This is the final post in this blog. I have moved it from the domain existdifferently.com over to original.existdifferently.com as an archived resting place. I will be re-using existdifferently.com. It may be for another personal blog or something else entirely. Regardless, although this is my oldest, original blog, my life is very different now than when I started and it’s time for a fresh start! However, I’m also a packrat, so I will likely never get rid of this archive entirely. (Whether I leave it publicly available or not I haven’t decided.)
Mon, 2008-03-24 (Mar 24)
Sun, 2007-03-04 (Mar 04)
WordPress 2.1.1 Dangerous, upgrade!
The official WordPress development blog is reporting that WordPress version 2.1.1 was compromised by a malicious hacker and anyone who downloaded that version in the past several days needs to upgrade immediately to version 2.1.2. Many more details at that link; I checked the two files they mentioned (feed.php and theme.php in the wp-includes folder) and I got one of the infected versions! If you do a “diff” and compare an infected file with one from the 2.1.2 download the infected line becomes obvious. The vulnerability, as far as I can tell, allows an attacker to easily execute any command on the system that’s allowed by the user PHP is running as by using a specially (but easily) crafted query string.
I’m still running 2.0.3 here as I write this, but I’m going to upgrade to 2.0.9 soon; I can’t run the 2.1.* series yet because I don’t have MySQL 4+ installed on my server yet.
Thanks to a post from security blogger Martin McKeay that was my first warning!
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Tue, 2007-02-13 (Feb 13)
VA loses doctor and patient data – again!
You’d think they’d have learned by now, but nope, 1.8 million records from patients, and doctors, too this time, have been lost or stolen from a VA research facility.รย They aren’t sure if the data was lost or stolen yet, but, “A VA research assistant was using the physician data to analyze VA health care providers and compare them to non-VA providers, according to a statement from the department. The research assistant used the hard drive to back up information contained on an office computer, and the data is not believed to have been encrypted.” according to that article from GovExec.com.
This is the VA’s third data breach in less than a year, and I can only imagine the negative press and blog coverage this one’s going to get! At least the VA should be the most secure organization for data by the time they’re done cleaning up (again) after this mess! (Maybe that last sentence would drip with less sarcasm if this wasn’t their third breach.)
This seems to be a pretty new story, one of the earliest ones I see in Google News after a quick scan is only 19 hours old, but most places have only written about it in the last 6 hours or less. I do see a couple of stories like this one from yesterday (Feb. 11th), but they just now appear to be getting widespread.รย Should see some comments from security bloggers like Martin McKeay and Bruce Schneier pretty soon, I would imagine.
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Mon, 2007-02-05 (Feb 05)
Colts Win Superbowl!!!
The Indianapolis Colts won the Super Bowl! Yay! Whoo-hoo!!! Just needed to say that :-) Peyton Manning is the Super Bowl MVP, no surprise.
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Fri, 2006-12-29 (Dec 29)
Thu, 2006-12-28 (Dec 28)
Mon, 2006-12-25 (Dec 25)
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas to everyone! My son’s not born yet, and if he continues to hold off, we’ll have a nice day with family after we get some sleep! I’m personally looking forward to the food :-)
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Mon, 2006-10-02 (Oct 02)
Toss some Phish in the Tank!
Created by the guys of OpenDNS goodness, PhishTank is a new site that lets you submit emails you’ve received and lets the community verify whether or not the phishing site is working, and if so it lets application developers query to see if a particular URL is a phishing scam or not!รย As this grows, it should provide a resource for programs like Mozilla Thunderbird and others to detect scams and help keep the less-informed users out there better protected.
I like the fact that you can submit phish, help verify phish others have submitted, but also you can tell when phish you’ve submitted have been verified by others and what the status is.รย Nice to be able to get some feedback to know you’re helping to make a difference with your submissions!
They also have a blog (who doesn’t) if you want to read the musings of the site’s creators.
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Wed, 2006-08-30 (Aug 30)
Vista Public Beta for Download!
You can download the Windows Vista Pre-RC1 Beta version here, limited to the first 100,000 downloads! No registration required, it’s publically available. You’ll have to burn it to DVD to install it, and it’s a big download (2.58GB). My copy is downloading as I write this, but I’m not sure if I’m going to test it out or not. I might get a chance to! Not on a system that matters, of course :-) Thanks to 4sysops.com for the link!
