The web is said to be about free access, and I certainly agree. When China’s Great Firewall entered a more rigorous phase, and Google decided to leave China, some said that free access to information on the internet was a basic human right, I disagreed. Still, here in Toronto, Canada I do appreciate open internet access. There are limits, however, when certain people take advantage of your hospitality. People try to scrape your site to use for their purposes, they try to break in and use your site to launch their own malicious doings, they try to spam you so that your site’s comments increase their link and trackback stats. There are all kinds of schemes that cost the site owner bandwidth, and eventually money. The site owner is forced to increase his level of service from his ISP (or get kicked off of his shared service), or move to another ISP. This is not a zero sum issue: The site owner loses financially.
Rest assured, I have not started a pharmacy and am not promoting illegal drugs on my personal blog. Oh no, as I am a “No Drugs” type of person. I was the victim of the Pharma Hack. This virus changes your indexing on Google Search so when people search for your site instead of your blog entry title they get ads for pharmaceutical drugs. I was not happy about this. After many extensive changes in beefing up WordPress security, so far Google search has started to index me correctly. This might take a couple of months, so bear with me.
