Bandinage in Robin Hood’s Barn

Posted on April 19, 2013 by bluedepth

Wow, what a long strange trip that was! I’ve got a lot of my amateur photography and I’ve been kicking around the notion of placing it all on my host and sharing it through my blog somehow. I started this sad trip with Pixelpost, then looked around for other LAMP scripts that could work after Pixelpost belly-flopped and died on impact. The issue I had with Pixelpost was trying to mass-import 218 pictures of my two cats. The software just couldn’t cope. So after a while trying to hammer a square peg in a round hole I just gave up altogether.

Then it struck me that I could use my WordPress blog maybe. I had a dim memory about something about Galleries. I can store as much as I like on my host and there’s no bandwidth issues so why not? So I did some reading in the Codex and well, there you go! Create a new Page, add Media, create a new Gallery and it’s EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED. Then I happened to notice JetPack and looked in there and it has Carousel feature which improves the standard Gallery control for WordPress. WOW! It was everything I wanted and it ate all 218 files without blinking and making new pages is a snap! Adding and removing pictures from the Galleries is just as easy.

So all that way and all that time blown out trying to get a weak system to behave itself and the answer was just under the covers in WordPress all along! I am exceptionally pleased. 🙂 Thanks all you wonderful ladies and gentlemen at Automattic! Thankee-sai!

You can find these galleries on the main menu of my Blog, under the title of Photo Galleries. I hope you enjoy them!

photo by: Nicholas_T

IP Filter Plugin – Blacklist Page

Posted on April 18, 2013 by bluedepth

I came across two great plugins – WP-Blacklister and IP Filter for WordPress. The first lists all the IP addresses for all the spam comments that a blog gets. The spam is identified by Akismet, I grab the IP addresses and then put them into TextWrangler. I sort the lines, find the really obnoxious networks, the ones with the same three octets over and over again, so something like 5.5.5.1 and 5.5.5.2, and 5.5.5.3, these, depending on how they resolve in an IP lookup get a block, either 5.5.5.* or 5.5.*.* or 5.*.*.*. From the left to the right there you block off more and more of the network. The more *’s in the block, the more stations are simply thrown off.

And then there is IP Filter plugin, I assemble a list of naughty IP’s and then fill in the details for this plugin. If an incoming IP address matches any of my blocks, they get no content and a short blurb stating that their network was either a source of spam, malware, or otherwise is unwanted traffic. I applied this list to all my blogs and I had spam comment rates which were about 30 per hour go to zero.

I will be creating a new page on my blog that lists these bad networks and IP addresses. Feel free to get this plugin and enter these blocks for yourself if you wish. I’ll be updating it as I find more spam or Limit Logon Attempt Plugin lockouts.

There is a wee part of me that is toying around with blocking the 141.218 subnet. We’ll see. 🙂

photo by: The Tire Zoo

Limit Login Attempts Plugin

Posted on April 18, 2013 by bluedepth

I recently added to my WordPress blog security now that blogs like these are being targeted by botnets. I’ve found a great plugin called “Limit Login Attempts” which allows me to set lockout values to people who try to guess what the ‘admin’ account password is.

First, lets just say that the level of entropy in my admin accounts is so high that there isn’t enough time left in the Universe to try every combination – but that being said, my values for this plugin would make this a non-issue. I give people 4 attempts to try the ‘admin’ account, after that they are locked out for 1440 minutes, a day. If they lockout twice, the lockout penalty goes to 720 hours, or a month. There is 4320 hour span until retries are reset, that’s 6 months.

Of course, the filter also captures the IP address, so I’m going to look into getting a IP blacklist plugin and adding these captured IP addresses to that blacklist. They’ll never be allowed to my blog. This line of reasoning led me to think about an immune system for the Internet. If an IP does something wrong, it is blacklisted and that fact is then sent to every other site and they blacklist it as well. One false move and you are suddenly banished from the network. I think this would radically change how people behave online. There would definitely be a lot of noise raised when people are suddenly unable to communicate with any host whatsoever because their systems were filthy, compromised, or malevolent. That would add a certain value of responsibility. It would only be a little bit more to establish a site like Digg where people vote on the malevolence of comment traffic, putting trolls right along with botnets and black-hats, out in the cold, banished where they all belong.

I can smell an RFC forming. 🙂

photo by: katerha

WordPress Security

Posted on April 16, 2013 by bluedepth

I run a gaggle of WordPress blogs, both for personal reasons and for work reasons. My SupportPress site runs on WordPress.org and the host I’ve been using all along, iPage sent me an email informing me that they have detected a botnet-sourced cyberattack directed at the login pages of WordPress.org installations. They also informed all their customers that they have installed network limits on these attacks, but that even though the attacks have been greatly reduced, that it shouldn’t lead to a flagging of security vigilance.

