h4x0r3d No More.

It sucks getting hacked or defaced on the web...especially when you haven't done anything to provoke it.

Who knows...the Blog of helios has contained content that's pi$$ed some people off...some of the projects I've involved myself in have evoked less than kind remarks and accusations.  Chances are though that what happened to us was due to a noted vulnerability and not any focused maliciousness.



In the unlikely event that it was a purposeful act, I don't have much to say to that person except:

I hope your toes fall off you ��({1n9  pr1({

OK...venting done.  Fact is, it took us less than a week to get the new site up and the old one needed fixed anyway...but I need to talk a bit about some of the things that happened in the background.  Many of you offered help in site construction and hosting and I sincerely apologize for not getting back to you individually.  I will do so shortly but it turns out that we've found a solution and that solution is now in place.

Welcome to the new HeliOS Project website.

The old site was a mess to be sure...it was too verbose, contained too many links to things that didn't pertain to our mission and was formatted poorly.  It wasn't that way until I started editing it...

Lessons learned.

I want to take this time to personally thank Mark Van Kingsley for his immediate and dedicated help in getting us back up and running.  Mark is a long-time friend of The HeliOS Project and a personal friend as well.  Mark attended the very first Linux Against Poverty event here in Austin and made the trip all the way from the Ithaca New York area on his own dime....

Actually it was a lot of dimes.  Thanks Mark...thanks for being there when it was needed.

We hope to find someone that will translate the entire site to Spanish so if you have that talent and the time, let me know and we will get to work on it.  A Spanish translation of our site would aid this community greatly.

At any rate, hopefully the drama is over and we can go about our business.  While I have you here, I will fill you in on a bit of what we will be doing this summer.

Aside from our normal install schedule for HeliOS Project Kids, we will be conducting two computer camps.  The first one will be held from the 20th to the 23rd of July at the United Methodist Church of Hutto Texas.  This camp will be for the younger kids, hopefully to spark their interest in hardware and software technology.  We're going to be taking apart perfectly good computers and identifying each component and their function then putting them back together again.  We will also be doing a fresh install of Linux on each machine.

Hopefully to achieve a still-working machine.  We'll see.

We are doing a carbon copy of this Computer Camp at the Bruno Knaapen Technology Learning Center in Austin from August 16th thru the 19th.  The kids attending here will be a bit older but we hope to achieve the same things.

Skip Guenter is taking personal vacation time to help with these camps so I want to thank him as well.  Skip does an inordinant amount of work for us and I am deeply grateful.

So...aside from installing computers and doing a couple of camps this summer we will be holding another Organization day to get our shop back into shape after the infusion of equipment from Linux Against Poverty

It needs it.

All-Righty Then