Posted January 30th, 2009, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Technology

I recently got blocked from being a subscriber to a video podcast based on nothing more than the fact that my IP Address is in the USA. The website only lets people within Australia download the content.  They can tell where people are based on the IP Address of the visitor.

One way around this is to use a “proxy”

The connection may be a little slow, but slow is better than nothing, right?

Here’s what to do in FireFox:

preferences>network>settings

Shown is one of many proxy sites’ IP Addresses you can find online by googling around.  I used xproxy.com for this example.

Once you do this, the server (website etc) your visiting thinks you’re visiting from within Australia.  Nice.  Actually you are visiting from within australia.  When you  use a proxy, your web traffic is actually going through another computer somewhere in this case, Australia.  xproxy has a bunch of proxies for different countries.

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Posted January 30th, 2009, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Evil Robots| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Spam and Scams| Technology

I was glancing at something over at The Pirate Bay and maybe I clicked on a banner or something but damn… What is this?  I’ve never seen anything like this on a Mac.  Is this new?  Are there new threats for Macs?  Or just new Warnings? 

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Posted December 24th, 2008, in: Semantic Web| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)| WordPress

Trying out Zemanta, a service for finding related resources. 

They make Plugins for WordPress, TypePad and other blogging platforms, as well as extensions for both FireFox and IE.

Currently, as I’m writing this, the Zemanta plugin is only giving me a “Loading Zemanta…” message… I figured Zemanta’s database would likely have plenty of articles about Zemanta.  Maybe not.

We’ll see.  Very cool idea either way.

Update:

I guess the first time I loaded my WordPress Dashboard’s Editing page, Zemanta took a little while to load… Ever since it’s been super fast.

Pretty cool little Plugin. 

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Posted December 11th, 2008, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Evil Robots| Technology

This attack on older versions of WordPress installs a file called index.html in the wp-admin directory so that when a user logs into their dashboard, the browser loads it rather than the index.php file that comes with WordPress.  The result is when trying to access the WordPress Dashboard, instead you get a page which says “Hacked By Guard_FB” followed by a graphic of a silhouette of a man with his with his fist in the air which reads “THE TURK PROTEST…”

Appears in place of the Dashboard in WordPress

The page then goes on with some left wing political stuff, and claims to be affiliated with a site called ateskes.org and is signed “King Defacer”

I’d rather see hacking going on for the sake of activism than for worthless spam, but this thing sucks. The blog on which I encountered this was not particularly political and so I suspect that the makers of this attack aren’t picking and choosing who they attack, which makes it evil crap.   

Bottom line, keep WordPress up to date, stay on top of your comment moderation, and use WordPress’ Cookie-Encryption “Security Keys” feature in your wp-config file.

If this has happened to you, I recommend deleting your spam/comments in moderation (if there’s too many, check here), upgrading WordPress, then changing your Dashboard passwords. Of course, also delete the file called index.html in your wordpress directory’s wp-admin folder.

Full text of “Hacked By Guard_FB” Dashboard page is as follows:

 

Hacked By GUARD_FB

 

Ateskes.Org

We Accuse:

G.W. Bush, T. Blair, and E. Olmert, the chief executives of the imperialist, colonialist, belligerent policies and actions of the US-British-Israeli coalition, of perpetrating the composite crimes of war of annihilation, occupation, and the premeditated mass murder of children and civilians in Palestine and Lebanon, following their atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq and foreboding the same in Syria and Iran, sinking into utter barbarity in transgression of all universal norms of human morality.

The Following Are Also Responsible:

All government employees and agents, advisors, civil and military functionaries who partake in collective and individual responsibility in these states; the legislative and judicial branches that have not curbed the criminal activities of their governments as they violate basic human rights, most significantly the right to live, and as they trample international legal norms and commit crimes against humanity; universities, media, intellectuals, workers and citizens who do not restrain and sanction their governments through domestic democratic channels; UNITED NATIONS and other national and international bodies that actively or passively support, aid and abet this illegality, crude force, and aggression –all bear responsibility for the catastrophe that is taking place.

We Demand:

An immediate cessation of this horror, the due trial, in international tribunals, as well as in the courts of conscience and history, of, above all, Bush, Blair, and Olmert as perpetrators of crimes against humanity, of their respective government agents and supporters, of the chief executives and state personnel in all countries that have been accomplices to these crimes against humanity, and their removal from office by the lawful and democratic initiatives of their respective citizenry.

