Other posts related to firefox
Apologies again about the light blogging. It might have something to do with the fact that my computer got infected by a nasty evil demon virus from HELL yesterday, which took me over 6 hours to get rid of completely. This evil monster blocked me from accessing antivirus related sites, hijacked my Google searches, crippled my AV software so I couldn’t download updates, blocked my attempts to use Regedit (so I could go into the registry), and constantly crashed Firefox. It also corrupted any antivirus software I tried to download too. Only by renaming Regedit and figuring out where the virus was getting its cues from in the registry was I finally able to disable it and download the needed software to remove it from the system altogether. Gads.
And that might have been the end of it, except that I’m minding my own business watching a Netflix movie and trying to unwind from all the stress before, when I get an IM from a friend letting me know my blog was down.
Uhhhhhh?
So I surf in and sure enough the only thing left of my blog was a weird PHP error. After doing some quick googling, the error usually occurs when the site has been hacked.
Oh no, oh no no no no no….
I logged in, checked some of my files and noticed right away many of them had been changed only minutes before. Upon opening the PHP files I saw malicious javascript code had been injected at the top, explaining why my blog was no longer functioning. Left to itself, once the code was operational it would have spread and potentially infected any subsequent visitor to the site who didn’t have their browsers appropriately shielded (you know, like dumbass me.) The irony of it is that the unique setup of my blog prevented the code from working properly, the one saving grace from having so much junk on my blog to begin with.
I contacted support in a panic, and they responded almost immediately, and restored my entire site within a few short minutes. I asked them to investigate and they found FTP logins that were out of the ordinary and didn’t match the IP addresses I normally used. After some investigating of my own, I confirmed it was the same group that infected my PC with a virus before. Evidently the trojan I was infected with had sent them my FTP passwords, and the hackers’ server later used that info to log in and inject my blog with all kinds of malicious crap. Fun times.
My host sent me the FTP logs and from there I was able to determine exactly who the culprit was, a server in Norway that appears to be a clearinghouse for Russian criminal activity. I’m pretty sure what happened to me was all automated, and that I was just one of many victims of what’s become a well organized setup designed to do what else, make money. The Google searches I tried when I was infected hijacked my searches and redirected me to spam sites instead. I also discovered 419 type scams as well coming from the same server (including my personal favorite, one from a Russian “single mother” pleading for money so she could feed her starving family, and oh by the way, she’s 30 and a hottie too.)
Glad the nightmare’s finally over though (I think). Can I go back to watching my movie now? 
Tags: antivirus, blog, code, computer, criminal, firefox, googling, hackers, javascript, nightmare, norway, pc, registry, scams, script, server, software, spam, support, trojan, virus
Categories: Tangled Webs
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Loading ...Twitter Doesn’t Like FireFox
Lincoln Adams | June 30, 2007 @ 1:47 amI’ve been surfing through quite a lot of tweetheads at Twitter, and adding a few of them as friends, but for some reason the number of friends for my profile stayed the same no matter how many people I added. I chalked this up for being a time delay before the server updated my profile, but I finally had the presence of mine to try it again using IE7 instead of Firefox.
Yep, you guessed it, adding friends doesn’t work if you’re using the Firefox browser. Not only that, you can’t delete tweets either. WT*?? 
Give me a flipping break Twitter. Are you guys such anal fart knockers that you can’t even make your website standards compliant for REAL browsers?? Get a fricking clue already you schmucks.
Sheesh, 20 minutes of my life wasted and now I have to do it all over again. 
Tags: bug, clue, firefox, friends, issues, knockers, presence, time delay, tweeter, tweetheads, yep
Categories: Blog Fog
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When Adsense Makes No SENSE At All
Lincoln Adams | June 21, 2007 @ 6:06 pmAfter putting up Google ads on my blog, I noticed scrolling in Firefox seemed to get choppy when the text ads came into view, but when they weren’t scrolling was smooth as usual. Great, another bug I needed to hunt down. I can just forget about getting any sleep this week. Web design, @#$%! 
Fortunately though, I got lucky and found out a line in my stylesheet ( background-attachment: fixed; ) turned out to be the culprit. I removed it and presto, the scrolling problem cleared up. My background stayed exactly the same afterwards, so apparently I didn’t even need it there. One of these days I’m gonna get a book on CSS so I can finally figure out what in God’s name I’m putting in my stylesheets. Even now I still can’t get a handle on floats and how they work. But I mean really, float this people. Sheesh.
But anyways, happy to see this irritating bug had quickly been squashed, I surfed back to my blog to double check… and saw an ad for cosmetics staring me right in the face.
What the…? Hellooooo, what happened to relevant ads, Google dudes???
Then it got worse. After refreshing the page a few times, an ad for John McCain’s presidential campaign showed up.
OMG get it off my blog, get it off get it off getitoff!!!! AHHHH!!!!!!!!