No time like the present to get things installed on all my WordPress blogs. The first thing I can think of since all my passwords are 16 to 20 characters long, randomized, stored for me in 1Password, and stored in such a way that even I don’t know them – is to install a plugin called Limit Login Attempts to all the WordPress blogs I manage. This will prevent people from screwing up their login attempts and it will email me when they try. So far this blog is covered and I don’t really expect any problems here.

Thanks to social networking, especially Twitter and my good friend @wyrdsmyth, and my hosting provider iPage I have been protected all along. More security is usually a good thing and in this case, warranted with this extra plugin. Next stop are all the other blogs I manage.

photo by: walla2chick

Chasing ePub Around Robin Hood’s Barn

Posted on April 6, 2013 by bluedepth

I tried a fair bit of cleverness just now. I found a bit of fan fiction online and copied the text to my Drafts app on my iPad. I’m at Chocolatea on Wifi and no access to any devices other than my iPhone, my iPad, and my Nook HD.

I wanted to get the text from my Drafts app over to my Nook HD. The best way? ePub. Or at least that was the challenge I had set for myself. Now I knew I could probably do it with the apps I had, Wifi, and Dropbox gluing it all together.

I opened the text in my Drafts app in Pages, which allowed me to export it in DOC format to my Dropbox app. So that was easy enough. Now I had my fiction in DOC format on Dropbox. None of the online file converters understands Dropbox, nor how to unpack the Public link URL that you can make with Dropbox. Instead of getting your document, you get HTML gunk from Dropbox. So I have another app on my iPad called Files Connect. I used that app to copy the DOC file from my Dropbox to my Windchilde account, so I could host it online *simply* (hah). Once I had a URL link that worked for the DOC file I went to Online-Conversion.com which provides a public service to convert DOC files into ePub format. I handed it my URL, let it go and it offered to email-attach the results to my email. Off it went. I opened Mail on my iPad, opened the email from the service, found the attachment and tried to open it on my iPad. My iPad gave up and offered to send it to a host of other apps that might handle ePub format, one of those was Dropbox, so I saved the data off to my Dropbox. Then I connected to Wifi on my Nook HD, started the Dropbox app and found my ePub file. I renamed it, then I exported it to my Nook HD.

What a mess. I got what I wanted to do but it took me about 2 hours of head-butting against online services and a lot of rigamarole just to do this one thing. I was half-hoping that Pages on my iPad would be Dropbox aware, and ePub aware, and it isn’t. No free apps exist that I could see that create ePub files from pasted in text or from other file formats.

At least it used up some time waiting for Scott to get out of work. At least there is that. As for interoperability, that’s hilariously not going to happen. At least not between iOS and Nook.

Nook HD: Built for Sluggish Annoyance

Posted on April 4, 2013 by bluedepth

I really would like Apple to come out with a iPad Mini with Retina display. I’m quite tired of this Nook HD. It’s not very user-friendly and definitely not me-friendly. I don’t want to take a hammer to the device but when I use it, I sort of do.

So I was online to a site that lets you browse various fan-written fiction stories and they have a feature where you can download epub files, so I did so and saved it to my Dropbox. Then I went into Dropbox app on my Nook HD and went to go look for it. The Wifi on the Nook HD is a flaky pile of junk so that took way longer than it should have. Once I found the file I wanted I downloaded it to my Nook because the only other way to get it in there is to pop the MicroSD card, root around for a universal adapter and then put it in that way. That’s annoying, I’d much rather just be able to tap and download, like I would with an iPad Mini.

I downloaded it from my Dropbox and it ended up somewhere in my Nook’s own storage, which I hate to use, I much prefer my MicroSD plugged into the Nook instead, but there is no way to tell it where you want it to store the files. So I had to find another app called OpenExplorer which has an awful interface but lets you move files around the Nook.

Then the Nook library was confused about where I put that file. Every time I went to go look for it and tap on what it found, I’d be sent to the Wifi activation screen, where I would turn it on (why?) and then nothing. Nothing more than that. When I went back to the search and tapped on my file, it told me “File is not present.” and that was that.

I’ve never been happy with the Nook HD user interface. I bought it because it was cheap and supported Barnes & Nobles but really I think I would have been better off getting an iPad Mini. I regret this Nook HD. It could be so much better if only the B&N User Interface wasn’t so fascist. That’s what it really is. B&N doesn’t trust anyone with anything so they make it impossible to use beyond the B&N Book Experience. I don’t want all my ebooks at B&N, I’ve got thousands of ePub files all on my own – could I upload them and locker them at B&N? Of course not. That’s what the MicroSD card is for. So what value does the B&N store have for me? Little.

