MT.Net

There are 150 posts filed in MT.Net (this is page 15 of 15).

Blogging blocker

You may have noticed I don’t do much posting evenings and weekends. Its not that I don’t want to or have anything to say, its just that I’ve got an ailing laptop that’s been giving my trouble recently.

I’ve known for a while that my Thinkpad T40 doesn’t like to be run anywhere but from a desk. The moment its anything but completely horizontal it promptly zaps its memory – leaving me to reboot the system. Frustrated by its lack of portability, I took it apart last night to see if I could find any visible damage. After an easy disassembly and look-over, I cranked it back up only to have it be even less reliable than before. Now it won’t even boot consistently from a flat surface. That’ll teach me to play technician!
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Phishing attempt is stoped

This just arrived in my inbox. Someone obviously didn’t read my earlier post:

From: “Google-AdWords-Noreply” support at google.com
To: markt at blahblahblah.blah
Subject: Your AdWords Google Account is stoped.

My account is stoped. My God, how could this have happened?

Packt lss

Looks like my blog server is currently having packet loss issues. Don’t expect much from MT.Net until these issues get resolved.

WordPress hacked

One of my umpteen million WordPress sites (but not this one) was “hacked” by an iframe hack. It was a WordPress 2.3 site which I’d waited to upgrade. Only one site and only one post had the hack, which was an iframe link that somehow got tacked on to the end. Google helpfully alerted me to the issue when it scanned my site and detected the hack. Pretty useful, that Google.

I’m still investigating how the attack occurred, as the single-post aspect makes me suspect a browser-based attack. I don’t really consider it a hack in the traditional sense, though I’m still puzzling over it. Any clues from my fellow network security gurus out there would be appreciated.

Y’all fellow WordPressers might want to check your WordPress database(s) for the issue. This SQL statement did it for me.

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM wp_posts WHERE wp_content LIKE "%iframe%";

…where you’re obviously pointed to your WordPress database.

Gen Drebery is an unwelcome guest

This is the second comment spam I’ve seen on my site(s). When WordPress emails me about a new comment, the new spam looks like this:

Author : Gen Drebery+ACc-,+ACc-deber@gmail.com+ACc-,+ACc-+ACc-,+ACc-63.2.12.45+ACc-,+ACc-2008-01-25 23:21:20+ACc-,+ACc-2008-01-25 23:21:20+ACc-,+ACc-+ACc-,+ACc-0+ACc-,+ACc-Internet Explorer+ACc-,+ACc-comment+ACc-,+ACc-0+ACc-,+ACc-0+ACc-),(+ACc-0+ACc-, +ACc-+ACc-, (IP: 69.31.80.66 , colo-69-31-80-66.pilosoft.com)

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The hazard of updating links

I discovered that MT.Net‘s once-impressive Technorati Authority rating is about half what it used to be. I think this drop occured when I finally pulled the redirects that pointed the old Drupal links to my site to the new WordPress ones. Even though search engines (and others) coming to old links were told by my webserver to update their links, Technorati (at least) didn’t seem to pay attention.

Bad behavior from Bad Behavior

I was blogging away happily from the Atlanta airport tonight when suddenly MT.Net didn’t like me anymore. I got a message from my Bad Behavior blog spam blocker flagging my IP address. Since I was coming from the airport WiFi’s gateway address, I assumed that spammers and the like may have sent spam from the airport and gotten the address blacklisted. Still, I managed to get in one post from the WiFi before it blocked me, so that didn’t seem to be the right answer.
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Removing old Drupal redirects today

I’m removing the old Drupal redirects today, the ones that make old, old, old links work. I’ve been using WordPress now for months so I figure its time.

If you don’t see new entries after September 17th, chances are you need to update your feed address. Get with the program, you lazy slugs!

[Update:] For the benefit of the extremely lazy, I’ll provide my new feed link here.