When I woke up this morning, I noticed an email from this site, congratulating me on setting up a new blog. Wondering what the hell that was supposed to mean, I went to this site, only to be greeted with the WordPress install page (wp-admin/install.php), as if no blog existed.

I figured the MySQL on this server had crashed. I wasn’t too worried about it as I’d backed up all my data late last week anyway. I figured I’d give it an hour for the host to sort out and check back later.

By the time I got to work, the site was indeed back up. I logged into WordPress and immediately noticed that the blog title that usually runs the top of the dashboard was now some long URL with words like “casino” and “gambling in it. All my posts seemed to be there, so I poked around a bit and noticed that the admin email had been changed to a hotmail address.

I quickly fixed this and continued to snoop around, but didn’t find anything else out of the ordinary.

I’m figuring that early this morning, some bot attacked all or a few of the WordPress blogs on my server, ramming it with requests until MySQL bailed. Then, it used the install.php file to try and create a new blog and change the password/contact address. Of course, it failed for the most part, but still…

So, no harm done, but I’m definitely wiser. After an initial blog is created, there’s no reason to keep install.php in your files. I deleted that as well as put several restrictions in place. Much Better.

Here’s a decent list of things you can do to harden and lock down your WordPress install.

This anti-waterboarding ad campaign, put out by Amnesty International is absolutely brilliant. Supposedly it will be running in movie theater previews, starting next month. Awesomely deceptive.

[Link to campaign site]

Here’s a set of photos from the Sourvein concert at The Knitting Factory last Sunday. It was really dark in the club and I couldn’t really take photos the way I normally do (without a flash), but I was twisted enough to actually bump the singer on stage, in between songs and ask permission to use one, which he very graciously gave.

Wretched, drunken and loud Doom Metal. I had a great time, although I did get way too smashed, somehow ending up at the Staten Island Ferry and nearly falling down twice in the various subway stations I stumbled through till I finally found my way home.

I think the plan to have heavily-armed police randomly patrolling subways is a fundamentally stupid, fear-mongering, ineffective and money-wasting load of shit.

In the first counterterrorism strategy of its kind in the nation, roving teams of New York City police officers armed with automatic rifles and accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs will patrol the city’s subway system daily, beginning next month, officials said on Friday.

Under a tactical plan called Operation Torch, the officers will board trains and patrol platforms, focusing on sites like Pennsylvania Station, Herald Square, Columbus Circle, Rockefeller Center and Times Square in Manhattan, and Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.

Officials said the operation would begin in March.

Financing for the program will be funneled to the Police Department and will come from a pool of up to $30 million taken from $153.2 million in new federal transit grants to the state.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Each team in the operation will comprise a bomb-sniffing dog and six officers: a dog handler and a sergeant and four officers from the Emergency Service Unit who will be outfitted in heavy, bullet-resistant vests and Kevlar helmets and will carry automatic weapons, either an M-4 rifle or an MP5 submachine gun.

This does nothing except intimidate people, waste money and promote fear. Pathetic. Atlantic Avenue is a daily stop for me. I’m not looking forward to commuting a route patrolled by some underpaid douchebag with an automatic weapon. Is the city going to equip the commuters with kevlar?

Today I upgraded this site to Wordpress 2.3 and modified my theme to use Widgets. Everything’s functional, but I have some style issues I need to amend, as you’ll see if you are not using RSS to read this site. I’ll fix all this crap tomorrow or something.

A friend of mine who teaches in California just sent me a pretty funny (I think) screengrab from his school’s web filter. Apparently, I am “R-Rated”.

Well fucking-shit-fuck! Nail me to a fucking cross and call me Jesus! I’m so fucking offended, I could rape a dead squirrel or perhaps spit blood down a nun’s throat!

I have committed an almost-major redesign of this site. It’s about 98% done, ready enough to be live now at this point.

I’ve been doing a minor redesign of this site over the past week using xampp so I can work locally. I highly recommend it. I figure this new theme is ready enough to go live so I can tidy up the loose ends. Most everything should be working and displaying more or less correct. Going live, I immediately saw some issues needing to be addressed. Please bear with as over the next short while, I’ll be tweaking things and probably bouncing back and forth between the old theme and this new one.

Someone created a Livejournal account to syndicate my website a while ago and I figured it was no big deal and let it roll. It’s now become annoying and so I’ve banned the IP from accessing the site’s feed. So, if you use Livejournal to read this site’s RSS…oh well.

##UPDATE##
Due to some dude’s impassioned and well-written request (people actually read my blog…like people I don’t know…wtf?), I’ve let Livejournal back in. It’s just annoying, but whatever…

I was looking at this site through a text-only browser this morning and saw some issues. Looking a little further, I realized that this site hasn’t changed much in two years and several upgrades of Wordpress. There’s a lot of redundancy in my style sheets and now is a perfect time to re-do everything, all nice and clean. A complete redesign would be nice, perhaps, but all i’m going to bother with is a good scrubbing of the code and style sheets.

I’m not going to bother taking the site offline—I don’t suspect this will take long. You may however notice that stuff may look out of whack. It will be fixed soon.

Bear with.