I furiously clicked as fast as I could to my Adsense account and read up on how I could filter out some of these ads. Let me tell ya, Google’s Competitive Ad Filter… sux… rocks. You can’t use keywords or even perform a search for ads you’d like to screen. Instead you basically have to check the link properties of a particular ad (since you can’t click on them), and then check out where it links to so you can add the originating site to the filter list. Unfortunately Google’s redirection script turns each link into a 300 mile long streak of cryptic nonsense, so you have to carefully scroll through it until you find the originating URL. This is what I have to go through to keep my blog from advertising lipstick. Good grief, I may as well start subscribing right now to Glamour and Vogue magazines.
Though now that I think about it, my fingernails could use a really good manicure… ohhhhh crap.
Tags: ads, adsense, advertising, blog, bug, competitive ad filter, cosmetics, css, culprit, firefox, God, good grief, google, john mccain, lipstick, nonsense, one of these days, presidential campaign, relevance, rocks, scrolling, sleep, stylesheet, stylesheets, web design
Categories: Blog Fog
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Banking on Xerobank
Lincoln Adams | May 31, 2007 @ 1:02 amI’ve been using the Torrify Browser at my job for a few weeks now, and man did I fall completely in love with it. 
Ever since I got into it with my boss over his refusal to accommodate my disabilities (among other things), and watching him piss all over my efforts to go back to school, I no longer felt safe using my work PC to surf the net and blog when things at work got slow, at least not with him lurking around. So I started exploring my options. When I somehow stumbled onto Torrify, I found something that not only enabled me to keep my browsing contents off the servers, it also enabled me to install the StumbleUpon and ScribeFire plugins as well (something I couldn’t do on my work PC). I now had a completely portable browser on my USB thumbdrive with all the goodies I needed for secure blogging (and *ahem* a little bit of stumbling too). 
It even bypassed the server filters so I could once again access Pandora and other streaming radio sites, something I USED to enjoy until the party crashing snotballs in ISD (Information Systems Department) decided to block it all.
Only problem was Torrify’s ability to access the Tor network (for anonymous web surfing). Initially it was slow (which was to be expected), but then it suddenly stopped working altogether. I’m not sure why, but I wasn’t too concerned about it since I rarely used it anyway. My main concern was keeping my content, cookies and whatnot off ISD’s servers, and Torrify was able to accomplish that for me quite nicely.
Now it looks like Torrify has become XeroBank, which will eventually offer anonymous email and a completely portable virtual machine (??????). It also offers hi-speed access for anonymous Internet surfing (the cheapest package being ten dollars a month), and I had to admit its touted features looked impressive. Offering a true broadband solution for secure and anonymous surfing had been an elusive quest for many privacy minded users, so if XeroBank is able to deliver here, this could be the start of something big.
I, of course, already signed up for a 3 day demo. 
Sign up for your own XeroBank Account
Important Update and Review:
After receiving email instructions on how to download Xerobank, I went to the site to choose the 3 day demo, but then it it forwarded me to a signup page for an account even though I had one already. Oh well, a minor hiccup that didn’t affect my account status, since I was able to download the browser from my Profile page without any further issues.
When I went to extract the files into my thumbdrive though, my antivirus software AVG suddenly started to throw a FIT, insisting that one of the XeroBank files was a trojan (Generic4.XXX). The name of the offending file was called KillProc.dll, and after a quick Google search I learned some antivirus products like to make a false hit on this particular file, even though it did have legitimate uses (which is to kill processes, duh). Still, this is probably gonna freak some people out if their AV also starts going bat crazy because of this particular file. AVG was still trying to grab and quarantine the file in my case, so I couldn’t get it to extract properly when I ran Xerobank the first few times, and sure it enough when I closed the browser, the processes were still running in Task Manager. I finally disabled the AVG shield and extracted it successfully, but then had to flush and recopy the files on to the thumbdrive a few times because the Firefox add-ons seemed to lock up on me for some reason.
When I finally got it running smoothly, I noticed the start page gave some some IPSpy statistics on the network I was currently using to surf anonymously. I was being rerouted through a server in Germany, but there was definitely a clear difference in speed compared to the Tor network. Wheeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!! At long last, anonymous BROADBAND!!
From what I could tell, I wasn’t actually using the Tor network anymore (even though oddly enough, the add-on to access the network still came pre-installed as it did in Torpark). My guess is that it’s being relegated as a backup option now, while your real connection is granted via an assigned static IP address as regulated by XeroBank. I’m assuming if I signed up for a Plus account that I would probably still be maintaining the same static IP, though this could really just be a unique characteristic of the demo version.
The important thing was that my connection was now effectively proxied, AND it was operating at broadband level speeds. If XeroBank can maintain this level of service, then man it’s definitely worth the 10 dollars a month it costs to use the Plus version at least. I can finally entertain my delusions of grandeur of being the faceless superhero who hacks his way through the Internet in an endless pursuit of truth and justice.
Update 2:
After being contacted by one of the administrators of XeroBank, I learned that if you wish to downgrade to the free “Torpark” version of the browser after installation, simply delete the two files in Data/XeroBank and you’re good to go. It was also confirmed the the static IP I was initially assigned would eventually be followed up with a broader range of IP addresses as they continue to expand their network and work out the remaining kinks.
