Google banned rae.tnir.org

Posted by rae in Reid, the Net, web site
at 10:17 am on Thursday, 28 August 2008

Well, I think it’s more of a combination of Google and Firefox.

My site was hacked via a Wordpress exploit. I’ve updated to the latest (I was at 2.5, now at 2.6.1), which should fix the issue.

I’ve applied to Google to get rae.tnir.org re-evaluated. But their form for re-evaluation says it will take “several weeks”! So until then, my site will be red-eye-banned by all Firefox users.

Ye gods.

2008-09-18 13:05 Update:
Found out that Google is in cahoots with stopbadware.org, and applied to them to get my blog reviewed. Their turnaround was significantly faster than that of Google (which hasn’t done anything yet). I got this email reply from them a day or two after I asked them for a review:

We have received and processed your request for review of your website, rae.tnir.org/. Google’s most recent test of your website found no badware behaviors on the site. As such, the Google warning page for your site has either already been removed or should be removed shortly. In addition, if your site has been listed in our Badware Website Clearinghouse, we will remove your site from the Clearinghouse list.

Sometimes website owners are confused about why Google placed a warning in the search results for their site. In many cases, a website run by an innocent site owner has been hacked by a malicious third party, causing the site to distribute badware without the site owner’s knowledge. If your site was distributing badware because it has been hacked, then simply removing the bad code from your site is not enough to keep your site clean in the future. You will also need to work with your hosting provider to fix all security vulnerabilities associated with your site.

Please note that we will be retesting your website at periodic intervals in order to monitor that it remains free from badware. If we find that you are hosting or distributing badware in the future, the reviews process may take considerably longer than the original review.

Answers to commonly asked questions from site owners who are the subject of Google warnings can be found at: http://stopbadware.org/home/faq#partnerwarnings For tips on keeping your website clean and secure, please visit: http://stopbadware.org/home/security

The StopBadware Team

So with any luck, this blog will be out from under Googles Red Screen of Death sometime soon.

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A Qik video from boardgaming last night

Posted by rae in entertainment, friends, gaming, the Net
at 12:50 pm on Saturday, 16 August 2008

I use the “Qik” iPhone application last night on my jailbroken iPhone to stream some live video to the ‘Net.

You can see all my awesome videos over at qik.com/rae.

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iPhone Updates

Posted by rae in hardware, the Net
at 11:34 am on Monday, 7 July 2008

It seems that (a) Apple is pissed at Rogers data plans and is limiting its shipments of iPhones to Canada as a result, and (b) Rogers will let you buy an iPhone on your existing plan, without a data plan.

Now, *I* would think that you would have to pay a higher price for the iPhone, since Rogers is subsidizing them with their onerous data plans, but Sergey says that you will still be able to pay the $200/$300 prices. We will see, I suppose.

P.S. This is a “blog post” submitted via ping.fm , and I’m curious how it will look..

P.P.S. This is a second attempt. Hope I can delete the first one from LiveJournal..

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CBC distributes “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister” via torrent

Posted by rae in entertainment, the Net
at 11:52 am on Wednesday, 26 March 2008

Wow, not only did the CBC use BitTorrent to distribute the show, they also encoded it as a 545 MB, 720×486 Xvid AVI (as well as a smaller, 320×240 MPEG4 version for iPods). I was half-expecting wmv or QuickTime…

And to top it all off, they put the torrent file up on Mininova! How cool is that?

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Toronto Fire

Posted by rae in the Net
at 2:40 pm on Wednesday, 20 February 2008

Queen Street fire
Queen Street fire, courtesy drpitch

There is a 6-alarm fire on the south side of Queen Street, east of Bathurst. Lots of coverage, with crap from mainstream news sources:

www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2008/02/20/toronto-fire.html
www.citynews.ca/news/news_19772.aspx
680news.com/news/topstory/article.jsp?content=20080220_054636_4388

Excellent stuff from local Toronto blogs:

torontoist.com/2008/02/massive_fire_hi.php
torontoist.com/2008/02/phototo_queen_s.php
www.blogto.com/city/2008/02/6alarm_fire_at_queen_bathurst
blog.davemadethat.com/2008/02/20/a-piece-of-my-history-is-destroyed

Spooky Google Ad words on these sites include:

Fire Fighter Training
3 month NFPA Accredited
Program Emergency
Services Academy Ltd.
www.esacanada.com

I’m trying to elucidate exactly what it is that makes the blogs better than the news sites. I think it’s mostly presentation and the much larger, clearer photos. Also the language is more down-to-earth and less “newsy”.

Also the use of:

  1. updates with new info
  2. community photos from Flickr
  3. community comments on the article page

really make a huge difference. Also the use of actually useful links like the Toronto Fire Services’ Active Incidents page stands out.

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Using Jaiku now more than Twitter

Posted by rae in software, the Net
at 1:20 pm on Tuesday, 19 February 2008

I noticed this last week that Jaiku has an IM interface now, and I find my self using it more than Twitter. In many ways, Jaiku is like Twitter 2.0. Each status update can have comments appended to it, and an icon attached to it.

There’s also the usual cell-phone integration too.

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Countdown to Ubuntu 7.10

Posted by rae in software, the Net
at 12:50 am on Friday, 5 October 2007

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Bad Movie Trailer Unicode

Posted by rae in entertainment, the Net, video
at 8:45 pm on Monday, 10 September 2007


what are those characters before the ©?

I was watching some movie trailers: Iron Man, War, The Last Legion, Exiled, Lions For Lambs, Right at Your Door, and The Signal.

At the end of “Exiled”, I noticed something funny in the end credits, as you can see to the right.

Heh.

Btw, I heartily recommend the “Iron Man” trailer. Yes, they used the Black Sabbath song.

“The Last Legion” looks really good, and I was susprised to see Colin Firth and Ben Kingsley were in it.

“War” and “Exiled” look to be two good martial arts action movies. I suspect the former will be more in the impossibly-good category, while the latter has more of a “Reservoir Dogs” feel to it.

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It’s time for the annual changing of the internet provider

Posted by rae in Reid, family, hardware, the Net, web site
at 2:27 pm on Tuesday, 26 June 2007

Well, it’s that time of year again.

Last year at this time, our then-internet-provider, istop.com, dumped all of its DSL customers into the lap of another provider, known variously as cia.com, 3web.com, igs.net and other names. I just call them 3Web. It seemed okay for a while, but then we started getting outages, and then they became more frequent.

I checked my logs for last night and we had a one-minute outage about once every 45 minutes. Needless to say, when Michael and Ronnie are plying WoW, a one minute outage is a major pain. Especially when they have to spend 45 minutes waiting to do something in the game.

Michael did some research à la Google and found a place called TekSavvy. They offer 5 Mbps DSL, have a no-throttling policy, and also offer static IPs. Sounds good to me!

So today I ordered our DSL from them to be activated on Mon Jul 16, 2007. Which DSL provider you use is selected solely by the login id you use, so for a couple of weeks I can go back and forth between them.

Hope it works out!

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Talkshoe

Posted by rae in friends, software, the Net
at 3:29 pm on Saturday, 24 March 2007

talkshoe.com looks like an interesting alternative to Skype for online meetings/chats. If someone else could create an account and let me chat with them to try it out, I would appreciate it.

Thoughts going out today to Peter and Laura and especially Jon.

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