No doubt you’ve seen the storm crossing the net these last few days (and weeks, months, years) concerning the possibility that Chinese hackers have planted code in our power facilities giving them the ability to remotely shut down our grid at their whim. Well, this isn’t my obligatory pseudo-opinion, instead I’ll just share a little bit about the area I live in. We are one of the windiest areas in the entire US, and the concentration of wind farms in our are is a testament to that fact.

Despite the seemingly endless supply of renewable energy around here, the power goes out quite frequently. Sometimes it makes me think about how it must have been to live in the early days of the electrical age when just the slightest breeze might knock out the power for days. It gets pretty crazy around here this time of year with winds peaking at 80mph on a near daily basis. Not only does the wind have a habit of kicking off the power, it also tends to kick up a lot of dust. On days like today, the visibility drops and going outside is almost equivalent to being willingly sandblasted…

Now here’s where the FUD comes in… I read a bunch of these news articles concerning the threat posed by malware at our power stations, and I also know from years of experience that the wind gets strong here and knocks out the power…. but can you guess what first came to mind when the power went out the other day? Howling winds and all, part of me still couldn’t help but remember the articles and that cast doubt in my mind about the cause of the outage. Now, I consider myself to be a very free-thinking adult with half a brain, and at least half an education, but think about every one else for a second. Ok, stop.

You just put more effort in to it than most. Congrats, now ignore the FUD and go back to your American Gladiators.

Wow, I haven’t had a Bill Hicks moment in a while. Feels good bro.

Also, here’s a great comment from a user named tehowe on digg:

The fair and balanced media has rediscovered botnets and hackers. What next, EMP? Surely this technology is well within reach of the turrists and foreign agencies. All computers henceforth must be stored in a secret cloud-top Colorado mountain complex with ninja assassin guards.

Great insight from a 10 year old. Better grammar and spelling than most digg commenters too!

Dropping on new Entrecarders can have many benefits, though EC’s use of Javascript in their category browser makes it hard to drop on multiple users without hours of tedious clicking. In this post, I’ll show you how you can create an easy to use link list of the newest members.
1. Install some Firefox extensions
Linky will allow you to highlight and open up to 99 links in new tabs.
DOM inspector will allow you to see the actual page source generated by Entrecard’s Javascript.

2. Get a decent text editor
Notepad++ is an excellent FOSS text editor with many additional capabilities.
OR
EmEditor (30-day trial) is possibly the best non-FOSS editor around.

3. Grep for Win32

Once you have your extensions, editor, and grep installed, go to your EC Category viewer sorted by newest members:

http://entrecard.com/category/browser?order_by=newest

Set the EC browser to view 24 rows and wait until it’s fully loaded.

Fire up your DOM inspector by clicking Tools > DOM Inspector in your Firefox menu. Once in, click this green button to activate the node inspector:

Now click on an card on the EC Category viewer and you’ll see a red box appear around it. Switch back to the DOM inspector and you’ll notice that the tree has expanded and highlighted an entry below the cat_results id. Click the arrow to expand cat_results and you should see the following:

Right click on the cat_results DIV and click “Copy XML”. Paste it into your text editor of choice. You should see one very long bit of code. Browse to the next page of Category viewer results and repeat the last few steps until you have 3 or 4 lines.

Save your text file to your desktop and launch your command prompt by clicking Start > Run > cmd > OK
In your command prompt window, type the following to change directories to your desktop where your file is saved:
cd Desktop

Now using grep, you can filter out all the url’s hidden away in the text file.
grep -Po "\/t\/oc\/\d+" DOM.txt >> newec.txt

You may need to run grep with the full path if that didn’t work:
"C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin\grep.exe" -Po "\/t\/oc\/\d+" DOM.txt >> newec.txt

Now open your new text file in your editor and do a search and replace.
Find:
/t/oc/
Replace with:
<a href="http://entrecard.com/t/oc/

Now add the last bit of that html using your editors macro function.
Click to position your cursor at the end of the first line.
Start recording your macro
Paste the following at the end of the first line:
">.</a>

Now hit the down arrow and then the End key on your keyboard to move to the next line and position the cursor at the end of the line.
Stop recording and run the macro with options. Set it to run one less than the total number of lines in your file, or until the end.
Optionally, you may wish to insert <br /> between every 99 links since Linky can only open 99 at a time.

Save your file as newec.html and open in Firefox.