Tags: anonymous internet, anonymous surfing, anonymous web, antivirus, boss, broadband, browser, disabilities, firefox, goodies, hi speed, job, little bit, mobile, pandora, portable, scribefire, streaming radio, stumbleupon, thumbdrive, tor, tor network, torrify, trojan, usb drive, virtual machine, whatnot, xerobank
Categories: Blog Fog
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MICROSOFT MUST DIE
Lincoln Adams | May 6, 2007 @ 8:36 pmI’m serious, the government needs to declare all of Microsoft a terrorist group, because quite frankly they are more of a threat to mankind than Al Qaeda is right now.
I was polishing up up my blog when I happened to noticed the colors I changed for a particular table wouldn’t take for some reason in Microsoft’s newest bundle of pure joy, IE7. No matter, since it didn’t affect the layout or anything… but then I glanced down and also happened to notice this HUGE horizontal bar on the bottom scrolling out for maybe half a mile before it ended. Oh no. No no no no…..
It wasn’t showing up in Firefox or IE6, so I knew this was an issue relating to IE7. Just beautiful. Worse yet, as I surfed around my blog using IE7, I noticed a few other things were breaking as well. Why, oh why, did I harbor the hope that maybe, just ONCE, IE7 would somehow prove not to be yet another disastrous release that would cause web designers everywhere to curse and spit at any and all things relating to Microsoft? I had thought IE7 would be just enough of an improvement over IE6 (which itself gave me endless hours of grief) that I wouldn’t have to pay it any mind when coding my blog.
Nope nope nope. IE7 promptly decided to treat my blog like a public restroom, hosing everything down in its path, but in just clever enough a manner that I wouldn’t notice it right away. And now because of those nice folks in Seattle who curiously enough also liked to worship Satan in their spare time, I had to deal with this mile long horizontal bar that was apparently stretched out to cover some 4th dimensional object residing on my blog, seemingly invisible to the naked eye.
So, with the clock striking midnight, I resolved to work this through until I figured out what was causing the problem. What would follow would be a series of deleting/adding code, uploading the modified file, refreshing my page, checking the results, then rinse, wash and repeat. I continued on this neverending cycle until 4AM, when I finally tossed in the towel and crashed on my bed, muttering curses at Microsoft, then sleeping and dreaming that I was muttering curses at Microsoft. I finally woke up around 11AM, somewhat refreshed and ready to pick up where I left off.
After another hour or so of googling for answers, uploading code and swearing yet another blue streak at Microsoft, I finally found an answer. The reason my horizontal bar spanned on to infinity was because the numbers I used to list comments in numerical order were in…. italics.
That’s it. No other reason. Because my comment numbers were in italics, IE7 in its unending wisdom decided it needed to create a horizontal bar that could be wrapped around the earth three times because somehow, that just makes it all better.
I hate those Microsoft coders. I hate them. I hate their mothers, I hate their wives, I hate their children, I hate their pets, I HATE THEM. There are not enough fleas in this universe to infest the armpits of those hacking terrorists to my liking. I long await the day when the earth will open up and swallow the entire Microsoft campus whole, while angels in heaven sing and rejoice over the destruction of the greatest evil the world has ever known, at least ever since the invention of disco.
But in the meantime, I must continue to fight off these demons from infesting my blog, and lend my hand in some small way to assist those who have also been afflicted by this plague of mankind. So here it is: I noticed this problem also occured in those running Wordpress blogs using the Tiga theme. If this describes you, check an individual page where at least one comment has been made (in IE7 of course) to see if you get the horizontal bar as well. To fix, simply change the font style in the class “comment-num” to something other than italic, OR add the line “overflow: hidden” to the class comment header in your Tiga stylesheet. That should resolve the problem.
Fortunately, the other IE7 related issues were easily solvable, and I managed to clean them up just in time to see the sun set in the sky, yet another day stolen from me because of those evil snotbags in Seattle. *Sigh*
I think it’s obvious web design is definitely not for me. I had to do all this with only a rudimentary understanding of CSS, PHP and XHTML, and things have gotten a wee bit more complicated since I built my first webpage back in ‘97. Ahhhh the good old days, where you could throw some text up, wrap them in a font tag and low and behold, you had a webpage comparable to Yahoo. Now it can suck up all my time just to figure out what relative and absolute positioning means, and why it’s making my blog look like a pile of moose droppings. I can either spend all my time building and maintaining a blog, or I can spend it blogging for real, but I surely can’t do both. I think the time will eventually come when the technology will be so far over my head that I’ll have no choice but to use a service like Typepad just to avoid the chores and anguish of building and maintaining my own blog. It’s kind of sad, but what can I do. I don’t intend to go down without a fight though, so while I can still dance, I say, bring on the NOISE. 
Tags: 4am, al qaeda, blog, blogging, bug, clock, colors, firefox, grief, half a mile, horizontal bar, IE6, IE7, Internet Explorer, mankind, Microsoft, naked eye, public restroom, satan, seattle, spare time, terrorist group, theme, tiga, web design, web designers, wordpress
Categories: Blog Fog
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