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.

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!

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 :-)

Sun, 2006-07-30 (Jul 30)

Google Talk now does File Transfers and more!

Filed under: Blog,chat,Google Talk,GTalk,im,In The News,Internet,Networking,Software,upgrade — David @ 16:21

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.

Mon, 2006-07-10 (Jul 10)

OpenDNS: interesting phishing and typo protection

Filed under: dns,In The News,Internet,OpenDNS,phishing,Spam,Tech (General),typos — David @ 11:17

The owner of EveryDNS, David Ulevich, has come out with an interesting new solution to phishing scams and domain name typos: fix it at the DNS level, which I found in an article at Wired.

The new service is free and it’s called OpenDNS.  You use it by changing the DNS server addresses on your maching, router, or wherever you get your DNS settings from to use their two DNS server IPs.  Then, they do some filtering to correct typos such as typing existdifferently.cm, which they automatically fix into existdifferently.com.  They also monitor sites that try to pull of phishing scams and block the addresses of the sites requesting your personal information, so even if you click the link in an email (such as “your PayPal account has been marked for fraud, come enter all your bank accounts, credit cards, and social security number at this link so we can rob you blind!”), if OpenDNS knows about it and you click on the link, you’ll be blocked and instead get a webpage similar to the screenshot shown here.

 Sample OpenDNS Phishing Block

Where do they make their money? Eventually, they plan on offering advertising when you type in a domain name that doesn’t exist and they can’t correct.  For now, they just give you some search results.  This is different from VeriSign’s fiasco Site Finder (see the Wired article above for details), because you’re choosing OpenDNS, it’s not being forced on all internet users worldwide at the authoritative DNS server level!

New Gmail features, just what I wanted!

Filed under: email,features,Gmail,In The News,inbox,Internet,Spam,Tech (General) — David @ 00:07

Just a few weeks ago I was cleaning out my Gmail inbox and wishing for a way to apply new filters retroactively to emails already received.  Apparently my wish has become a reality: Google Operating System reports that this is now possible!  It is enabled on my Gmail account, I just checked.  Maybe it’s available on yours, too. ZDnet’s article says another new feature is to “Delete all spam emails” in the spam folder at once, which doesn’t help me much now as I’ve never let more than a screenful of comments accumulate, but should be helpful in the future as that never lasts long on my email addresses! Not that I need to delete the spam, really, but I’m just obsessive like that…I like Monk because I see too much of him in me a lot of times :-)

Okay, really time for bed now…

Sun, 2006-07-09 (Jul 09)

eBay says Google Check”out” over it’s own PayPal

Filed under: checkout,eBay,ecommerce,Google,In The News,Internet,PayPal,Tech (General),unfair business practices — David @ 23:34

I’m a bit late on finding this out, but apparently eBay has banned Google Checkout from being used to pay for its auctions.  Something about it being “too new.”  Which is perhaps code for “we don’t want to let our PayPal have any real competition especially with Google so we came up with a lame excuse.”  I don’t actually purchase from eBay often, but next time I log in I may hit their feedback page and let them know I don’t appreciate their decision. I’m trying to get to bed now, so I’m not going to hop over there at this precise moment :-)

Thanks to Robert Accettura’s link for the story, which is also carried over at theunofficialgoogleweblog.

Sun, 2005-05-29 (May 29)

I’m Engaged!

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

Yep, it’s something at times I thought I’d never get to say except on April Fool’s day, but it’s definitely real this time!

I’m engaged to be married!

I proposed to my now-fiancée Ruth on Friday evening, May 27th, close to 4:35 pm local time. I won’t bore you with details of the proposal at this time, because if you know her, she probably wants to tell you herself, and will do a much better job of it than I will! Plus, if I’m there when she tells you, I get to see how excited she gets and it about kills me every time! :-)

I’d also prefer to not tell you date predictions (we have an idea but we haven’t locked things down yet) here. But, I will say that we think 12 months for an engagement is too long! :-) But I will almost definitely be over 21 when we get married, which if you know me, narrows it down a tiny bit :-)

YAY YAY YAY!!! :-D

Wed, 2005-05-25 (May 25)

So that’s why people don’t get me!

Filed under: Blog,Funny,General,In The News — David @ 00:59

Forbes.com says “Researchers Pinpoint Brain’s Sarcasm Sensor”:http://www.forbes.com/lifestyle/health/feeds/hscout/2005/05/23/hscout525874.html. No wonder! I run into way too many brain-damaged folks day-to-day. Kill them all! (In case that part of your brain is malfunctioning…that was sarcasm ;-)

Found that article through “Robert Accettura’s blog”:http://robert.accettura.com/archives/2005/05/23/sarcasm-found/ in case you’re interested :-)

Wed, 2005-05-04 (May 04)

Actual Expert Too Boring For TV

Filed under: Entertainment,Funny,General,In The News — David @ 11:34

Gotta love The Onion! They always have too many good stories, I try to stay away or I end up doing nothing else and wasting a lot of time :-) But this one’s pretty good: “Actual Expert Too Boring For TV”:http://www.onion.com/news/index.php?issue=4118&n=2

We now return you to your regularly scheduled web browsing.

Sat, 2005-04-23 (Apr 23)

Glad to be home!

Filed under: Blog,Digital Cameras,Flickr,General,In The News,Personal,Photography,Tech (General) — David @ 02:47

Vegas was great, but it’s so good to be home! I love lots of things that are in my life, and people that are in my life. It’s a good time to be alive, and God is good. And sometime, I’ll be able to share a bit more of it. For now, you get to read whatever I feel like putting here (well, you’ll always get that, it just might not be as interesting as my life actually is :-)

I got my camera, and it’s really cool. Haven’t had much time to play with it yet! Also they didn’t send me an adapter ring that I need to use the lenses I got, but they’re sending me one for free that will hopefully be here next week (never depend on specific timing from the USPS!). So I haven’t been able to play with the macro lens that I was looking foward to…not like I’ve had time anyway, so I suppose it’s all working out :-)

I have two friends that have actually uploaded a significant amount of stuff to “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/ now! Takes time, but eventually I bring people around to the latest and greatest I’ve found :-) Sometimes ;-)

Also…I didn’t know until I read one of the blogs I keep up with that “Adobe bought Macromedia”:http://robert.accettura.com/archives/2005/04/18/adobe-buys-macromedia/! Very interesting, but makes sense. I’m sure we’ll hear more soon!

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