The Vacuous Society

Pinched from Hopi Sen, who grabbed it from the Downing St website:

12 Comments


  1. An all-time classic. You couldn’t make it up.

    Quote | Posted 18 May, 2010, 9:14 pm

  2. In case you don’t know, some kind of spam infestation has hit your RSS feed.

    Quote | Posted 18 May, 2010, 10:11 pm

  3. Thanks for this. Someone else reported it yesterday, but I thought maybe that was a one-off. I’ll have a look, though goodness knows how you sort this kind of thing out.

    Quote | Posted 18 May, 2010, 10:12 pm

  4. Is that any better?

    Quote | Posted 18 May, 2010, 10:41 pm

  5. Following Jasper, I was also getting “Buy Sorbitrate Overnight Delivery Order Sorbitrate Order Sorbitrate Online Order Sorbitrate Without Prescription Order Sorbitrate No Rx Order Sorbitrate Overnight Delivery Order Sorbitrate COD Order Sorbit…” on my blogger reading list. It only seems to affect the top post, so the test one’s got rid of it and this is showing up now.

    Quote | Posted 18 May, 2010, 11:24 pm

  6. The spam is showing up in the google cache of the site, too.

    Quote | Posted 18 May, 2010, 11:59 pm

  7. Test came through as “buy sorbitrate” etc etc on my feed, I’m afraid.

    Quote | Posted 19 May, 2010, 5:58 am

  8. I know, let’s just buy the bloody sorbitrate and then they’ll go away!

    Quote | Posted 19 May, 2010, 6:53 am

  9. OK — sorry about all of this. The site’s been hacked in some way that affects Google Reader (though not, for example, the RSS feed on Bloglines); I thought I’d removed the files that were causing the problems, but maybe not. I’ll have to do some surgery on the WordPress installation before too long – but won’t have time to do this for a bit. So bear with me – and if you want to buy some Sorbitrate (whatever that is) to pass the time, be my guest.

    Quote | Posted 19 May, 2010, 7:22 am

  10. Oh, yes, the Google cache looks great.

    Quote | Posted 19 May, 2010, 7:26 am

  11. Latest “testing” RSS post came through fine to me (looking at it in Google Reader).

    Quote | Posted 19 May, 2010, 12:10 pm

  12. Yes – looking at the Google Reader feeds, I think the situation has improved.

    But I think (judging from webpages I’ve looked at) that some spammer hacked the site, and there’s a nasty infection of something deep in the WordPress database, and I’ll have to work out how to extract that (and then change the passwords, etc.) in order to (i) get the cache & Google results back to normal and (ii) prevent this happening again.

    Thanks to all for helping to point me towards the symptoms (I don’t use Google Reader myself, so hadn’t really noticed what was going on).

    Quote | Posted 19 May, 2010, 12:14 pm

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