Original ExistDifferently.com Weblog of David, a Christian Network and Systems Manager, with topics ranging from Apologetics to Worldview, and some crypto, open source, programming, opinion, and daily life thrown in between.

Sun, 2007-03-04 (Mar 04)

WordPress 2.1.1 Dangerous, upgrade!

Filed under: Blog,General,In The News,Open Source,Programming,Security,security WordPress blog tech,Tech (General) — David @ 00:59

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!

Tue, 2007-02-13 (Feb 13)

VA loses doctor and patient data – again!

Filed under: Blog,General,In The News,Security,Tech (General) — David @ 00:30

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.  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.  Should see some comments from security bloggers like Martin McKeay and Bruce Schneier pretty soon, I would imagine.

Mon, 2007-02-05 (Feb 05)

Colts Win Superbowl!!!

Filed under: Blog,General,In The News — David @ 00:00

The Indianapolis Colts won the Super Bowl! Yay! Whoo-hoo!!! Just needed to say that :-) Peyton Manning is the Super Bowl MVP, no surprise.

Mon, 2007-01-22 (Jan 22)

Colts go to the Super Bowl!

Filed under: Colts,football,General,Super Bowl — David @ 00:48

Yay! The Colts beat the Patriots and are going to Super Bowl 41! I wonder if I can get more people to read my blog if I say that? We’ll see if it gets me higher rankings in Google or something. It is pretty cool though, I watched a lot of the game and coming back from being down by 18 was amazing! I’m not much of a sports fan, but it feels good for the local team to get that far, and I know all my coworkers will be super-extra-heavy-duty-excited this week :-) I think the Colts won because Nathaniel was “watching” the game for his first time ;-) Peyton Manning might have had something to do with it too, but I mention that mainly to get higher Google ratings by mentioning his name.

My dad grew up in Chicago and the Bears are going to play the Colts in the Super Bowl, so it should be an interesting game! Jim Belushi’s funny TV show According to Jim ought to be interesting in the next few episodes due to this development as well, since the show’s set in Chicago and Jim’s a big Bears fan.

Sun, 2006-12-24 (Dec 24)

Favorable Favors

Filed under: General,Wedding — David @ 11:25

Our wedding favors were featured in a blog about wedding favors and decorations! They found my picture of them on Flickr and posted about it back in October of this year (almost a year after my wedding). Cool!

Tue, 2006-10-24 (Oct 24)

Firefox 2.0 is out

Filed under: General,In The News,Internet,Mozilla,Open Source,Tech (General) — David @ 22:16

Yep. Mozilla Firefox version 2.0 was released today.  I’ve been running it since yesterday.  I agree with Martin McKeay about tabs resizing vs. scrolling I think, I’m not sure yet.  I probably won’t try the Tabbrowser Preferences plugin he mentions yet, I’ll try and get used to the new way for a while first.  The spell check in form fields is nice, although writing this post is the first time I’ve seen it in practice.

One thing I missed at first was the del.icio.us plugin which wasn’t updated for Firefox 2.0 when I installed it, although I just checked and they appear to have released version 1.2 today with updated compatibility.  Firefox refuses to install it however, perhaps the old version is cached?  I’ll have to play with it, but the fact that they updated it makes me happy!

My favorite thing about 2.0? The look of the tabs and buttons look much more polished. The search function is improved, spell check I mentioned, phishing protection is good but I haven’t seen it in action yet (not likely to see it unintentionally!), RSS support slightly improved, and maybe something else I forgot.  Oh yeah, they seem to duplicate IE7’s new features and look in nearly every important way. Which is good, in my opinion…I tried IE7 the day it came out (last week), too, and although I’m sticking with Firefox, IE7 is much improved over IE6 and compared to Firefox 1.5, I was a tad jealous!

Mon, 2006-10-02 (Oct 02)

Toss some Phish in the Tank!

