Nicollet.Net

I wish to personally thank you for your meaningful contribution on my blog. While posting a link to a pornography site certainly showed one of my articles in a new way that would have certainly enlightened (no pun intended) most of my readers, there are some standards of decency I wish to enforce on this blog and, sadly, I will not be able to publish your comment.

The fact that you posted your comment as admin, with a coincidentally unusual website of nicollet.net and an incorrect yet default mail address of info@nicollet.net was only tangentially involved in my publishing decision.

However, I could not help but notice that your IP is running an unsecure internet-accessible XAMPP-based website. This, in itself, is a bad idea, because that would expose a lot of precious information to random internet users. Besides, I will only restate what phpMyAdmin has already told you:

Your configuration file contains settings (root with no password) that correspond to the default MySQL privileged account. Your MySQL server is running with this default, is open to intrusion, and you really should fix this security hole by setting a password for user ‘.root’.

I am a honest, law-abiding man. I fully understand your ability—nay, your right—to turn the computer at {IPADDR} into a blog-spamming zombie, and I do not wish to interfere with its operation, as that would be illegal in several countries including the one that I am currently living in.

But be aware that many people will not be as supportive as I am of your enterprise. An evil man, a weak-willed webmaster, a law-breaking vigilante, a bandit sans foi ni loi, who would happen to know an ounce of SQL, could easily connect and DROP your databases away. Or perhaps one of the many internet worms that target phpMyAdmin on random web servers might get you in turn?

I sincerely hope this outrageous loss of precious data will not happen to you.