OK, so we as good as promised almost two weeks ago that we'd stop going on about the much-publicised www.milliondollarhomepage.com.
But just when it seemed that the bright student behind the wheeze had made his money and we could move on to other matters, the site returned to the headlines with a front page story in the Financial Times today.
To recap briefly, you may remember that Alex Tew had the rather clever idea of selling space on his homepage to advertisers at the price of $1 per pixel with the aim of earning $1m (£566,000). The runaway success of the sale meant that the last 1,000 pixels were auctioned on eBay for $38,100 last week. When we last checked, the 21-year-old Nottingham student was off to buy a car with some of the proceeds.
However, today's FT story carries the alarming news that the FBI has been called in to investigate the hijacking of the site. According to the paper, Mr Tew was sent a demand for $50,000 from a hacker, believed to be Russian.
"Hello u website is under attack to stop the DDoS send us 50000$" the message read, the FT reported. An expert told the paper that the DDoS - distributed denial of service - was a common way of blocking internet users on a site. Earlier this morning, anyone trying to access the site received a "502 denial of server" message.
Several gambling sites, as well as companies such as Microsoft, eBay and Yahoo!, have been victims of DDoS attacks, according to the paper. Mr Tew believed the blackmail to be a hoax and ignored the email until his internet server company told him the site had experienced extremely high traffic and could break down.
As the FT predicted, www.milliondollarhomepage.com now appears to be working again following a security update by the server operator. In his blog, Mr Tew confirms that the site has been under malicious attack and promises more news soon about what must have left a sour taste to his otherwise stunningly successful stunt.
