2/17/12 – Chad

listen. you’re not going to find anybody who sticks up for the little guy more than me. i mean at least not many. i’m not a communist or a socialist or anything, but i definitely believe in fairness. anybody who saw (or will see) Leprechauns & Lies can attest to my intense outrage to the crap that the poor and middle class in this country have been subjected to during the last few decades. so when i see things like Wikileaks exposing dangerous lies in our government or Anonynmous uncovering international pedophile rings and whatnot, i’m obviously all about it, but why … why oh why do hackers need to hack into sites of small, struggling startups like ours?

seriously?! we have two short films to deliver by the end of the month (sooner if at all possible) and we have to try to keep food on the table and gas in our cars and everything, but for some reason these f#&^ing hackers have to constantly hack into our various sites and plant malware like their lives depended on it. so of course, this week was supposed to be spent making sure our two shorts were done in time for our screening and trying to get together We Make Movies‘ upcoming Kickstarter campaign for their next slate of short films, but instead i had to spend half my week – staying up until the wee hours four nights in a row – just trying to find and delete all the malware that these dickheads keep dropping into our sites like it’s funny or something.

thankfully there is this new service i literally JUST discovered called Website Defender and it’s been very helpful so far in locating the malware and pointing out the sites’ various vulnerabilities. they’re in beta, so they’re not charging anything at the moment and they let me register five of our sites in their service. it’s helped a lot so far, but it’s been about 36 hours on one site and about 12 hours on four others, so whether or not it holds up remains to be seen. i really hope it does. when they launch, apparently they’ll cost $5 per site per month and if i can’t figure anything else out, i guess i’ll have no choice but to pay all that.

i’m also meeting with a friend who’s an expert on this kind of thing next week to see what i can do to solve this problem (if at all possible) once and for all. in the meantime, if any of those unfriendly neighborhood hacktards who keep dropping all your crap into our sites is reading this, please go and find somebody else to bother – perhaps a bank or a hedge fund or some greedy bastard who isn’t actually trying to do good in this world (Mark Pincus seems like the perfect target for instance). i know you don’t realize how difficult it is to get a new company going – in fact, i’m sure you really could care less -, but just take a good look at yourself in the mirror and wonder if you think whatever you are doing is worth putting a company like ours under. give our mission statement a read – take a good look at what We Make Movies is about as well – and ask yourself if the people you’re attacking actually deserve your costly, hurtful and heinous intrusions.

thank you,
- Chad