Filed under: Blog,General,Internet,OpenDNS,phishing,Spam,Tech (General) — David @ 14:27

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!  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.  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.

Wed, 2006-08-30 (Aug 30)

Vista Public Beta for Download!

Filed under: beta,Blog,download,free,General,Tech (General),vista,windows — David @ 10:56

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!

Thu, 2006-08-10 (Aug 10)

OpenDNS steps up to Cameroon .cm challenge

Filed under: Blog,General,In The News,Internet,Spam,Tech (General) — David @ 14:25

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!

Mon, 2006-08-07 (Aug 07)

Cameroon takes over all .cm typos of .com

Filed under: Blog,cm com domain typo squatting typos Cameroon wildcard dn,General,In The News,Internet,Spam,Tech (General) — David @ 09:17

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?

Filed under: Blog,College,college colbert comedy humor wikipedia IUPUI britannica,General,In The News,Internet,Personal — David @ 14:01

Apparently on his TV show, Steven Colbert actually modified the Wikipedia entry about himself “live” (while the show was being recorded) on-air!  And got a bunch of other users to modify some other pages as an example.  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.  (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 :-)

Tue, 2006-07-04 (Jul 04)

Happy Independence Day!

Filed under: 4th of july,fireworks,food,General,parents,strawberry shortcake — David @ 15:41

It’s the 4th of July! We already set off a bunch of fireworks last night but might grab some more tonight. My parents (and Ruth’s parents, who are visiting and staying at my parents) have made enough food to last an army a week, and we’ll be heading over there as soon as Ruth wakes up from her pregnant nap. I only ate a bowl of cereal this morning (well, this afternoon, I slept until after 12:00) so I’m getting hungry, but I’m waiting for the good stuff!

We’re stopping to pick up some whipped cream on the way to top the strawberry shortcake that awaits us! Yum!

Mon, 2006-07-03 (Jul 03)

Law Enforcement Incident Maps for Indy

Filed under: General — David @ 14:08

I found an interesting site with maps containing police incidents for Marion County/Indianapolis mapped out and searchable! Not sure I wanted to know the number of incidents near our old apartment, which wasn’t terribly high but was slightly unsettling.  None in our apartment complex however, which was thankfully a blank area on the map!

You can check it out at CrimeView Community – City of Indianapolis. I wonder if similar information is available for our new location in Hendricks County?

Sat, 2006-07-01 (Jul 01)

BABY COMING!

Filed under: Blog,General,Kids,Marriage,Parenting,Personal,Pregnancy — David @ 13:56

Just wanted to announce…Ruth and I are having a baby! It’s due the end of December, and we’re going to find out the sex but the ultrasound isn’t until July 25th.

Oh yeah, and we moved in June to a new apartment, closer to Ruth’s job, and not terribly far away from mine!

Canned some Spam!

Filed under: Blog,General,Internet,Spam — David @ 13:54

Well, I’ve been spending some time deleting spam comments from this blog, which have piled up over the last year. I was doing it 20 at a time from the admin area, then I edited the .php file and told it to show me 500 at a time and did a few that way. Then I just went into the database and found the date of the last real comment, looked at the ID of that, and mass-deleted all comments newer than that comment. I’d already deleted a couple thousand manually at least, but the automatic cleanup deleted another 11,839 comments!!

There shouldn’t be a single spam comment left now, but they keep trying to post more ever minute or less so some will probably get through even though I have a ton blacklisted. I’m working on upgrading to WordPress 2.0.3 (this is 1.2.1) and we’ll see if it has better anti-spam built in. If not, I’m going to implement a Captcha solution where you type a number from an image to post a comment and see if that stops the spam, but it will be stopped, someway, somehow!

I’ll probably be doing the upgrade over the next few days, not sure when specifically (have in-laws coming over tonight though Tuesday), but this site will probably go down for a while while I complete the upgrade. Don’t worry…I’ll be back!! :-)

Married life is good, by the way…since I haven’t posted since my marriage announcement :-)

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