Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

OK, its not a secret but it got your attention didn't it!

I was pleased to see the recent addition of a new sub-domain to the oracle.com site, blogs.oracle.com that is to be the home of Oracle blogging. My site had been listed for around a year on the blogs & community link that existed previously and I was keen to see if my blog appeared on the new Oracle blogging home page. At first it was listed as it was clear that the list of blogs included was the same as the old blogs & community page. I then noticed a couple of days later that my blog had dissapeared.

I questioned why this had happened and was it simply an oversight? - the answer was no, it was deliberately removed because i regulary refer to security products and advice that is not endorsed by Oracle. The concern was that anyone following links from this new blogging community site to my own blog and then onto other sites that I have linked to that offer security advice would be assumed to be endorsed by Oracle. So my blog had to be removed.

But on a different level the new site cannot be thought of as an Oracle blogging community when one of the most prolific Oracle related blogs is not included. I am not sure if others are missing. I know Edward Stangler posted yesterday in a post titled "Oracle Gets Sleepy" that he had been removed as well. A comment on there suggests how vital it is that orablogs keeps going so that the full Oracle blogging community is catered for

I am of course still listed on http://www.orablogs.com - (broken link) Orablogs site, Thanks Brian! and I am also included in a number of other blog aggregator sites.

I guess other Oracle bloggers in the community who are listed on blogs.oracle.com should beware that they should not post links to sites or stories that offer security advice, workarounds or exploits otherwise they too would likely be banned!

If there is a burst of security postings on various blogs that follow the well known trend for blogs - linking to each others posts - then we could end up with a situation where a lot of blogs are banned and the "community" grows towards zero members..:-)