UPDATE: Apparently, according to the Windows Vista Team Blog, the download can only be activated if you install with a key as being an existing beta tester. So…not as nice as it would appear, since they never mention this on the download page!
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Thu, 2006-08-10 (Aug 10)
OpenDNS steps up to Cameroon .cm challenge
The guys at OpenDNS have responded to my (and the general online community’s) issues with Cameroon and .cm domains by allowing you to turn on the option to fix this individually from their prefs page. Turn on filtering if you want, or leave it off, it’s up to you. They even have a great blog post about it. OpenDNS has been doing a great job of setting up a service that lets the user choose what they want for their scenario, something that’s been lacking in the DNS arena for a long time. There are many charges I’ve seen claiming OpenDNS is trying to “control” DNS and they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing. But as long as you’ve got control of whether or not to use their service, or even better which options of theirs to apply to you (which this post shows they are actively providing and expanding), they’re only going to help, not hurt, the internet in general. It doesn’t hurt that they’re doing it so openly and transparently on their blog! Thanks to David Ulevitch and his team!
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You want me to try this out where?
Saw this sign the other day at Wal-Mart…apparently they want me to head to their demo table and try out some toilet paper. Really? You really want me to sample it there? What language did the person that put this up speak, anyway? Darn funny, though :-)
(click for full-size version)
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Mon, 2006-08-07 (Aug 07)
Cameroon takes over all .cm typos of .com
The country of Cameroon has redirected all unregistered domains ending in their country top-level domain (TLD) of .cm to advertising pages in attempt to capitalize on people that mistype .com. Slashdot is where I read about it this morning, and their source was an article at CircleID.com, and someone else has more details and opinion over here.
Further investigation by a Slashdot commenter at the article above shows that the ads are being served by a company called “NameView Inc,” which is the owner of the IP block 72.51.27.0 – 72.51.27.255 (72.51.27.0/24), a subnet I’ve easily blocked access to from work (which at least gives an error when mistyping domains as .cm, I haven’t stumbled upon an easy way to redirect .cm to the correct .com using the Microsoft ISA 2004 firewall). OpenDNS doesn’t yet fix this but I’ve asked them to, so we’ll see what their decision is on this! If they re-start typo-correcting .cm to .com as they used to before Cameroon’s new trick, it should just work on top of my firewall block since they won’t be redirecting to the advertising IP addresses I’m blocking!
Wed, 2006-08-02 (Aug 02)
Stephen Colbert and Wikipedia, and how good is it, anyway?
Apparently on his TV show, Steven Colbert actually modified the Wikipedia entry about himself “live” (while the show was being recorded) on-air!รย And got a bunch of other users to modify some other pages as an example.รย Interesting stuff, especially when compared with an article in Nature showing that the Encyclopaedia Britannica has an error rate of less than but still comparable to Wikipedia.รย (Britannica didn’t like Nature’s article and Nature responded…follow the thread here.)
Personally, I like Wikipedia, but I’ll proably stay on the safe side and use it only for basic information and links to more credible information when writing college papers (oh yeah, I’m starting college this month since you probably didn’t know :-)
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Sun, 2006-07-30 (Jul 30)
Google Talk now does File Transfers and more!
Hooray! Google Talk (their instant messaging application using a jabber compatible back-end) has finally released an update that lets you do file transfers to/from other users, as well as leave voicemails if they’re offline (and you have a microphone) and display what music you’re currently listening to in your Google Talk status. The new version is numbered 1.0.0.95, which doesn’t show up unless you really look for it :-)
Only some users have gotten the update with the automatic upgrade feature (they roll out new features a few users at a time generally, and this is no different), but if you want the upgrade now, you can grab it from http://dl.google.com/googletalk/googletalk-setup-testing.exe and start transferring!
There’s a good review of the features (how to use them, how well do they work?) over at BigBlueBall.com.
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Mon, 2006-07-10 (Jul 10)
Photo from Holland – Pizza!
While we were in Holland, we ate Italian two nights in a row (at the same restaurant), and this is one of my meals (minus a quarter of it :-) It was pretty good! Plus, I’m testing a new Zooomr account (similar to Flickr in many ways…but different) and they’re giving away free pro accounts to bloggers who display a photo from them in their blogs :-)
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