David Weiss writes a thoughtful and well researched analysis of the potential security risks of shortened URLs should they become ubiquitous. It is well worth a read: The Security Implications of URL Shortening Services Shortened URLs hide the destination site from the viewer until they’ve visited the potentially malicious site, they bypass SPAM filters and […]
The new GParted LiveCD (v0.4.1-2) allows booting into a RAM disk so you can eject the CD and shred other servers with it while the first server is still doing long-running shred commands. Very cool! For those who don’t know about it, GParted is a GPL (free and open source) software suite that allows re-partitioning […]
I have is_human() coupled with Akismet and together they knock out all the comment spam I was getting. The other interesting little factoid, is that nearly all the spam I was getting was coming from only three IP addresses… hurray for blacklisting. I’ll share the nefarious addresses so you can firewall them out if you […]
I am very annoyed that for some weeks now, every time I sign into Yahoo’s instant messenger service I get two spam messages from random Yahoo accounts that change every time. I only get the unsolicited offers for illegal goods or services when I first sign into the service for a session (never in the […]
Gah, I find myself once again dipping a toe into the murky waters that make up the Windows(tm) experience. I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate that I have not had to touch any MicroSoft crap for many years now… but I inherited an old Compaq desktop and my boss suggested we put XP on it so […]
If you live in Virginia, it’s primary election day, remember to go vote! Results are on the state board of elections website, and will be updated live. I am following very closely to see if we will be hosting a Webb fundraiser or a Miller fundraiser later in the summer. We just found out that […]
So this morning, all my attempts to use google are returning the strangest error, as if I were a spammer or hacker program trying to harvest their site for information. The message reads: “We’re sorry… … but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, […]
So I had trouble figuring out how to activate the Akismet filters on my WordPress blog, because I could not find my own API Key – turns out you must register a WordPress.com blog to get that key. This became more important recently because the amount of spam commentary showing up on my blog was […]
John Gruber has an excellent and very sarcastic article poking a little fun at the recent hype about the possibility that someday there may in fact be a virus for Mac OSX. The fact is well known and common sense, but why is there repeated story after repeated story about new Mac viruses (there are […]
A few months ago I volunteered 2 hours of my time as a computer geek to a charity auction, and lovely L.G. won the auction. So Saturday morning found me helping her with her IBM Thinkpad A20m (P3 @700MHz, 256MB, 40GB, XGA, Win2000 Pro). I found myself impressed with the hardware, that this laptop made […]
