If you don’t have automatic updates on your computer, you need to check this: Massive Global Ransomware Attack Underway, Patch Available. This is from the folks at Wordfence, who, in my experience, have been right on the money multiple times. If you don’t have automatic updates set, update your...
Happenings
Fake Chrome Font Pack Alert
I got this via e-mail alert from Barkly and thence to Bleeping Computer. Here’s the takeaway: What everyone should take away from this is that if you see a popup on a page stating that you need to download a Chrome Font Pack, you should immediately close the browser...
Shopping on Amazon: The HP Omen Laptop
I had an opportunity to look at this computer this week in the flesh, or better in the silicon, and so I thought I’d put it up here for shopping at Amazon.com. This is a high end computer for gaming or serious business applications that require graphics or very...
An answer to the question: Do You Need a WordPress Security Plugin? The explanation is also useful in helping those who aren’t experts understand why computer security must be regularly updated.
Dreamweaver FTP Error
Today I was setting up a site to edit using PHP and MySQL with Dreamweaver 2017. I like to use a test site that’s on my VPS, not my local machine. There’s a little bit of overhead time, but a number of things work better. Basically the public site...
A Quick and Obvious Note on WordPress Site Errors: Check error_log
A few minutes ago I encountered an error on one of my sites. The front end was working fine, but I got a 500 error “The site isn’t working properly. These errors remind me of when I was about 12 and was asked to spend some time playing with...
You Need to Deal with Computer Security
There was a time when cars were few and far between and when car theft was essentially unknown. You could leave your car sitting out in your yard or on the street and generally expect to find it there in the morning. Then the automobile came into its own....
Link: Gmail Phishing Technique
Whether or not you use gmail, you should read this. The article is from Wordfence, which primarily does WordPress security, but they have previously published excellent work on other attacks, and every word of their advice is good. In particular, the advice to carefully read your address bar to...
Capital not Technology
People often think of technology spreading as it’s invented, so we talk about the progress of technology. It’s not entirely wrong to think of it that way, but the technology that you see depends on capital. Sometimes a large company will have older computers than a smaller one. The...
Update: Wordfence now Has an FAQ on Alleged Russian Hacking
They’ve laid out the critical data in a post titled Election Hack Report FAQ. This report includes clarifying that, despite their headline, they were not claiming that the report truly traced the hacking to Russia. I thought that was pretty clear in the first place, but I suppose “headline...