Matt: On Money Stuff

The­re are a few wri­ters who I fol­low reli­gious­ly, and one is Matt Levi­ne of Bloomberg’s Money Stuff. For busi­ness and finan­ce it’s one of the smar­test and fun­niest things you can read. Yes­ter­day, I think for the first time, he men­tio­ned Word­Press! In the con­text of his quo­te on this gre­at X thread about how the Poly­mar­ket insi­der pre­dic­ted the Nobel peace pri­ze win­ner.

This trader appar­ent­ly didn’t have insi­de infor­ma­ti­on, in the tra­di­tio­nal bad sen­se of like brib­ing a Nobel com­mit­tee staf­fer. Ins­tead, web scraping:

“The Nobel site runs on Word­Press. Like many Word­Press set­ups, it has an XML site­map that lists every indexa­ble page, even ones not yet public. If someone were moni­to­ring this site­map, they could easi­ly noti­ce a new page appear, some­thing like “http://nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2025/machado/facts/”

If you run a Word­Press site and want the best advice in the world for how to avo­id this sort of thing, I high­ly recom­mend our enter­pri­se Word­Press VIP ser­vice! They help run some of the lar­gest and most secu­re Word­Press sites in the world, and could easi­ly help navi­ga­te avo­i­ding some­thing like this from hap­pe­ning. Word­Press is easy and cheap to run ever­y­whe­re, even on a Raspber­ry Pi, but you get what you pay for, and any serious orga­niza­ti­on or mis­si­on-cri­ti­cal web­site should be on VIP.