And We Declare:

We stand at a critical juncture in human history. These aggressive, colonialist, exploitative, and militarist practices are negating the achievements of humanity, destroying the basic pillars of international law, and thus, threatening the present and the future of this planet. We refuse to submit to this brutal force and be accomplices to its crimes. We refuse to give in to the (il)logic of blood-fed economies and lethal war machines. We declare that we will continue to struggle for a different world.

 

---

www.Ateskes.Org

King Defacer

 

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Posted October 13th, 2008, in: Computer Problems and Fixes

After a few weeks of thinking there was something wrong with my little iPod Shuffle, I found out that in shuffle-mode, the iPod Shuffle can’t/wont play back certain kinds of audio files.

Just change it back to non-shuffle and the Podcasts will play fine!

From support.apple.com:

When iPod shuffle is set to shuffle songs it will play all the audio files on iPod shuffle that are not audiobooks. Podcasts of type .m4b or AAC will not play on iPod shuffle when it is in shuffle mode, which is the intended behavior, although a podcast of type .mp3 or .wav may play while in shuffle mode. To play an audiobook or podcast that is on iPod shuffle, set the switch on iPod shuffle to play in order.

Wow. All this heartache over one tiny little switch switched to the wrong position.

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Posted October 2nd, 2008, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Technology

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Posted September 30th, 2008, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Evil Robots| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Spam and Scams| Technology

If your blog has been deleted suddenly by WordPress.com, DON’T PANIC!  …that is, unless you use your blog for phishing scams or spam-commenting or anything else that brings down the experience of other people on the Web and/or makes it harder for people to find the information they need.  In that case, panic.  Scream and cry.  I hope your blog is permanently deleted, and everything you eat for the rest of you life tastes horrible. The Web is our garden!  

Assuming you are an ethical participant of The Cloud, pretty soon you should get an email from WordPress.com explaining the nature of the take-down.

[Anyway, my blog is back, obviously.  I guess I need to start backing up my blog? Jeeez.  What a hassle.]

[begin story]

I regularly blog about scams/spam on the Web.  It’s a way for me be discovered by, and to provide guidance to, people who happen to be googling around about some questionable content they find or are emailed.

One example of this is this search result for “paypal-cgi.com,” a site that mimics PayPal in order to trick people into handing over their paypal login info.  I come up number one for the search, and the title of the result makes it clear that you shouln’t trust PayPal-CGI.com… If you click thru to my post, I explain why these things exist and how to detect this kind of crap.

You see, I’m actually doing something good here.  And it’s good for me too.

Anyway, recently I encountered some scam crap on craigslist and blogged about it. And since my blog post contained a link to the spam/scam site I was exposing, WordPress.com’s evil-detectors went ape shit and my blog got automatically removed by wordpress.com.  

I was in the middle editing a post and suddenly my category selection buttons stopped working.  And there was a thing saying somethin like “you do not have permission to edit this..” or something like that.  When I refreshed the page, I got “The authors have deleted this blog. The content is no longer available”

…and my blog had been completely removed leaving only this scary screen saying: “This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service.”

Ironic. I got banned for merely exposing something malicious.

Current Spam-Filter technology isn’t context-aware. This is a slippery slope: Using words or links alone, without regard to context, to define what is untrustworthy content.

See the post in question for yourself HERE: 

Fortunately, about an hour later, I got a message from WordPress.com: 

from: Anthony – WordPress.com:

Hi,

Your blog was automatically flagged, as links to overnightcashexplosion.com were detected (and these are certainly not permitted). The blog is back – please remove all such links.

Best,

Anthony

Automattic | WordPress.com

I responded with:

if it’s a url in text, is that different in the eyes of your spam defenses from an actual link?  I’d like to leave the url if possible so I can still come up in searches for that url. 

WHat’s your take on that?

Thanks for communicating with me.

-A

Anthony from WordPress replied:

Hi,
Sure, you can leave it – I understand the context.

Best,
Anthony
Automattic | WordPress.com

So, there is a layer of discretion here?  That’s good I guess.

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Posted September 22nd, 2008, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Technology

Here’s what I did that finally solved this problem after 2 full days of suffering and searching for answers.

