Tag Archives: SEB

SEB has officially been around for 11 years now.

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bird-hawk-looking-at-clock-timeIt just occurred to me that I missed SEB’s 11th anniversary. On December 2nd, 2001 I launched what would become SEB thinking I’d give it a shot for a few weeks and then it would slowly fade away as I lost interest. Over the years I’ve come close to shutting it down a couple of times after frustrations with maintaining it or periods of inactivity and yet here we are still spouting out the occasional missive on the Interwebs.

I’m not as prolific as I once was (and I’ve never been particularly prolific at the best of times) and some of the projects (SEB Podcast) have progressed in spurts, but considering how it’s not made me rich and famous yet I think it’s not too shabby an effort. I can’t promise you it’ll last another 11 years, but there’s still some bits and bobs left for me to pontificate upon before I call it quits for good. My beard — though oddly enough not my hair — is a little grayer than it used to be and I’ve added a few wrinkles from when I started. I don’t know if I’m any wiser, but I’m certainly more experienced. It’s weird to dig back into the archives and read some of the stuff I wrote years ago. There’s only a handful of articles that I can remember off top of my head which makes reading some of the stuff that captured my attention fascinating.

So I’m a little late in announcing it, but here it is. Happy 11th Blogiversary to Stupid Evil Bastard!

SEB user accounts should be working now.

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If you’ve tried to login to your SEB user account recently and found it wouldn’t let you, well, I’ve fixed that. I had turned off new user registrations back when I had to uninstall all the plugins to stop the recurring malware infection and when I turned them back on a week or so ago I installed the Sabre anti-spam bot plugin so I wouldn’t be flooded with fake accounts.

I forgot one thing in doing so. I neglected to tell it to accept all of the current accounts as legit. So if you’ve tried to login and got an error message of some sort, that’s why. You should be able to login to your account once more.

SEB site notes.

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Just a quick blurb to mention that I appear to have finally gotten rid of the malware that was randomly inserting Viagra spam into the entries. It took removing every single plugin except for Akismet along with every theme, turning off user registration, and reinstalling WordPress, but I’ve not seen the files show back up since so it appears to have worked.

Now I’m slowly adding plugins back in and watching to see if the spam returns. The podcasts should be playable once more as I put the Blueberry PowerPress plugin back in yesterday, but user registration is still turned off until I test the plugin that helps to cut down on bots making accounts. I had quite a few plugins installed so this will probably take some time and I’ll be evaluating alternatives to many of them while I’m at it.

In the meantime, if the spam starts showing up again be sure to let me know.

Anyone else seeing Viagra spam being inserted into SEB posts?

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A user contacted me through ***Dave to let me know he was seeing extra content in SEB entries that didn’t look like it belonged there. He sent along a screenshot and a copy of the HTML source and, yep, there appeared to be extra paragraphs with spam links being inserted among the other text.

Here’s the screenshot:

Click to enlarge (ha!).

Awhile back there was some WP hacks going around (mainly through compromised plugins) that would insert hidden spam into a template that only showed up when you did a Google search for the blog in question, but otherwise didn’t show on the live site itself. This, however, appears to be something totally new.

I’ve checked SEB pretty thoroughly and it doesn’t appear to be anything generated here. The reader who reported the problem has since followed up saying that it only happens on his work laptop and not his personal machines at home. ***Dave also verifies that he doesn’t see it on any of his machines. I check SEB on a number of different PCs and smartphones regularly and I’ve never seen this happen so I’m assuming it must be something on the user’s laptop, but he says it only happens when he views SEB which seems oddly specific.

I can’t find anything on Google that seems to match this odd situation so I’m turning to you guys to see if anyone else has experienced this with SEB or something similar with some other site. Anyone else seeing this happen or know anything about a possible hack or virus that could cause it? Let us know in the comments.

SEB should be a little easier to read on mobile devices now.

