The title of this article deliberately mirrors that of Dr. Jerry Coyne’s article at Why Evolution Is True. I agree with Dr. Coyne that we have created a society in which “infractions” that three decades ago when I was in primary school would have been ignored or, at most, resulted in a lecture about how to behave now result in police arrest. This is both counterproductive and idiotic. We have to stop thinking in terms of “security at all costs”.

I just watched the excellent movie “Black Mass” starring Johnny Depp as the criminal James “Whitey” Bulger. But the reason for this post isn’t to talk about that movie. It’s to talk about the second trailer, subtly different from the first, I saw for the movie “The Martian” in which Matt Damon’s character, Mark Watney, says “I’m going to have to science the shit out of this!” The book on which the movie is based is one of the few I gave a 5 out of 5 rating last year and will definitely read again.

Today I noticed the search phrase “what does dog is my copilot mean” was used to reach my site. Since I titled my site “Dog Is My Copilot” I’m not surprised the person searching for an answer to that question clicked through to my site. But they were probably unsatisfied since I don’t explain what the term means (even to me). So I’m going to do so in this article.

A lot of HTTP proxy firewalls used by companies scan web pages (i.e., HTTP responses) received by users behind the firewall. That is reasonable as they have a legitimate need to protect their network from malware. What is not reasonable is that those proxy firewalls then pre-fetch any URL mentioned anywhere in the returned web page(s). Regardless of whether or not the human (and their browser) which made the original request would also request the URL.

Once in a while I see malware attempt to issue HTTP POST requests to non-existent paths. Most often the malware is attempting to exploit a bug in a WordPress plugin that I don’t have installed. Sometimes the malware is clearly probing to see if software other than WordPress is running on my web server. For example, two months ago I saw a “POST /api/v1/config” request. But today I saw a truly bizarre attack.

Are the authors of PHP and WordPress merely evil or Satan incarnate? That was the thought that crossed my mind (even though I’m an atheist) when I saw the most recent attack against my site. The attacker was in the Ukraine (country code UA) on domain hidehost.net at address 91.200.12.53. The attacker started with a “GET /” request. The subsequent requests were all POST to a /wp-includes/*.php path. Specifically these paths:

Back in May of 2015 I read an article on Mother Jones about Chipotle getting rid of GMOs. As a skeptic who has closely followed the science regarding genetic modification of food (or genetic engineering if you prefer) I recognized that Chipotle was cynically jumping on the anti-GMO bandwagon. And I wasn’t the only person to reach that conclusion as this article shows. This is the message I sent to Chipotle via their web site:

There is a new piece of malware attempting to guess WordPress account credentials. You can recognize it by its odd user-agent header. Here is the first one I saw: Parser::Template::Auto=CODE(0xa1d5ff0) All subsequent occurrences have been identical other than the hexadecimal value inside the parentheses. The first incidence of this user-agent on my site occurred at 2015-09-02T07:35:06 UTC; that is, ten days ago. Since then I’ve seen at least 241 attacks with that signature (see note below).

I just installed the Mac OS X El Capitan “GM” (golden master) release. I was surprised to find doing so had deleted all the historical log files from my /var/log directory (e.g., /var/log/system.log.0.gz). I had been running the beta builds since they were announced. It is possible, in fact likely, that first beta build behaved the same way and I didn’t notice. Regardless it is pretty obnoxious for an operating system upgrade to delete files that cannot possibly impact the upgrade.

Nine months ago I commented on a YouTube video and wrote a blog article about a hyper religious individual who can’t resist proselytizing in the wrong context (i.e., an ostensibly secular YouTube video). Yesterday someone named “Tommy Rad” replied to my comment. A full month since the previous reply. Devout Christians, and highly religious people in general, just cannot let criticism of their beliefs pass without a comment. I stopped responding to those replies to my comment long ago but this most recent reply was too good to ignore.