Mostly about my amusement
Get your latest copy of Firefox 3.0 here. Thursday openSUSE 11 comes out. It’s like an open source cosmic alignment of the planets.
I’ve avoided the openSUSE 11 beta only because I don’t have the time. I’ve been kicking around Firefox 3.0 RC version and a couple of days ago, even Greasemonkey got updated for version 3.
Over a week ago I complained about WordPress users crying security wolf and not being able to recover their blog when the “Bad Thing(tm)” happens.
Since then a real brawl developed on the support forum that could be summed up like so:
This discussion was just plain nuts and went around in circles. Complaining about a problem without providing any proof and then getting all pissy about it is totally useless. It is entirely possible that such an exploit exists and many people replied so. But without any providing data other than saying “I can assure you that the hack occurs via XMLRPC”, then everyone’s time gets wasted.
Fortunately, Donncha provided a page that covers the issue succinctly and today he added another post on setting up aide. His two posts are good and anyone considering monitoring their WordPress files for modification should give this a try.
Aide will let you see if your installation files and directories have been tampered with. It won’t protect you against HTTP POSTS or database attacks but it’s very good if someone succeeds in modifying your files.
There are ways to log what’s being sent via an HTTP POST and examine that information; if (or even when) I get hacked, I’ll try to start looking at that data. MYSQL database monitoring, that could be interesting but for now I’m not aware of a good tool to do that.
On my OpenSuSE installation, installing aide is simple. As root run
zypper install aide aide --init mv /var/lib/aide/aide.db.new /var/lib/aide/aide.db aide --check cp /usr/share/doc/packages/aide/examples/etc/cron.daily/aide.sh /etc/cron.daily/
All of which I just did. I ran the check option to make sure I did not create any issues with the aide.conf file. I’ll play with the aide.conf file and see what kind of output I get when the daily cron job gets run. If I add and modify files and I set it up correctly then I should see that in daily cron job’s output.
Update: this worked but in /etc/aide.conf change the line verbose=1 to verbose=5. That will get you a useful output of which files and directories changed.
Friday was the mid-season ender of Battlestar Galactica and I just saw it on my DVR. No spoilers but if you want, you can read about it on Salon’s website.
The show is still good and the series wrapping up at the end of this season is a good thing. But I have a tough time watching the show. No matter what happens, people die, their situation gets worse, and each episode ends with “do we shoot ourselves now or wait till next week?”
It’s like reading a good Harlan Ellison story because each episode is gritty and tough but still satisfying. It’s very anti Gene Roddenberry; Battlestar Galactica is the space opera equivalent of HBO’s Oz. At the end of each chapter the characters are still in a really bad place.
I can’t wait to see how the series ends.
New Doonesbury today! I like number 18 best. That was a long 3 month sabbatical, I was beginning to get Doonesbury Withdrawal Symptoms.
It doesn’t happen to me often, but this is what it looks like when I work on a Saturday.
Non-stop being on conference calls. It’s not bad, just I have a lot to do today.
No way. I’m posting the image from CNN’s website but I could swear it says
U.S. Supreme Court says detainees at Guantanamo Bay have constitutional right to challenge their detention in civilian courts.
I see this headline and I can’t help but wonder “Yes, but what’s the catch?”
Around 5:30 PM today I had gotten an e-mail letting me know that my web server was down. I figured that since my server is in my basement, I must have had a brownout. No big deal I’d deal with it when I got home.
Only it was not me for a change. My cable modem was not establishing a connection up stream. TV was working fine, just no Internet access.
The Cablevision support phone number kept ringing busy. When I did get through it played a message saying “If you are calling about an Internet outage and live in the following towns, then an outage has been reported.”
The message played the name of every town I had ever heard of in Long Island. My town was listed at the last one at the very end with “and Dix Hills”.
At 8:30 PM we got sporadic access back. The connection is not good and it keeps going down in the middle of a page load. I’m sure it will be all fixed before midnight. But I’m really dying to know what part of their backbone caused this outage.
Meh. It happens. Wonder if Verizon will market this outage?
With my old ISP in Queens had a page bulletins from their NOC. You could look and at least find out what happened and what the ETA was for a fix. If I find the equivalent page on Optimum Online I’ll update this post.
Today the family started with this
And ended up with this
We got to pick strawberries in the morning and in the afternoon we set up a inflatable pool on the patio. It hit 90+ degrees today and we found out that the second floor A/C does not work. Good thing it rained; it is much cooler now.
Still we all had a great time. Some friends came over for dinner and all the kids got to play.
I’m reading about Senator Clinton and her speech to be given today. I can’t help but wonder “How is President Clinton going to mess this up?”
When Al Gore was running for president, people commented that one of his failures was not getting President Clinton to campaign for him. Bill Clinton is great for working the crowd but he also brings a huge liability. I mean, the day of the last primaries instead of dealing with the election, people are hearing that he called some reporter an expletive deleted.
When President Clinton was in office, his opposition was obsessed with the failings in his personal life. Yes he absolutely lied, yes it was an amazingly stupid thing for him to do. But lining him up just to get him to lie about his personal life? What a waste of the governments time and money.
This is the baggage that President Clinton is encumbered with. I believe he is a smart man and was good for the country, he just brings a cloud of distractions with him.
He’s like that successful uncle that the whole family likes but man, it must be rough being married to him. Senator Clinton’s participation is going to have to be metered with this in mind. It’s unfair to her; I think she is as smart and capable as her husband.
Senator McCain seems to have realized that he needs to work to capture his base and that means embracing President George W. Bush. It might work; many good and decent people who are Republican are repulsed by what this administration is doing. But they’re more repulsed by the idea of not winning the election at all cost.
Senator Obama is running on change. He’s counting on the fact that so many people are sick and tired of the same old same old. I think he may be able to become president provided his opponent does not do a Karl Rove on him. Senator Clinton’s involvement as VP or otherwise may do more harm than good.
It’s Wednesday morning and it looks like Senator Obama has crossed the finish line.
Normally I shy away from the Wall Street Journal on politics as they frequently lean too far right. But this article is a good read about how Senator Clinton went from the leader in the race to falling behind.
Senator Obama’s campaign should enlist her in some important role; she did lose but a lot of people voted for her and still believe. I don’t know if VP would work but she she proven to be a great campaigner.
I hope Senator Obama is prepared to take on Senator McCain. I don’t like Senator McCain pandering to his base but in 1999 I thought he was better than our current president. It should be a good election if both sides can concentrate on the issues at hand.
