Newsletter #44

The Web's Only Peer-Reviewed Panama Newsletter
One That Got Away, Hacked, Cost of Living

One That Got Away

Tuesday, Henry III and I went to Arenosa to meet with an appraiser and have an appraisal done on the 10 acres of lakefront that is listed in the 'FSBO' section on the website. On the way back, I spotted a rare photo opportunity, but unfortunately my JVC camera had died. Hanging from a power line wire about 12 feet in the air and almost exactly halfway between two concrete poles was a large Sloth. How he got there is a mystery, because I would have thought it impossible for him to climb a smooth concrete pole, but there he was. I usually carry a small camera as backup, but didn't remember putting it in the car, so after watching him for a while, we drove on. When I got home, I opened the glove compartment and there was my spare camera. I guess some things are just not meant to be.

Update: When I mentioned this to John Mercier, he told me he had seen it before, that Sloths can climb the smooth poles with no trouble, but when they venture out on the wires, they slide to the lowest part and are unable to get back to the pole, because their large hooked claws cannot get a grip on the smooth wire.

Hacked!

On Wednesday last week, our online Forum was broken into. The hacker deleted two of my administrative accounts, and placed a picture containing the Windows WMF exploit on the opening page. The attack occurred sometime between about 7:30 AM and 10:30 AM. I discovered it while doing a routine check of our website from a computer in the city, but was unable to do anything until I got home a half hour later. Two of my admin accounts had been deleted, but a third was still accessible. The first thing I did was to change my admin password, then lock the forum and remove the link to it from the main website. I then deleted the hacker's post and backed up the forum. When I added a new admin account and received the email notification, I found that the link which allows for easy activation of new users no longer worked, meaning the hacker had done damage down into the guts of the program. At that point I decided to remove the forum from the server, then reinstall and restore from backup. The deletion and file cleanup went OK, but then I discovered that GoDaddy no longer offers the PHPBB2 forum package. So, I chose the one forum they still offer, which is presumably more secure than PHPBB2, but naturally could not restore the backup to it. Now I'm manually going through the backup files to extract email addresses so I can notify everyone of what happened. After I finish that, I'll begin reposting questions and answers from the previous forum.

The good news is that the hacker did not get into the main website, which is a lot harder to penetrate than the Forum was, so no one has to worry about accessing the website. I now have a much stronger password on my admin account and I believe the new forum is a lot more secure than the previous one.

The Rising Cost of Living - Update

On Sunday, January 22, La Prensa in top of the page headlines announced that the government had placed a freeze on electric rate increases for 90 days. However, the article below the headline said that the government would petition the Ente Regulador de los Servicios Públicos (Public Services Regulating Entity) for a rate freeze on Monday. I sometimes get the feeling that some of Panama's newspapers have hired headline writers away from 'Weekly World News'. Why is it so hard for them to make the headline agree with the story?

There is a lot of finger pointing and charges of profiteering going on, and it seems there is more than enough blame to go around. Collectively, Panama's private power companies have enjoyed an average of about 15% per year gain in after-tax profits since 2000.

My prediction is that the increases will stand, and the cost of everything will go up. Businesses in particular will be hard hit, with 30% increases, not the 33% I stated in last week's Newsletter. For my part, just last week the same transformer fuse a block down the street that has been blowing for the last 23 years blew yet again.

The Website

Only minor changes and updates this week, but as of midnight Sunday the traffic count for the month stood at 1850, which is a new monthly record. With two days to go in the month, I believe my prediction of 2000 visits for January will prove true.