So is there any way I could get ePubs from Project Guternberg? Nope. I have to find some other way to get them, like on my iPad and then use Dropbox and OpenExplorer to… it’s way too much work. I’m tired even thinking about it.

So, if and when Apple decides to sell a iPad Mini Retina I’ll put all my Nook stuff on eBay and save up for the iPad Mini Retina. At least iOS respects me and I don’t feel like a criminal trying to cajole Android to give an inch.

I still don’t know why people think Android is any good. Wretched system.

photo by: Nomadic Lass

e-Cycle and Gas Station Sushi

Posted on April 2, 2013 by bluedepth

I sent three old iPhone 4’s to e-Cycle for recycling, they had a relatively good buy-back rate for the old devices. Of the three that I sent, only one was accepted. The other two were shredded and I got nothing for them, other than the vague satisfaction that the hazardous materials in them were recycled, probably.

I can’t really blame the company, it’s all there in black and white. Don’t send phones with active lines on them. Oops, that was my fault, but after hearing that they had this problem I thought I could just go into Verizon’s site and mark the lines as suspended. That didn’t do the trick. So the phones were summarily destroyed and recycled. I think that’s the part I don’t get, the rush to obliteration. Then again, I do get it, it’s a company trying to maximize all their angles and this is a rather convenient angle. It strikes me that they could have simply shipped the phones back to me or perhaps told me that my attempt at suspend didn’t work. Instead, they took the silent and cheap way out – shred the phones and mark the Unit Price as $0.00.

So, do I do business with e-Cycle in the future? I don’t know. I have learned my lesson at least, a phone you haven’t used in six months may still have a line on it. I don’t think I’ll be doing any further business with e-Cycle. It’s not because of anything overtly naughty, but just the sense that they didn’t care to even get back to me after I tried to disconnect the lines – that haste to simply shred and zero-balance fills me with doubt as to whether I got a fair shake on that deal, or not. I’m thinking not. While it wasn’t against any of the fine print, it did leave a rather bitter taste in my mouth, and I did learn a lot dealing with them, so perhaps in the end, it was good for everyone. I got a lesson, they lost a customer, and I’m wiser next time.

Now, to see if e-Cycle has any competitors.

UPDATE: They do have competitors, so at least there is a wide field available. Also turns out that the reports of the devices shredding were perhaps premature. They were found in a box, waiting for Verizon to disconnect them, since I sent that little nugget to Verizon today, it may take a bit for those devices to register as disconnected. I’ll update more as events unfold.

photo by: That Hartford Guy

Burning Sage

Posted on March 26, 2013 by bluedepth

I just received my invitation to attend Sage Summit 2013 in Washington, DC from July 23rd to the 26th at Gaylord National Hotel and Resort.

Since Sage dropped the hot potatoes it was juggling, this yearly pilgrimage is now utterly laughable and irrelevant. Not only will I not go to Washington, DC in the pit of Summer but I will definitely not be going to another Gaylord property. Those “resorts”, especially the abomination in Nashville Tennessee is a crime against humanity and an insult against nature.

My “most favored thing” today that I will do is to click the Unsubscribe button to all Sage communications. My interest drops like wet trousers around the ankles of my professional disgust. Tootles!

photo by: recubejim

Rather Than Fix The CFAA, House Judiciary Committee Planning To Make It Worse… Way Worse | Techdirt

Posted on March 26, 2013 by bluedepth

Rather Than Fix The CFAA, House Judiciary Committee Planning To Make It Worse… Way Worse | Techdirt.

This is wretched and wrong. The TL;DR here is that there is a law already on the books called the Computer Fraud And Abuse Act and this bill is seeking to amend the law on the books and take it in very wrong and upsetting new directions. One of the biggest things that I spotted on that really has me upset is the redefinition of talking about an offense as equal to actually completing that offense. If you say you are going to do something that breaks this law, save your bus fare, you’re already guilty of committing the crime! The other part is even more insidious and that is even if you are given authorization to access a machine, if you use it for a different purpose, then the authorization is void and you are committing a crime.

This makes my work more complicated. Now I have to be careful about what I say, as this bill, if passed would curtail my first amendment rights to free speech and then that second bit would legally prevent me from noticing anything else wrong with a computer if I was just fixing something adjacent or unrelated to the original problem.

What a mess. Encourage your congress-critter to vote no on this bill!

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Category Archives: Technology

Nook HD: Built for Sluggish Annoyance

e-Cycle and Gas Station Sushi

Burning Sage

Rather Than Fix The CFAA, House Judiciary Committee Planning To Make It Worse… Way Worse | Techdirt