Dear readers:

Several days ago this blog was hacked and taken over by someone posing as Bono from U2. Of course this was not really Bono from U2, and I’m sure you’re aware of that, but for legal reasons I’ve been advised to state this fact plainly here on the blog. To reiterate: The person posting on this blog over the past several days was not Bono of U2.

I’ve spent the past few days working with Google (which owns Blogger) to try to gain access to my account and put a stop to this prank. For various reasons (the holiday, and my own travel schedule, and the fact that Google is reluctant to meddle with people’s blogs) it has taken more time than I would have liked to get things straightened out.

As best we can tell, someone managed to obtain the password to my Blogger account. It’s still not clear how they did this. They also obtained access to my Gmail account and sent messages to some people pretending to be me. If you received one of these mail messages, I apologize.

After signing in to my Blogger account, the hackers authorized a new user (“Bono”) and changed the blog’s password so that I could not sign in to stop them. The worst part for me (other than having to read the items) was that I had no way to tell my readers what was going on.

I deeply apologize to Bono of U2; everyone at Elevation Partners; Marissa Mayer and Eric Schmidt of Google; and anyone else who was mentioned over the past few days.

Thanks to Google and Blogger, this evening I’ve finally been able to gain access to my account again, and I’ve eliminated the “Bono” poster and changed all of my passwords. I believe the hack should be over now. I hope we can all move forward again.

An investigation is ongoing. I will keep you informed as soon as I know anything. And again, I apologize. Peace out.