Posts

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WordPress Pingback Vulnerability

An older vulnerability that got ignored in 2007 is showing up again.

According to Acunetix’s Bogdan Calin, this particular vulnerability is exploitable through the platform’s XMLRPC API (through XMLRPC.PHP). Attackers could try and guess hosts inside each network they target, port scan those hosts, reconfigure internal routers and launch large scale DDoS attacks.

Mas aqui.

From the details it doesn’t sound extremely dangerous, but something that should be fixed sooner rather than later. You can bet that we will see WordPress 3.5.1 pretty darned soon!

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The Links menu in WordPress 3.5 didn’t actually go away

In the lead-up to the 3.5 release of WordPress, we kept hearing that the outdated “blogroll” was going to go away. No longer would you see the Links menu in your WordPress admin area because it was no longer really needed with the advent of custom menus last year.

So after I updated many sites to 3.5, I noticed the Links menu was still there.

Turns out it only goes away on new installations. Bleh. In case you were wondering, that is why you still see it.

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Dear WordPress Theme Developers

For the love of humanity, please quit adding SEO ‘optimization’ into your custom WordPress theme options. Don’t assume we want to use your restrictive interpretation of what is best for our website.

Love,

People who know what they are doing.

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Evernote 5 for Mac

I love Evernote and I use it a lot to keep my life organized. Still, I wish it had a few things that it doesn’t:

  • Notebooks full of notebooks. I’d like to nest things more deeply. It keeps things organized better than tags.
  • The ability to work with non-Evernote-approved scanners. I want to scan my receipts, docs, and pics to Evernote without having to buy a new scanner/printer.

That’s about it. Until now.

Evernote 5 came out the other day for Mac, and I gotta say I don’t like the new interface. It feels like it introduced extra steps to find things. I’m not crazy about it at all, and I’m hoping there will be a way to revert to a simpler interface.

What do you think?

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Renegotiate your cable bill today

As a long-time customer of Charter cable for TV and Internet service, I’ve had many a battle with them over negotiating better deals. One piece of advice I’ve learned over the years is invaluable: call every 6 months to renegotiate your deal with them.

I did this just today, actually. What I learned this time is that they no longer offer special 6 month or 12 month rates on things — something they dropped when their new CEO took over in July, 2012.  Apparently these deals would inevitably lead to a price hike in peoples’ bills once the deal ran out, and that in turn led to angry customers. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

Granted, they should have been aware that their deal was going to expire, but who actually bothers to pay attention to that?

Now, Charter offers levels of bundled services. What I got today is great: every single channel they offer (except PPV and adult channels) for the same price I’d been paying, which only included about 1/2 of the channels.

Why does this matter? Because basketball season is starting and because I was losing out and didn’t even know it.

Lesson to learn here: call your cable company at least twice a year and find out what you could be saving on.

 

 

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So long, old friend.

After 10 years, I am quitting Firefox and moving to Chrome. This is a big change for me. I’ve used Firefox since it was called Phoenix. I’ve written magazine articles about how much I loved it. I’ve rubbed elbows with its developers and championed its cause.

But I gotta move. Chrome has evolved and has surpassed my old friend. I do not feel great about having to depart from my allegiance with the browser that began the death of Internet Explorer, but I really can’t justify clinging onto it anymore.

Since becoming a full-time Mac user last year, I’ve noticed the flaws of Firefox. The locking up, the memory leaks, the slowness. It has become quite annoying.

Now that I’m a full-time user of Google Apps at work and at home, it just makes sense.

Now that my favorite plugins for Firefox are all available for Chrome, and even some new ones that are awesome, it just makes sense.

So after I gave Chrome a decent trial this week (something I’ve done in the past just for kicks), I have decided it is time.

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