I just binge watched the first two seasons of the British TV program Black Mirror on Netflix. If you liked Orphan Black you should definitely watch Black Mirror. Fuck that. You should watch Black Mirror even if you didn’t like Orphan Black. Each episode of Black Mirror stands alone and is completely unrelated to the other episodes. Unrelated other than the fact that each one will make you think about and how we interact with each other and technology.

The number of attacks from Thailand has been a significant fraction of the total for several months. In the past 24 hours I saw attacks from 51 address in Thailand, 241 in the past week. That exceeds the runner-up country (US) by a factor of five. Ten months ago I noted that Italy was the source of a disproportionate number of attacks. Every single recent attack from Thailand has attempted to register a bogus WordPress account via a POST /wp-login.

Today my server was attacked by a server owned by soladrive.com; specifically IP addr 96.44.156.75 (which is also owned by quadranet.com). I sent a report of the attack to abuse@soladrive.com. That email was rejected with this text: pipe to |/home/sola/public_html/support/pipe/pipe.php generated by abuse@soladrive.com local delivery failed I then forwarded that to support@soladrive.com — the address I found on their web page. That also bounced with the same error. WTF! Why would anyone use a VPS provider without a working abuse email address?

I rode the bus this afternoon to assist the San Jose Downtown Streets Team in putting homeless people back to work. On the bus ride back home I noticed an individual on the bus I initially thought was blind and/or mentally handicapped. But a few minutes after I boarded he started shouting seemingly random phrases. He then made several random seating changes (while showing us his lovely butt crack). Soon after that he slowly took off his pants.

Yesterday I had my second Internet outage in the less than three months since I switched to Comcast cable broadband as my ISP. The first incident was a little less than two months ago when my IPv6 address changed for no reason and hardware and software connecting me to the Internet failed to handle the situation. In the preceding seven years using AT&T + Sonic.net I had exactly two Internet outages and one of those was because my DSL modem died.

Today I logged another attack that attempts to exploit the horribly broken (i.e., full of security holes) “beauty-clean” WordPress theme. It also exploits a misfeature of PHP that is one of hundreds of reasons that PHP needs to die. Anyone who tells me they’re proud they write most of their code in PHP is someone who probably received way too many awards as a child merely for participating. I wrote about the first attack I noticed against this theme just two weeks ago.

This is making the rounds but can’t be repeated often enough, so… via a friend of a friend (& "momma goals" @kestrin) pic.twitter.com/tt97FO2Z7d — Raviv Ullman (@ravivullman) October 3, 2015 The text from the image (so it’s searchable): “Gun violence problem solved. Or, “hey, how about we treat every young man who wants to buy a gun like every woman who wants to get an abortion” — mandatory 48-hr waiting period, parental permission, a note from his doctor proving he understands what he’s about to do, a video he has to watch about the effects of gun violence, an ultrasound wand up the ass (just because).

I’ve been seeing attempts to exploit bugs in the WordPress revslider plugin for a very long time. But all of the attacks that utilize a POST request have attempted to upload a Zip archive. And a bug in the mod_dumpio module meant I was unable to extract the contents of those zip files. Having just fixed the mod_dumpio module I was able to capture one of those zip archives. The attack was from a server at namecheaphosting.

Two weeks ago I wrote about my surprise in learning that the Apache mod_dumpio module does not dump null (i.e., zero) bytes. That shortcoming makes it difficult to analyze attacks that involve binary data such as Zip archives. That a module which claims to log all the data sent to or from an Apache web server does not actually do so is rather surprising and exasperating. Especially since the module has been around for at least nine years (earliest reference I could find was October 2006).

If you’re reading this you might be interested in joining the Atheist Community of San Jose. The ACSJ also has a Meetup group where you’ll find many events of interest to the godless such as our monthly assistance at Second Harvest Food Bank. Below is an eclectic list I made from a tiny fraction of the books, movies, podcasts, YouTube videos, and web sites that have informed my worldview as an atheist, scared me (the documentary movie “Jesus Camp”) or amused me.