I’ve fixed the comic “That’s Life”, which was broken in my comics aggregator.
Archive for the ‘Web’ Category
“That’s Life” comic fixed in aggregator
Wednesday, December 21st, 2011![[Digg]](http://blog.kamens.us/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Facebook]](http://blog.kamens.us/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[Email]](http://blog.kamens.us/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
Comics added to aggregator
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011By popular demand (i.e., somebody asked), the following comics have been added to my comics aggregator:
- Banana Triangle
- Birdbrains
- Dog Eat Doug
- F Minus
- Ink Pen
- Luann
- The Other Coast
- Overboard
- Pluggers
- Rubes
- Scary Gary
- Strange Brew
Enjoy!
P.S. If you find the aggregator useful, please consider making a donation. Thanks!
“Jew” is not a bad word
Monday, November 28th, 2011Someone forwarded me a chain letter today about how offensive it is that a blatantly antisemitic web site, JewWatch, shows up at or near the top of the search results when you Google the word “Jew”.
Here’s my response: http://blog.kamens.us/jew-is-not-a-bad-word/.
Post-mortem of security breach on my Linux server
Friday, September 16th, 2011
On the afternoon of September 15, I started getting some strange email messages from cron on my Linux server, which hosts my email, blog, DNS, and several web sites for various non-profit organizations I’m involved with.
(Background: One of the web sites, an old Drupal installation, handles scheduled tasks through a cron job that periodically fetches the URL /cron.php on the site. Each time /cron.php is fetched, Drupal checks if any scheduled tasks came due since the last time it was fetched, and executes the PHP code for those tasks. The scheduled tasks aren’t actually supposed to generate any output, so the cron job that fetches /cron.php shouldn’t generate any output and therefore shouldn’t cause cron to send email.)
All the sudden, the cron job that fetches /cron.php started sending me email every time that it ran. When I looked closely, I saw that the contents of the email were some strange, totally incomprehensible JavaScript fragment. I was incredibly busy, so although I thought it was curious that this should suddenly start happening, I didn’t immediately give much thought to it. After it had been stewing in the back of my mind for a couple of hours, however, I suddenly realized with a start that some script kiddie had almost certainly broken into the server and added malicious JavaScript to its pages, so I had no choice but to stop what I was doing and clean up the mess.
Email identity thief strikes again
Wednesday, August 24th, 2011This time, my email identity thief created an account using my email address at support.mozilla.com. I received email from the site in French asking me to confirm my email address.
I’ve reset the password on the account to prevent him from using it, but I can’t log into the account to see what profile information he specified or what he did on the site, because the site provides no way to recover a lost username. I’ve contacted webmaster@mozilla.com and asked them to provide me with the username as well as information from their logs about who created this account.
They’re a bit more likely to be willing to help then Skype, given that (a) they’re a collaborative, open-source organization and (b) I have an ongoing relationship with Mozilla, having submitted several core and Thunderbird patches and been nominated as a “Friend of the Tree”.
I’ve asked them at the very least, if they’re unwilling or unable to provide me with the username, to delete the account, since I don’t want accounts created by other people using my email address on sites all over the internet.
IMPORTANT UPDATE on Brave New Foundation and Nation of Change
Friday, August 12th, 2011I wrote several days ago about spam I received from Nation of Change at an email address which had previously only been shared with Brave New Foundation. Earlier today, I wrote about Nation of Change apparently attempting to cover their tracks after their unauthorized use of email addresses was discovered and reported by me.
I have been in conversation about this with a high-level employee at Brave New Foundation, and I am now able to report the following important information:
- Brave New Foundation does not sell, share or rent their email lists.
- There is a Brave New Foundation employee with access to their lists who has a relative who works for Nation of Change.
- Brave New Foundation believes that this Nation of Change employee made unauthorized use of his/her relative’s access to copy an as yet undetermined subset of Brave New Foundation’s email lists for Nation of Change’s use.
- Brave New Foundation does not believe its employee was complicit in this unauthorized access. In fact, s/he was unaware that it had occurred until I brought it to Brave New Foundation’s attention.
- Brave New Foundation considers this breach of their data to be extremely serious, and they are actively investigating it.
- Brave New Foundation is considering legal action against Nation of Change both to prevent any further use of the copied email addresses and to obtain financial compensation for the damage to Brave New Foundation’s reputation and the time and resources spend investigating this incident.
All of this information, as well as some additional off-the-record supporting information that I cannot report here, was provided to me directly by an employee of Brave New Foundation. I have no reason to believe that employee is lying, and what s/he told me is consistent with my suspicions and impressions about Nation of Change. However, in the spirit of full disclosure, I want to be clear that I have not seen any hard evidence supporting any of Brave New Foundation’s allegations against Nation of Change.
When you combine these new allegations against Nation of Change with all the other issues I raised in my first posting about them, it seems doubtful that this is an organization which deserves anyone’s support.
Nation of Change trying to cover their tracks?
Friday, August 12th, 2011I wrote recently about spam I received from a new, shady-seeming progressive organization called Nation of Change, sent to an email address that I had only ever used to subscribe to another organization’s mailing list.
I asked a lot of questions about Nation of Change, and thus far they’ve failed to respond to any of them. Here’s what has happened instead.
More Citizens Bank shenanigans
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011Those of you who have been reading the ongoing saga of my dissatisfaction with Citizens Bank will no doubt be pleased to hear that it is nearly at an end. Last week, my wife and I transferred our home equity line to Century Bank and opened a checking account there, and we applied for a Capital One Venture Rewards card to replace our Citizens Bank card. In another week or two the final details of the transition will be complete and we will close our Citizens Bank accounts for good.
In the meantime, however, I have yet another bit of Citizens Bank lunacy to report.
Mysterious identity thief uses my email address to create Skype account
Friday, August 5th, 2011As I previously reported, somebody has been interacting with Web sites using my email address.
I suspect that in addition to the ones I know about, this individual is probably also doing things that I don’t know about, because I assume that not all the web sites at which he’s using my address are kind enough to send me an email address alerting me to what he’s doing.
Today, however, I did get a notification from one site that I didn’t know about before — he apparently signed up for a Skype account using my email address. They emailed me about it because he attempted to purchase Skype credit but didn’t complete the transaction.
I immediately took advantage of Skype’s password recovery feature to reset the password on the account. I.e., I stole the account from the identity thief, just as I did when he signed up for a gmail account using my email address.
Then I sent this message to Skype’s customer support department. I don’t honestly expect them to respond in any useful way, but I figured it was worth a try: (more…)
UPDATED: “Basic Instructions” added to comics aggregator
Wednesday, July 27th, 2011I’ve added “Basic Instructions” to my comics aggregator. Tip of that hat to Seth Gordon for pointing me at this fine comic!
UPDATE: Because the author of “Basic Instructions” sometimes publishes his strip after people have already read their daily comics, I’ve also added “Basic Instructions (1-day delay)”, so you can use that one instead if you want to be sure not to miss one!