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If you’ve tried to access SEB on your smartphone you may have noticed that it’s not exactly easy to see much of anything. So to make things a bit more legible I have installed WPTouch which reformats the output when it detects you’re using a smartphone or other mobile device.  I had the plugin installed previously, but somewhere along the way I took it out for reasons I don’t recall. Now it’s back so you can once again read SEB without going blind.

I didn’t have a smartphone to test it with last time I had it installed, but I do now and the difference is quite dramatic. Alas it does drop the template we use, but you don’t come here for how pretty the site is. You come here to see me say things out loud that most folks would be too polite to dream of saying. Not only is the site readable, but it even improves the ability to leave comments on an entry if you are an avid thumb typist. No idea if it changes things on tablets, which are arguably better suited to display the site the way it actually looks, so if you have a tablet and visit SEB let us know in the comments.

 

I’ll be turning off the importing of Google+ posts.

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It seems the inclusion of items I’ve shared through Google+ is confusing the hell out of a few people and I’ve had multiple complaints saying that folks don’t want to sign up for Google+ in order to read my posts. Ignoring the fact that there’s no need to sign up with Google+ to read anything I post publicly there or here, the extra but shortened content seems to be more problematic than useful for a lot of folks.

So I’ll shut off the importation plugin and go back to my usual much longer, but less frequent postings. The plugin(s) I was using for this process were a bit wonky anyway so it’ll be much less of a hassle for me. Perhaps this’ll motivate me to put more effort into posting by hand more often. Or at least I won’t have to keep repeating the same explanation to people.

Susan G. Komen Foundation suffering from a backlash over decision to drop donations to Planned Parenthood.

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It’s hard to say how much damage they’ve done to their own reputation with this, but it’s good to see so many people standing up for Planned Parenthood. The Koman Foundation bowed to political pressure from Christian zealots and a lot of folks just don’t appreciate that. #seb #politics #backlash

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Angry Reviewers Sink Susan G. Komen Foundation’s GuideStar Rating
As you’ve probably read about in the last few days, the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation (also known as Susan G. Komen for the Cure) decided to stop funding breast exams and mammograms at Planned Parenthood locations. This has obviously not gone over well with a number of people who view the decision as a capitulation to Christian conservatives. So in response, some of them have taken to the non-profit world’s equivalent of Yelp to voice their disapproval.

GuideStar is probably the bi…

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Angry Birds CEO sees opportunity in piracy

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There is a growing number of people in the various entertainment industries that are calling for a different approach to dealing with piracy other than trying to nuke it from orbit. There will always be a certain amount of piracy, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make money from your products. Especially if you can come up with new ways to turn pirates into customers. This is a problem that requires innovation, not legislation. #seb #piracy #videogames

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Angry Birds CEO: “Piracy May Not Be A Bad Thing”
While lawmakers and Hollywood execs try to come up with ways to combat piracy in ham-fisted, knee-jerk ways that punish everyone, the CEO of Rovio Mobile — better known as the company that makes Angry Birds — has joined his voice to more sensible suits who see online piracy as an opportunity to learn and grow.

While admitting that his company has issues with piracy and unlicensed products that make money off the wildly popular game, Rovio Mobile CEO Mikael Hed said earlier this week, “We c…

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10-year-old comes up with a novel new chemical

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That’s pretty cool in its own right, but the best part is that it sounds like it may have sparked an interest in science for the young girl. #seb #science #discoveries

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5th Grader Accidentally Makes Explosive in Class, Gets Co-Authorship on Subsequent Paper
Kenneth Boehr wasn’t expecting more than the usual from his ten-year-old students when he started a lesson on the Periodic table and handed out the molecule modeling kits. Then Clara Lazen handed him a model constructed from oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon atoms, and asked if she’d made a real chemical or not. Boehr found himself stumped. So he took a cellphone picture of the whole deal, and sent it to an old college buddy: Robert Zoellner , professor of chemistry at Humbolt State University.
Tu…

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