After two more guildmates got hacked last week, I decided to check and change my account security. I’ve used an authenticator since shortly after they were released, which I think is 90% of the protection that can be applied.

The other 10% is a combination of obvious email addresses, spyware, and repeated passwords for different purposes.

Here’s the rest: Account Change to Avoid Hacks

My son’s account has been hacked twice, recently. The first wasn’t so bad. They leveled his DK to 80 and he was able to get his stuff back from Blizzard. He stopped the second before any damage was done.

So we now use the authenticators and I think I may change some account data.

Amazon.com has the authenticator for $50 (!) but if you want to save a few coppers you can get yours from Blizzard for $6.50 (no, that’s not a typo.) Click here’s for the Bliz store.

It’s easy to use. You’ll connect it to your battle.net account (directions are included with the device) and then, every time you log in, you’ll be prompted for the 6 digit code the the authenticator generates. Enter that and in you go.

Regardless of race or faction affiliation or the quality of your gear!

I’ve sent emails to both, asking “What’s up with this?” and I’ll try again later if I don’t get a response. I’ll update this post with any replies I get. Feel free to add your comments, as well.

Nyhm of the Vids sent this comment, to this post, this morning:

B***S***!!  This is not me, i never did an interview with anyone, this is some fool still trying to sell his garbage. Im getting damn sick of this shit and im going to have to make a video putting this site and any gold selling site out of buisness once and for all.

Im done with this b***s***!

By the way, I saved the email interview. So it looks like there are the two Nyhms (and I’ve been told that this might be the case.)

Until then I’ll go through all my Nyhm posts and delete the guide references that looks like they confuse the two Nyhms and make sure that Nyhm of the Vids gets appropriate credits.

By the way…

1. Nyhm of the Vids page is here
2. Nyhm of the Guide’s page is here (and it isn’t working as I write this. edit: it works now. )

Anyone care to add anything to this?

Update: Nyhm of the Videos sent an email stating that he is not the same guy as Nyhm of the guides. So I have deleted all of the guide links, since those links were on pages with videos by Nyhm of the Videos. My bad.

Update 2: Nyhm of the Guides sent an email the stated that they are different Nyhm’s, but that they have very similar characters. WoWarmory lists nearly 100 Nyhm’s as I write this, so there seem to be a few that can lay claim to the name.

updated: edited 12/31 for grammer, etc.

By the way #1: Nyhm of the Videos has graciously agreed to an interview and I’m coming up with questions to ask, which hopefully won’t be too brain-dead. Any suggestions?

12/31: No questions have come up so you’ll have to live with mine. Ha.

By the way #2: Nyhm is not to be confused with MGM’s NIMH.

Ok, now I’m going to go play WoW for a few…

So I received a backup of all my data from them and moved everything to the new host, where it actually seems to be running ok.

Umm… so where’s “The Cookbook is Back #1?”

Well, in a massive display of epic falm palming fail, I deleted the database for the blog. It was actually supposed to be the OTHER (expletives deleted) database, but there you go.

Fortunately, I was able to extract the database from the aforementioned backup file and restore everything, except “The Cookbook is Back (#1)”

So just the one post and the one comment (Sorry, Zug) is gone.

And now it’s time to get back to work. Or gaming. Or something. Maybe I’ll just watch some more 24 (via Netflix.)

Go here to browse.

edit: Some additional info on use and installing addons can be found here: WoW addons

How long would it take to download all those patches, updates, addons, reconfigure your hotkeys and other characters setups?

DominateYourServer has a detailed guide to backing up your WoW installation. Basically you copy/backup the entire WoW folder set over to your backup system and you’re good.

There are a number of choices for backing up, but none are foolproof. Do two or more if you’re really concerned (or paranoid.)

1. Install an internal hard drive and use it for backups. Just copy data from whichever drive you have your copy of WoW on over to the other drive. This is great if your main drives dies, not so good if your computer is fried (eg: by a lightning strike,) but it’s lots faster than the other methods.
2. Use an external drive. These connect with a USB cable and usually come with backup software. A bit slow, but since you can disconnect the drive after backing your system and then store it in a safe place, you’re pretty well protected.
3. DVDs (and BlueRays) are  cool, get yourself the appropriate software and burn some disks. Then store then in a safe place. DVD burners are pretty cheap, Bluray not so cheap (yet.)
4. Online backup. We use Mozy, but there are a bunch of other services available. You pick the files/folders that need to be backed up and it does it all in the background, making incremental backups on a regular basis. The first backup will take a long time since it will back up everything that you tell it to. Once that’s done then the following backups take a lot less time.
5. Go Raid. A RAID is a set of dard disks which work together. We’re interested in the mirroring function here. You set up to drives to mirror each other and then every bit of data that gets written to drive 1 also gets written to drive 2. So if one or the other fails you have a backup. I’ve seen these fail, so I suggest another backup method as well as this one. Also, this won’t backup your existing data, it’s best done with a new install.

ExNovis has a write-up about it and answers the “Yes, but is it really secure?” question:

So the Blizzard Authenticator is back on sale, even after a day of being sold out. This time, it’s available in more countries and it looks like Blizzard understood there would be a huge demand for them. I bought one for myself, and for my partner, Cantara. Sometimes, I get teased from people about ‘wasting money on a device that doesn’t provide total security.’ Well folks, Blizzard has stepped into the fray of the debate and confirmed, yes, the authenticator is secure!

Here’s the rest: For The Last Time, YES, It IS Secure

Basically you write or submit intell (articles) on the subject of your choice and get links back to your site. Since the links aren’t buried in some directory someplace they might actually get clicked.

Links in the articles are nofollow, links outside the articles aren’t. Right now the site looks to be mostly marketing related, since those are the most popular tags, but that’s ok, and they really do have a lot of other articles. You just have to dig through the tags a bit.

All the navigation is done by tags. So if you want to find the stuff on WoW then you go to the alphabetical list, click “W,” and you’ll get the “W” tags. There are several that are WoW related.

So check ‘em out, see if it looks good to you, maybe write some intell,  and maybe we can get some traffic from it.

Here’s my, somewhat barren, profile page. You can browse the site from there, just like Facebook and the others.

Having nothing whatsoever to do with the World of Warcraft, or anything else game related, comes this post which I thought was just plain funny.

Standing apart from the bog standard Vauxhall and Peugeot drivers of this world, there exists a special breed, a group who nary flinches when the word ‘insurance’ is mentioned. Such people insure tanks for the daily shopping run. Inspired by this, I decided to take on the ultimate car insurance challenge. I was going to quote me happy for the Batmobile.

I took as my example the Batmobile from The Dark Knight, or, as it’s officially known in movie lore, the ‘Tumbler’. A brief look over the specification reveals myriad possibilities for 3rd party fire and theft, including a jet burner in the rear, landing hooks for when the Batmobile jumps over rooftops, front-mounted machine guns…

It’s a fun read. So take a break from WoW and check it out, here:

Insuring the Batmobile