When I was a kid growing up in Tehran, one of the favorite metaphors for an untidy place was to compare it to the Shoosh square in southern Tehran. Actually at one time Shoosh square and street were merely downtown areas but the city had sprawled north leaving the Shoosh area in the south, relatively — Continue reading »
Wordpress Base64 Hack or PHP-CGI Hack? part III
📆 August 13, 2012
After being hit by the Wordpress base64 hack twice within a couple of weeks, it finally dawned me that the PHP CGI flaw was the culprit. The attack robots (a la Metasploit) use the knowledge of PGP CGI flaw together with the well-known scripts of popular products (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.) to penetrate sites and — Continue reading »
Apple Discrimination
📆 July 16, 2012
A few weeks ago my children dragged me into the local mall's Apple store, kicking and screaming where I bought them each a Macbook, a cheap Linux knock-off in a shiny skin. I am a devout Apple-hater and have been so since 1988 when I had to write a LISP program on a Macintosh desktop. — Continue reading »
Wordpress Base64 Hack or PHP-CGI Hack? part II
📆 July 5, 2012
To be factual about it, my site was hacked twice in exactly the same way over a period of couple of weeks. The first time around I noticed it when the feeds coming via Feedburner kept crashing the RSS readers because of a javascript malware block inserted right at the top of the feed. Turns out — Continue reading »
German court bans male circumcision
📆 June 28, 2012
Nothing like baby penis mutilation to bring Jews and Muslims together. Kudos to this court for banning baby circumcision. Religious Rite? -Feel free to cut it off when you're an adult and can make a free choice. Infection prevention? -How about general hygiene? HIV prevention? -Ever heard of a condom? German court bans male circumcision, — Continue reading »
Wordpress Base64 Hack or PHP-CGI Hack?
A couple of months ago I started noticing that this blog's RSS feed, which is via Feedburner, wasn't coming through on some RSS readers. After some tests I discovered that the feed actually contained a malicious javascript block at the top. That was breaking the XML format, causing the RSS readers to fail. Turns out — Continue reading »
Oracle's Java Bet
📆 June 11, 2012
A couple of weeks ago a judge finally ruled that Google hadn't violated any patents when it used the Java programming language in its Android OS. Good, finally someone wasn't intimidated by Larry Ellison and ruled based on logic rather than emotion. Word has it that the judge actually took some time to learn Java — Continue reading »
What's Facebook Worth?
📆 May 29, 2012
I can't possibly the only one who's had a perverse pleasure in seeing Facebook's stock slide after the much ballyhooed IPO. It's not like I wish the company bad fortune or dislike its boss, although I don't think much of Facebook as a product nor do I use it much. It's just that something so — Continue reading »
Give a few Sats