ve been teaching at Penn finished their digital project: an online edition of John Leyden’s “Tales of the Peries,” a handwritten manuscript in the archives of the National Library of Scotland. Leyden was a romantic poet as well as close collaborator of Walter Scott’s, before traveling to Southeast Asia as a functionary of the East India Company. Once there, Leyden established himself as an Orientalist and specialist in Asian languages, and the Tales of the Peries is an example from this fruitful period before his early death in 1811.

As part of a larger class on historical fiction, fantasy, and the influence of empire, my students built an Omeka site that includes digital facsimiles of the manuscript, transcriptions using Scripto, a plugin for Omeka, and a “readerly edition” that incorporates their research into editorial practices and critical editions and links to supporting materials and entries in the Omeka collection and on the wiki. In addition, they built a host of supporting materials for the site, from critical evaluations of the Tales, its verse, and the influence of Urdu and Arabic literature, to information about Leyden, his involvement with the EIC, even an animated Flash map that walks the reader through the geography of the tale and details the main transformations of Melech Mahommed, the main character, over the course of the narrative.

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The Perils of Certain WordPress Servers

Right now I’m flying back from the Seattle MLA, where I gave two talks, including the one that I’ve been writing about below. I’ll share some of those materials shortly. But I noticed this morning that the server had crashed and it took me some time to sort it out. And I realized that, even though I back up the blog, I’d never backed up the server itself using Amazon’s image-making service. Pretty dumb. That’s fixed now, but I’m also going to figure out a way to set up a test for the website so that I get an email if it goes down again. Probably a good thing to work out as I head into this semester, when I’ll be hosting and supporting an OMEKA server for my Historical Fiction and Fantasy class. More soon.

(As a side note, it’s pretty remarkable that I can now get into my server and get it up and running at twenty thousand feet. Age of wonder, indeed.)