Once your page is up in Firefox, you’ll see a ton of “…..” links. Highlight a few of them and right click to open selected links in tabs with Linky. You’ll want to uncheck “Select already visited links” to keep from reopening sites you’ve already dropped on.

Voila! You’ll likely notice more than a few sites don’t have widgets, usually due to newb bloggers spending hours trying to figure out how to add the script to their sites…
Enjoy

BBC.CO.UK is reporting the possibility that 3 major undersea cables have been severed, disrupting internet connectivity across the middle east.

It is thought the FLAG FEA, SMW4, and SMW3 lines, near the Alexandria cable station in Egypt, have all been cut. A fault was also reported on the GO submarine cable 130km off Sicily. Experts warned that it may be days before the fault is fixed and said the knock on effect could have serious repercussions on regional economies.

Looks like there will be a lot fewer website hijackings and a major drop in spam over the next few days

The latest edition of Opera was announced on December 3rd and I decided to take it for a test drive after seeing that it had aced the infamous Acid 3 browser compliance test.

Frankly, I was initially disappointed at it’s apparent speed, though I suppose that the way the engine loads pages is more or less linear compared to Firefox. I must be used to Firefox’s way of doing things, though the cosmetic issue quickly faded. After a while, I was quite used to it, and then the clear differences of the new Presto (WebKit based) rendering engine really started to shine.

One of the first things I did was look for widgets to load multiple links the way a Firefox addon such as Linky would so I could do my Entrecard drops as sort of a torture test. Loading 50+ tabs in Firefox 3.0.4 is an easy way to drain your system resources in a hurry. Addons such as Adblock and Noscript tend to help alleviate this drain to a degree, but you’ll still run out of RAM if you push it too hard.

Once I turned off Java, Plugins, Music, and etc via the Tools menu (yup, FF users, no addons needed) multiple page loads really seemed to fly. JS widgets that were used by multiple sites (such as the EC widget) seemed to load instantly and I was able to complete my 300 page loads in roughly half the time it would have taken for FF 3.0.4. Overall memory usage seemed about the same, but due to the dynamic nature of the pages I loaded, there was nothing quite scientific about the results.

With every new browser comes a landslide of benchmarks and really accurate data concerning page loads, compliance, and Javascript precompiling performance, but the real test of a good browser will always be security first, and the “look and feel”. Opera 10a’s changelog doesn’t seem to focus on the security aspect (all filed under Misc.) so much as the latter, but I guess that’s always been their niche anyway.

Other exciting stuff
CSS3 RGBA colors
Dragonfly
Web Fonts and SVG
30% Faster (than a non-webkit browser?)

Not so exciting… Playing catch up with the big boys
Inline spell-check
Auto-update
HTML formatting in Opera Mail

Quirks
Load a bunch of tabs, then run Solitaire. Minimize Opera and enjoy seizure.

Predictions
With Opera 10′s final release coming mid-2009, it seems that Firefox and IE will be alone at the top with everyone else using WebKit based engines. I have a strong feeling that by the time IE hits 9 it will have adopted WebKit as well, possibly leaving Firefox completely obsolete with fan boys attached to it like kids are to their NES… On second thought, that is probably just as likely as IE adopting Tracemonkey… But still more likely that the Twilight Zone possibility that Microsoft will shock the world with their own proprietary Precompiles-teh-entire-web engine with 9000 times faster benchmarks and rock solid standards, security, and stability. Who knows… I do know that I wrote this post in Firefox.

Yesterday’s zone-h stats:

And here’s a couple of screens I took from defaced Entrecard members blogs:

What you can do to protect your blog:

1. Make sure none of your WP plugins appear on milw0rm or any other vulnerability site.

http://www.milw0rm.com/search.php?dong=wordpress

If you run any other CMS or script, search for them too just to be sure. If you find that you are running a vulnerable script, remove or update it immediately.

2. Check out my post on securing your blog.

3. Not all script kiddies will deface your site. Some will simply replace your affiliate codes with their own, or insert iframes for other malicious code.

Download a SFV checker, FTP your entire site and check every file. QuickSFV can create md5′s or crc32′s for every file that you have. Download and verify their integrity at least once a week or any time you suspect a breach. This should become part of your standard backup routine.

4. Stay on top of your site. If you run multiple sites, you may want to have a look at a service such as Internet Uptime Monitor’s Hack Alerts. Basically, their free service will allow you to recieve hourly checks on your website. If it goes down or gives an error, they will email you. Upgraded service for more frequent checks on multiple sites is also available for fairly cheap.

Stay safe!