spam

How to view questionable PDFs safely

Dave Farquhar security , , , , , , ,

I said Tuesday that it’s a bad idea to download and view PDF (Adobe Acrobat/Adobe Reader) documents from questionable sources, but I didn’t really elaborate on why, nor did I tell you how to view questionable PDFs safely.

The reason is that pretty much anybody with a little bit of determination and the ability to follow a recipe can plant a trap in a PDF file and use it to gain access to your computer. Adobe Reader is extremely prone to these kinds of attacks, and don’t think you’re safe if you don’t run Windows. There are toolkits that will inject traps that work on Macintoshes and Linux too.

Yes, your antivirus software should catch it. But most antivirus software doesn’t dig deeply enough into PDF files to find it.

Scared yet? You should be. You do have some options.
Read more

Why people hack Facebook accounts

Dave Farquhar security , ,

I’ve seen several people I know ask me recently why people hack Facebook accounts. Their Facebook accounts got hacked recently, and they couldn’t figure out why.

I know why. It probably wasn’t Sanford Wallace doing it, but it probably was someone just like him.

So who is Sanford Wallace and why does he want in your Facebook account?
Read more

Don’t fall for the new Facebook stalker scam

Dave Farquhar security , , ,

According to trusted antivirus vendor Sophos, there’s a rogue Facebook application, posing as an app that claims to reveal a way to see who’s been secretly viewing your profile.

It’s a scam. And it’s spreading rapidly. It posts messages on your wall and tries to get you to visit a spam site. Don’t fall for it, but if you already have, delete the fake messages it posts.

Here’s a real app I want you to install instead: Safego.
Read more

Putting blog updates on Facebook

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized ,

Some unknown percentage of my Facebook friends are interested in my blog posts. And some other unknown percentage of them would be if they knew what I was posting. There are several ways to get WordPress to put blog post links on Facebook, but some work better than others. I’d like to thank Rob O’Hara for doing 90% of the R&D for me on that, by telling the world about FT Facepress II.

There was just one problem for me: My web server can’t send e-mail.

Read more

Why would anyone want my e-mail account?

Dave Farquhar security

One of my train acquaintances’ e-mail addresses got hacked last week. And yesterday The Consumerist warned not to play games on social networking sites telling people what your royal name would be by substituting things like the names of places you’ve lived for your real name. That led to people asking why anyone would want an Ordinary Joe’s e-mail account.

Ordinary Joe’s e-mail account is priceless, that’s why.
Read more

Spam, spam, spam, spam!

Dave Farquhar Spam

I’m noticing a trend with my spam comments lately (you never see them because I have a plugin that catches them, and lets me delete the day’s batch with one click). Begging and desperation.

Let me elaborate.
Read more

The circulating privacy threat warnings miss the boat

Dave Farquhar security , , , , ,

This week I’ve had multiple people send me warnings they saw on Facebook about a new privacy threat, which, after I read about it, really appears just to be something that aggregates information already available about you.

Perhaps not coincidentally, PC Magazine has a piece telling you what you need to do if you’re really concerned about privacy and really want to disappear. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2376023,00.asp
Read more

Fixing my b0rken WordPress installation

Dave Farquhar Linux, Servers and Networking, This weblog, Troubleshooting , , , , ,

A little over a week ago, WordPress started acting weird. First, it just got dog slow. Then my site stats page started freezing until I scrolled down and then back up again. Then I started seeing a WordPress.com logon screen on my site stats page. I had to look that account up. Thank goodness for Gmail. Then my Akismet spam filter quit working. Then my stats page stopped working entirely.

I lived with it for a couple of days. I figured maybe WordPress and Akismet had changed something. Or maybe my Linux distribution had. And maybe some update messed things up, and some other update would come along and fix it. No such luck. Read more

Bias is good?

Dave Farquhar net.culture , ,

Blekko could be an idea whose time has come. It’s a search engine with bias.

The idea is, you punch in what you’re looking for, and include a slash term to bias the search in a particular direction. That could help filter out spam sites–sites that are loaded with keywords and a few links but no real content, for instance.

But I imagine some significant percentage of its users will use it to try to find content they already agree with. Read more

And we have safely arrived in the 21st century.

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking, This weblog ,

It wasn’t the smoothest of transitions, but it went a whole lot better than it could have. I’ve moved the venerable Silicon Underground, with its nearly 1,800 posts spanning a little over a decade, to WordPress 3.0.1.

This blog’s been pretty stale for a long time. Some of that is due to the software. Some of it’s my fault. Blogging software has really advanced a lot in the last few years, and the software I’ve been using since 2004 was a bit behind the curve even then. In its defense, in 2004 nothing could do everything I wanted, and the system I chose was one of the few that required login and authentication, which I desperately needed in order to stop spam. But then registration broke, and I didn’t fix it, which meant only longtime readers could comment.

For commenting, we’re going back to username and e-mail address with optional URL, and with some spam analysis tools hopefully filtering out the spam. Users are moderated until their second comment, which will help take care of the trolls. Comments containing multiple hyperlinks automatically go to moderation. And comments will be closed after some period of time, probably 14 days. Discussions usually go downhill as time goes on.

Will I post more now that it’s easier? Probably.

Modern blogs can interact with one another; mine was always an island. Now I can trackback and pingback like everyone else, which will probably prove useful.

I’m sure I’ll be making changes for a while, but this is a big improvement.

I’d like to thank Steve D. and Rich P. (you know who you are) for their help with the migration. It only took me what, three years to go through with it? Four? And then it ended up taking about two hours of real work, if that, spread out over the course of a couple of weeks.