Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

Ok, the title lies. but I’m cleaning up my desktop, and came across a screenshot from a few days ago. It is a CAPTCHA that I, for the life of me, could only make sense of as: Six E Pi Pi. So, in this case it worked, right? The human figured out what the letters should be, except as clearly as those are Pi’s, Pi is not a letter on my keyboard. I figured I should get a screenshot to show where CAPTCHAs are going:

Sadly, CAPTCHAs are a technology we need to combat spam, which accounts for at least 80% of email today, not to mention message boards, instant messages, or text-messages. However, we’re merely engaged in a technology arms race with spammers, this is *not* a technology that is winning any fights, we just try to stay one step ahead. This is increasingly hard with CAPTCHA entry being a job in countries with lower incomes, spammers cheating by offering porn in return for solving a CAPTCHA, and (in a case that doesn’t just apply humans) CAPTCHA breaking drives AI research. Basically, no ‘new’ CAPTCHA technology is going to keep spammers out for long. A bleak future indeed. On the other hand, we already have 80%, how much worse can it get? I think the real answer lies in spam filters, although for the most part those are also in a mere arms race, but at least then you can control your own computer, not just leave the image out there for another human to crack.

Tragically, there was another school shooting at the beginning of this week. This one was in Finland, and their second in 12 months which left 10 dead, 11 including the shooter. We can expect the cry for more gun control, both domestically, and in Finland, so I pulled out a post I’ve been saving due to not having time to finish it.

A year ago today the Virginia Tech shootings occurred. As I mentioned a year ago, it somewhat surprises me at the sadness today has evoked in me, considering I was hundreds of miles away that day, and still am. It didn’t seem like it was a year already, but I was reminded this morning when I turned on the TV to see an image that’s been stuck in my mind ever since. I poked around on the Virginia Tech Memorial site, but couldn’t find it for some odd reason, which is a shame because I think that image captures the moment perfectly.

The morning news had that Bugler image up this morning, and immediately the first two lines of the following poem popped into my head:

Blow, Bugler, Blow

Blow, Bugler, blow, let all hear you play,
The hope of our nation’s enshrined in your lay.
The notes flow like tears poured out from your horn,
Splashing our souls and hearts, broken and torn.
Floating past candles held high in the sky,
Twinkling like stars who whisper “Good-bye.”
Tonight there’ll be pain, and tomorrow the same,
But during it all, we stand and proclaim:
“We are Hokies, America, as strong as they come,
From the siblings who visit to the oldest alum,
We know our potential, what we can become,
We’ll always fight on, we’ll never succumb!”
So blow, bugler, blow, let all hear you play,
The hope of our nation’s enshrined in your lay.

ADMIN EDIT: Missed a line in there, had to add it.

This past week saw the release of Geert Wilders’ “Fitna”. I’d like to quickly say this post is not endorsing that film, the author of it, or any specific religion. I hope, instead, to point out what the film has actually accomplished, and look at the issues surrounding it. I’d also like to point out I fully support all basic human rights, including those of freedom of speech and religion. I won’t be giving a link to the video as I don’t support it. In addition, those viewing it might be disturbed by a few scenes (beheadings, hangings, close range gun shots) and I don’t want my site affiliated with any of that. Read below the cut to see my analysis.

At some point in the recent past my site was compromised by Wordpress.net.in spam. I don’t know exactly when the back door was put in place since I haven’t been very active on this site, though I do know that on March 20th 194.110.162.23 hit default-filters.php and uploaded the malicious code to inject spam into the footer of my pages. Unfortunately the attack is for a different version of Wordpress so rather than infect me with ads, it just screwed things up royally. Maybe that’s a good thing as I noticed it.

A great write up of how to clean this mess up can be found here.

To sum it up:

• Remove wp-includes/class-mail.php, its fake.
• Take out the lines hooking into the footer in wp-includes/default-filters.php
• Remove the line from the top of wp-includes/default-filters.php that accepts a file given a random GET variable.

The take away lesson here is: Even if you’re not actively publishing on your blog, you better make sure your software is up to date. I’ve been busy with other stuff and neglected mine, unfortunately.

EDIT: I’ve done some poking. 194.110.162.23 is out of “Extended Host” in New York City. I’ll refrain from scanning it, though I am darn tempted to see what back doors were opened on that box. As it is, I’ll just email the host and inform them of the troubles.

Note: This post somewhat breaks my “No politics” rule. If you don’t want to hear it, don’t read it. If you have an opinion, leave a comment. I’m about freedom of speech and if you want to say “You suck” or “Amen to that” you can feel free to email me at snarky(at)thesnarky.com just please don’t leave that as a comment since I want comments to go somewhere discussion wise. Oh, and Kanye if you read this, please drop me a line.

Today two albums came out today. One is 50 Cent’s Curtis, the other is Kanye West’s Graduation. (Ok, three if you count Kenny Chesney’s newest as well *grin*). I have a very wide taste in music, there’s no genre I completely dislike (though individual artists, as you’re about to find out I am very specific about) and that taste does include Hip Hop/Rap (as well as Country). Both these artists are rather large in the Rap world, and its very interesting that they ended up releasing on the same day. Also interesting is that they both appeared on the same TV show (106 and Park) this afternoon. I decided to watch, as I’ve got mixed feelings on both artists and felt it’d be very interesting. Boy, I hate being right. Where to begin? (Note, if you don’t care why I feel this way, skip down to the “Tell Kanye off with your wallet” section to see what I’m doing about it)

Man, I just got an amazing deal on some printer ink for my nice Dell A920 All-in-one printer! I was going to have to buy the ink off dell.com at $31 for the color, and $28 for the black and white cartridges. Quite steep paying $60 just to print, huh? I can’t just get them [...]

For the past few weeks I’ve been working for Harkins, specifically for NearbyGamers, to build a Facebook application. Work was going nicely, and this afternoon I finally got close enough to being done to set a release date for myself: Friday afternoon. Now, if that went as planned, would I be writing this post? I left my SSH session open, grabbed some dinner, and sat down to play Chez Geek with a friend. I wandered back about an hour later to find my SSH session hung. This happens often, not sure why, so I thought nothing of it, closed the terminal and logged back in. But when I got to the file I’d been working on, it appeared to hang again. Maybe the file was getting too big to load in a quick manner? 10 seconds later and vi still showed no data. Then, to my horror, I realized it was because the file was empty. A quick ls -al showed the following:

Also a waste of time. My internet’s been down all day, which means no coding from home, no email, no nothing. I work during the summers mostly from home, and every day without Internet has a direct impact on my quality of life during the school year. Anyways, I just got off the phone with a comcast “technician” trying to fix this minor inconvenience of not being able to make money. This is to the best of my recollection how it went, I was trying to type and talk on the phone at the same time, AND dealing with power flickering.

So, real quick as I just got the idea to actually post this little story, I was writing a little script. This script dealt with ids I’m using for a project. Basically I knew there was a lot to begin with, but wanted a flat file, not a database because I figured “Hey, I’m dealing with a lot, why pay the overhead every id of doing a bunch of queries?” Among other things, this script couldn’t list an id more than once. So I (stupidly) chose an array to store the ids and sort through them. At first, no issues, I could process a few ids in a second and get all my work done on them. Well, after I hit around 15,000 I had issues. It was now taking about 5 seconds an id. It only got worse, and worse, and worse. Around 19,000 ids I finally CTRL-C’s the script, to retool it. I changed it over to throwing all the ids into a database, accepting a tad more overhead per id, but overall this becomes linear time. I stupidly forgot my Big-O notation classes, and that sorting through a large list of numbers takes longer than a very short one. *sigh*.