joeware - never stop exploring... :)

Princess Bride 25th Anniversary BLU-RAY on sale for $5.99 on Amazon… Too good of a deal to not share… NOT AN APRIL FOOL’S DAY JOKE EITHER!

PRINCESS BRIDE ON SALE!

Blast from the past as Microsoft releases MS-DOS and Word for Windows source code

http://www.wpcentral.com/ms-dos-word-source-code

I dislike when I start up one of my AD Lab Forests with the intention of breaking replication to fix it only to find that replication is already broken but not in the way I need it broken so I have to fix it, then break it again. 🙂

C# Fundamentals for Absolute Beginners

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/c-fundamentals-for-absolute-beginners#?fbid=0HknA4ARcxo

This isn’t a hack. I just wanted to post a link to some boots I bought last month because of this hellaciously cold winter was making my feet freeze solid when I was outside. They are the lightest boots I have had since I had moonboots as a kid too. My feet are no longer getting cold.

Cool ass boots!

So one of my friends, Hunter, contacted me and let me know that the blog had been defaced. Basically a bunch of links were inserted into the SQL table that contained the links. I was able to quickly clean them up and then scanned through everything else looking for other problems. I didn’t find any and in particular I found no changes to the configuration information in the database NOR in any of the PHP code. I did, however, notice that there were some tens of thousands of userids defined and while I would like to think I have that kind of following looking at the IDs and emails addresses it appears that large numbers of them are/were bogus. It looks like they used some sort of vulnerability in the trackback functionality to insert data into the links table. I believe I have blocked that.

I have also implemented several spam/hacker type blocks on the blog. One of them is a new user activation scheme so that when users create a new account they will be mailed an activation code and will have to enter it the FIRST time they log on.

Further, I forced every account to be deactivated so EVERYONE that logs on the next time will need to enter a reactivation code. That code is simply a single specific word all in lower case… And that word is "reactivate" without the quotes. So you will type that exact word out for the activation code. Got it? 🙂

In a few months I will go through and purge the database of every ID that wasn’t reactivated. 

If this is an inconvenience I apologize for that but I felt it was necessary enough to force the inconvenience.

    joe