Hot Dorkage

This is a prototype expression of thanks in the form of Linky LUV in appreciation of my fans over on Hub Pages It randomly displays one of their widgets right here in an IFRAME. If you don’t like the looks of the one you see, refresh the page and it will give you a different one. Thanks HubPages fans!

The dork is featured again in Issue #4 (August 1) of Information Security Short Takes that I was in last month. This blog features a monthly blog carnival potpourri webzine of useful selection of security related articles. I know, I know, nobody wants to hear about security. It’s boring as all get out, and it’ll probably not happen to you. Except that it is happening, to more and more of us each year. Knowledge is power in this game. Know how it works, what to do and what not to do, and diminish your chance of being ripped off.
Continue Reading…

Akismet is an awesome spam filter plugin no wordpress blogger should be without. It’s point ‘n’ click installable if you happen to use wordpress, but they claim that hacks exist for 20 other blogging platforms and they do provide an API. Hacks don’t mean evil programs, they just mean ways to enable you to use the software that aren’t quite as slick as for wordpress. Today Akismet flagged 54 spam — all on the Eleven Signs post. (BTW Eleven Signs is my LEAST original post. All the ideas in it had been blogged elsewhere; I just picked my eleven faves and did them up in my own style. ) Previously I had been getting maybe 5-7 spam a day and they were random. I was unperturbed about the jump in spam because Akismet does the right thing.
Continue Reading…

A old school phish typically involves an Instant Messenger or email message asking you to click a link. This tried and true technique uses bogus links, and this article shows you how to detect them. Newer phishes bite you at a different level. They feed you “good” links but then they cause the good links to turn into bad ones at the network level where you normally don’t go. These phishes will work even if you manually type the good URL into a completely virgin browser. About the only way to be safe from these is to protect your computer overall. The section where I describe bogus URL’s may seem a little long, but consider that it is easier for human brains to spot patterns than it is to talk about them. An accurate and complete description is necessary so your brain can learn what to look for. Don’t sweat it — with just a little practice you’ll be able to sniff a bogus URL in a matter of seconds just like an IT security pro.

• Make sure you are checking the real URL
• How to check a URL
• When “good” URL’s go bad
  

Continue Reading…

Another database: CRACKED A recent security breach of a local online merchant prompted me to write this post. As a shopping cart software author and former security analyst at Symantec I know the nuts and bolts of security from several perspectives. Credit card fraud is a huge and growing problem. See my article about credit card security online for a detailed discussion on how credit card security works and what the vulnerabilities are. There is a solution, but it will not be implemented until pressure is brought to bear on the key players.
Continue Reading…

If only Ning were as easy to hack on as WordPress!    Ning is a different animal in that you can’t just throw a Ning up on your own hosting like you can with WP.   All Ning social networks reside on Ning’s servers.  They can’t be deployed elsewhere because they rest on  a proprietary inner core (written in Java)  that Ning don’t give out.     When we say hacking Ning we have to specify our level of involvement.  It can fall anywhere from superficial to committed.
Continue Reading…

…and probably other things are wrong with you as well.  Got it from xkcd.

For those who have been asleep, educate yourself on Ning, the up-and- coming social network platform. It allows anybody to create their own free full featured network and it’s no harder than creating a blog on blogger. Of course, as people find out, the mere act of creating a ning space doesn’t mean you will instantly be the monarch of a thriving community, any more than creating a blog guarantees that you’ll have thousands of adoring fans worldwide and rake in the chips. Ning is in its infancy. I built a Ning network a few months ago with a local focus, but it wasn’t my primary focus, and I’m not stupid enough to have expected it to grow exponentially without serious marketing. My primary focus at the time was my own home-grown calendar aggregator.

But then everything changed…

Continue Reading…

What is it with me and Text-To-Speech? Just fond memories, I guess. At one time I had a TalkR widget in my Blogger blog. It had a list of all the posts and it would speak whichever one you picked. It must have worked at one time or I would have never published it. I followed the directions at radio.talker.com to create one for this blog. The widget looked just fine but it didn’t work. In fact that entire widget seems to have gone south in general. So I’m not putting it here.

I also had a hack in the post template of my Blogger blog that would read each individual post but its code was blogger specific.

Good ol’ Wordpress to the rescue with a plugin for TalkR. I installed the TalkR plugin, registered the feed and now it is putting a little TalkR link at the bottom of every post. I had to install a codec in Firefox (Ubuntu) on the clientside to get it to stream mp3, but now it seems to work for me.

There is concern expressed in the ranks about the flakiness and spotty availability of TalkR. I removed both the widget and the individual post hack from the Blogger blog because, if I recall correctly, if TalkR went down the blog wouldn’t load. If it does that to Hot Dorkage I’ll have to disable the plugin.

The hacker in me is rearing it’s head. I want to hack something cool. A true hacker hacks for the challenge. The other day I was browsing Google Gadgets and I found a Text-to-Speech gadget from Vozme that touched on a subject that’s dear to my heart. I did some of my best work in the area of Text-to-Speech many years ago. (See the patent post for a good story about that.) Next thing I noticed was that it can generate Spanish. Woohoo. Spanish. That’s my language! What to make it say? Dirty words, of course! That gets people’s attention. So the goal is for this post to blast out a few vulgar expressions carefully selected for their exceptional insult value. In Spanish. And I wanted it to be as user-friendly as possible.

Continue Reading…