Tag: Blog

So This Is Happening

For the last seven years I’ve offered a website service wherein I provide a year of hosting, a domain name search, and the latest WordPress installation with theme configuration and initial SEO settings, for $180.00.  That’s super cheap and I believe it is a quick way for a person or business to achieve a web presence without the learning curve of doing it themselves.

I’ve had clients come and go, and those that let the hosting lapse have done so because they don’t see their site appear on Google.  Invariably, the lack of search engine traction is due to a lack of regular content addition.  Now, I do include training on the use of WordPress with my package, along with a discussion on the importance of posting to the site on a regular basis with two to three paragraphs of relevant, truthful, useful information in the blog section.  Without fail, it is that section of their site that remains fallow.  It seems that spending an hour a week adding something to their site is just not a priority.  And that’s a shame as no one would know more about their site subject than the owner, and spending four to five hours a month on self-marketing the business is far more cost effective than paying someone else to do it.

However, it seems that content creation and management is a viable service and one that I can provide.  For as little as $250.00 a month I will research and create content for your website for regular updates and posts.  I can also offer video creation in a range of production values for reasonable rates.  If you have an interest, see my pricing list here.

 

The Real Story Behind Facebook Moderation and Your Petty Reports | The Internet Offends Me

Love it or hate it, Facebook is a big thing in our society. Something that big is going to have some really good things happening within. Unfortunately, something that big will also have some of the worst things imaginable within. It is, after all, made of people. The following blog post gives a glimpse behind the curtain of Facebook:

“THE REAL STORY BEHIND FACEBOOK MODERATION AND YOUR PETTY REPORTS

Imagine going to work every day and at the start of your day, with your first cup of coffee, you sit down to glance at be-headings, children in the process of being raped, human bodies in various stages of decomposition, the living and dead results of domestic violence, hanging bodies of 10 year old boys accused of being gay, real-life snuff films and bloody dog fighting rings and their subsequent results. Can you think up a human horror? I’ve probably seen it or a picture or video of something very similar. It’s fair to say that some of the people who work around me do not fare so well. Often they end up suffering from the endless barrage of horror they witness 8 to 12 hours per day. Did I share that *most* of these people make around a dollar per hour to do this job? That’s the truth. Not me though. I am an American who demands rights and all, so I make approximately $29 dollars per hour more than them. Technically, I don’t even have to do anymore than make sure they are clicking the buttons in the correct order. I don’t have to look at the images, but most of the time my focus on remaining unbiased in the face of, makes me do so anyway.

It’s Not All Blood and Guts, Sometimes it’s Worse…”

Read the full article here:The Real Story Behind Facebook Moderation and Your Petty Reports | The Internet Offends Me.

mca blog [RESTful or not? Here comes trouble!]

Are IT buzz words and classifications becoming a hindrance to modernization and growth? Worse yet, are obsolete concepts being used as criteria for employment suitability?
Check it:

mca blog [RESTful or not? Here comes trouble!].

Forget marketing, try hacking for fun and profit!

I was going to do a post on marketing and the B.S. tactics that are increasingly in use.  Indeed, this blog gets an average of six  comment posts a week extolling the virtues of low-cost faux boner pills and heart medication (I’d be wary of the latter), or how to get rich by marketing faux boner pills and heart medication.  There are plenty of others, and all have the commonality of playing upon two major human weaknesses: Fear and Greed.  The Greed is pretty straight-forward; who doesn’t want to be rich?  But the fear is more insidious as there are tons of things people are afraid of, such as:

  • My Health: I’m afraid to die!  Give me pills that allow me to live forever, even though my retirement money will run out soon.
  • My Wealth: I’m afraid of being poor and homeless.  This fear is the least unfounded of the group, these days.
  • My Social Standing:  I’m afraid that if I don’t keep up with the latest fads and trends I’ll be considered in some unflattering light.
  • My Connectivity:  I’m afraid that if I absolutely, positively, cannot be in constant communication with everyone I know, and update my Facebook status from anywhere, I will miss out on something!
  • My Boner: I’m afraid that if I can’t perform sexually, all the time, every time, my wife/girlfriend/life-partner will look for sex elsewhere.
  • My Toilet Paper: I am terribly afraid that my toilet paper will leave little pieces on my buttocks, or that guests to my home will see the roll.
  • Everything Else:  I’m afraid of everything, but I am also afraid of being Agoraphobic.  Sell me something quick, to comfort me and give my life meaning!

And there are plenty more you could come up with, I’m sure.  But, these marketing tactics are nothing new (think of how many bomb shelters were sold during the height of the Cold War.  Ah, the good old days…), and pointing them out is a fool’s errand as few people apply reason where Fear and Greed are concerned.

Instead, the point of this post is to share something I discovered today while doing some website housekeeping: the existence of some nasty little scripts added to my page code.  I wouldn’t have noticed them were it not for Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), in conjunction with a site-wide backup, bringing the scripts to light.

The backup was done by my S.O.P.: I ftp the website folders to a directory on my home computer and download a zipped copy of the MySQL table schema to the same directory.  Simple enough…I’d done this a few dozen times before.  But, this time around, the MSE was throwing frequent alerts to a known Trojan.  This is not wholly unusual with heuristic Anti-Virus if a normally safe bit of code resembles something in the AV database.  However, I know I haven’t written anything Trojan-like, and more than one alert made me think there was some serious poop happening.  My suspicions were confirmed when I could not open a file locally in notepad; MSE squashed that with a quickness!  I browsed up to my CPanel and did a little snooping in the files with the on-site editor.  What I found was a cryptic script appended to every instance of a generic entry file throughout the site: index.php, index.html, and default.html.  About 30 minutes of searching for and deleting these pests (while muttering profuse epithets toward the scum that deposited the scripts in the first place) resulted in being able to backup my site without MSE flags being raised.

Thinking that this might not be an isolated event, I immediately did a backup of a client’s sites and came across the same scripts, and in some cases additional scrips added to the top of the page.  What the hell?  Oh, well.  Repeat the cleaning process and move on.  That was three hours I’ll never get back.  But, it got me to thinking:  How did they get there?

The why is pretty easy.  Evil hackers look for all sorts of ways to get their grubby little scripts onto as many individual computers as they can for all sorts of nefarious purposes.  There is big money in furtively collecting personal and financial information from unsuspecting users, for example, or zombie-fying a slew of computers to perpetrate a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in an extortion plot against a large web-connected entity (banks, the FBI, maybe the power grid?).

But, the how still eludes me.  I don’t think my passwords were hacked, else the scripts would have shown up on all my site pages.  Indeed, there could have been some better-hidden funkiness stuck into called-code that I might never have noticed without a line-by-line investigation.  So, no, I don’t believe this was a hands-on attack.  This is an automated thing (a worm?) that looks for the common entry-point files in a site and deposits its manure on the fertile fields at the top or bottom before crawling off to infect someone else.

So, what to do?  I’m not sure.  One thing I’m going to try is to find some way of giving my entry-point files a different name.  Something cryptic that will thwart guessing.  I believe that can be accomplished through the .htaccess file.  The main thing is to get away from the generic tags that are easy targets.

Finally, if you have a website, blog, maybe even your Facebook page, you may want to look at the source code (you can do that in IE and Firefox with a right-click and View Source) to see if there are any long strings of two or three character clusters at the top or bottom of the page.  If there are, remove them if you can.  If not, tell somebody (look for a “contact us” link).  There may be occasions where a single-line, un-commented, and poorly located script like that is there for a good reason, but I can’t think of one.