1. I uninstalled the DP software reverse-incrementally, starting with 5.13 in UNINSTALL mode, then DP 5.1 and finally the original DP 5 Installer on the CD.
2. I repeated the same process AGAIN, but this time selected “MyHardDrive” rather than the “Applications Folder” as the target install directory, again selecting UNINSTALL rather than Easy Install
3. I Manually deleted all remaining Plug-Ins that came with DP from username/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/MAS/
4. I manually moved my remaining [dot-bundle] .bundle files (other MAS plugins that didn’t come with DP) from my user directory to my hard-drive directory.  Originally, some were at UserName/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/MAS/  and I moved all those files to HardDriveName/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/MAS/ 
5. I manually deleted the folder called MAS from username/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/
6. I manually I deleted all files from both the user and hard-drive versions of Library/Preferences/ that had “motu” in their names, all “.plist” files
7. I manually Deleted a folder called “Digital Performer™” from UserName/Library/Preferences/
8. I manually Deleted  HardDrive/Library/Audio/presets/Digital Performer/
9. I manually Deleted the Auth-DigitalPerformer 5.0 file from my hard-drive via the Terminal (it’s an invisible file)
10. I manually deleted any/all extra/unnecessary MOTU apps/utilities from my Applications Folder… I had some out-dated FireWire Audio shit and some Un-Needed PCI shit.
11. I re-booted from MAC OSX CD and REPAIRED PERMISSIONS (which incidentally were all good)
12. After rebooting, I re-installed MOTU DP5, which does not run on my Leopard machine as version 5.0 (Unexpectedly Quits Etc)
13. Installed the MOTU 5.1 Update
14. Installed the MOTU 5.13 Update
15. My Equalizer  Plugins are back.
16. Repaired Permissions (and the plugins are still back) DP is back to normal, at least for now.

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Posted September 19th, 2008, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Technology

PROBLEM: In MOTU Digital Performer (DP5), at least 2 of the Plug-Ins that came with the software are missing from within the program.  Both of the ones I know are missing for sure are Parametric Equalizers, which is an odd coincidence.

SOLVED! Click Here To Read The Solution

The following is a copy of a forum post I made to MotuNation.com.  I never post to forums so this is an indication of how desperate I’m getting.

Please help me. This is driving me crazy.
Suddenly my MW Equlaizer and my Para EQ Plugins don’t show up in the list of plugins available from the Mixer. They do get scanned/loaded during the splash screen at startup. They’re just not listed via the mixer or via the Audio Menu (Audio>Audio Plug-Ins).
This is what I’ve tried, not necessarily in this order and some of these things I’ve done multiple times:

• *Repaired Permissions (All were/are correct according to Disk Utility)
• *Varified/Repaired Hard Drive (Disk Utility said it’s fine)
• *Uninstalled and Re-Installed DP
• *Trashed User/Library/Preferences/com.motu.DigitalPerformer.plist
• *Deleted Auth-DigitalPerformer 5.0
• *Renamed User/Library/Preferences to Preferences-old (to flush all system prefs at the user level)
• *Renamed ParaEQ.bundle (By this time I’m making solutions up!)
• *Moved Plugins from HardDrive/Library… to User/Library… (and back)

The .bundle files are there in HardDrive/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/MAS/ but they just wont become available via the UI. I have been googling like mad since yesterday and getting nowhere. I’m going crazy. 

Does anyone have any suggestions? 

http://www.bigbluelounge.com/forums/vie … p?p=351040 …This Person on this other forum is having the same problem it sounds like, but no solution there (I will post the solution here and there if I can find one) …Interesting that it’s the 2 built-in EQ’s for both of us… Interesting and completely horrible.

Please help me if you can. Thank You.

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Posted August 9th, 2008, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Technology

When trying to install Adobe AIR on my Mac running 10.5.4, I was getting this annoying message:

Error: Adobe AIR Installer requires Adobe AIR to be installed. What?

This application requires Adobe AIR to function. Please download the latest version of the runtime from http://www.adobe.com/go/getair, then launch the application again.

Which is weird because why would Adobe AIR require Adobe AIR to install?  Isn’t that like… impossible?

I found the solution!

1. Open System Preferences. 
   
2. Click on International.
   
3. Click on Edit List
4. Check Or Uncheck a Language (In other words, change something)
5. Hit OK to save the changes
6. Adobe AIR will now install!

OSX Adobe AIR Installer Works Now!

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