Read on for the sordid saga of “why bureau42.com wasn’t available for most of the day”.

It gets a bit technical. Short version: it was broke, hopefully it ain’t no more.

Long version: I can’t write good code.

PHP is a good programming language for whipping out sites fairly quickly, but it can be tricky to write secure code (i.e. code that won’t let any random schmoe 0wn the Web server this site is hosted on). I thought I’d done so, but I failed. The site wasn’t cracked or anything like that, but a recent upgrade to PHP made a lot of my code break because it depended on the obscure “register_globals” variable. I thought I’d taken care of everything, but I overlooked so much stuff it’s not really even funny.

Hopefully, the only visible effect of this is that most users will have to logout and then login again. I apologize for the inconvenience.