Archive for the Category Internet

 
 

Inspiring!

I caught wind of this TED talk while perusing the internet this evening. Very inspiring! I, one day, hope to allow my children (future tense, none expected or planned for the next few years) to have the unhindered freedom to think and do as their creativity inspires them as with this video about “Tinkering School” by Gever Tulley.

Working Now?

Apparently, my website was hacked a while ago (I suspected it previously, but couldn’t find any proof or evidence) and it reared its ugly head this morning in the form of text spam injected into my RSS feed.  Thanks to Lance and Face, who both emailed me about the problem.

After a few hours of hunting for the problem looking through MySQL entries, users, comments, and file permissions, I found an old plugin that had a file that was 2 years newer than all of the other files in the directory and the directory itself.  On top of it being newer, the payload of the php in the file was encrypted.  Encrypted php?  Really?  That’s possible?

After a few WordPress-hardening changes (recommended here and here); nuke the admin account, verify the permissions on files and directories, remove stray _rss_* entries in the wp_options table of my database, rename the wp_* tables of my database to a non-standard name, remove all non-necesary Plugins and Themes, and install WP Security Scan to hunt down vulnerabilities; I think that my site is fixed.

If anyone sees anything fishy coming out of the site from hence forth, please feel free to contact me!  My website maintainence email is webmaster [at] geoffkerr [dot] com.

Site Updates (repost to test some problems with the site)

It was a few years overdue, but I’ve finally updated the theme of my website to something a little more simple and easily customizable. Along with the fresh new coat of paint, I’ve updated to the latest WordPress build, updated all plug-ins that I use, and have been updating the layout to better support some projects that I’ve been putzing around with both on paper and in my head.

Stay tuned for one of those projects, a long-term (with lots more work to go) project of mine to develop a weather monitoring system.

OpenID is a go…

I finally updated my WordPress blog to the latest 2.7.1 build and, after browsing the plugins that are now available, I’ve added a few plugins to support OpenID authentication. Hopefully I’m not too late to support new, “open” standards of authentication prior to them being passed by due to lack of use.

Bailout, Dilbert Style

Dilber Comic for 02/26/09 Scott Adams rocks!