Hackers Put Malware On Football Site

Thursday night I got home from work & went on a fansite for my team. Problem was: I couldn't get on it. OK, so the NFL draft is on, maybe the servers are overloaded. Problem with that is I go on this site every Sunday during football season, & never have a problem getting on the site.

This isn't the official site. It's a fan based site where I was hoping to see what the fan reaction would be to the teams first draft pick, which i thought was an odd pick. But first, I couldn't get on the site at all. Then I got on it, but the forum threads seemed surprisingly small. Then when I clicked on any topic the browser would time out.

Then it happened. My antivirus popped up a malware warning. What to do. "Remove it". Heck yes I clicked that. Then 10 minutes later that popup came back, clicked "remove it" again. So I closed my browser, launched Malwarebytes & did a complete scan. After 40 minutes it found nothing. Now the really weird thing is the malware was listed as HP.exe. Since when does a computer manufacturer have an executable file on it's hardware?

A couple of years ago I had another malware attack. but that time the same anti-virus program didn't find it. I knew about that one because one of those phony av popups showed up. I knew it was phony because it had a different name than my av software.

So I wonder. Was this a false positive? A re-direct to a phony site? I say that because as I said this site has dozens of topics on a normal day & this was draft day, so there should have been a lot more threads especially on the player my team drafted at #7. Instead there was very little & none of the discussions would come up. And if it was a fake site, what was the point? You don't need to register to read the posts. Thus no e-mail addresses to steal.

This is why I am wary of registering with lots of sites. As of tomorrow I will no longer be on Facebook. I found a way (thanks Google) to actually delete my account, not just de-activate it. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't need all my info.

Firefox Extension Fights Flash Cookies

If you are a tech geek you know about these. Local Shared Objects AKA Flash Cookies. They are stored on your computer but your browser can't detect them. They are used for tracking info about users like you & me. yes this is what regular cookies do, but you can delete those. these you can't.

Some companies use them to re-install cookies you have deleted. That is just wrong & is the reason we are suspicious of big corporations. You can delete them through Adobe's website but who knows how to do that or have ever been on the site except to update the Flash Player?

So someone created an extension for Firefox that deletes them on exit. Better Privacy® also lists all the LSO's on your browser. It's amazing how many there were when I first installed it. Now I only have a couple that I have whitelisted because I need my e-mail, the rest are unneccessary.

Another thing about these is their size. A regular cookie is 4kb, LSO cookies are up to 100kb. That's a big difference especially if you don't have a lot of memory. I do, but I still find this to be a security issue. Mainly because these things don't expire & companies use them to track you usage, within their websites & where you go afterwards. I don't need that.

So hopefully the message gets out. Some companies including Adobe & Mozilla suggested a new API that would clear them. Apparently it hasn't been done or Firefox wouldn't need an add-on.

HBO's Firefox Failure

Drama series on HBO can be confusing at first. What is great about the network is how rich the shows are. No easy stuff there. Game of thrones just had it's second episode. I never read the books, so I rely on what I see on Sunday nights.

Like most HBO shows it has a large cast with interconnecting stories & sometimes it is hard to keep track of who everybody is. What is their relationship to other cast members. Or even who exactly they are. Especially in a show like this with 3 different families fighting over the royal throne.

So because of this, I want to know who the cast members are. Well, HBO does have a cast page with photos of the actors & their names. So I want to print that page so I can figure out who everybody is. It's not like I'm going to be on the website during the show. Yeah there's a lot of info on there. HBO does a great job except for one thing.

When I tried to print the cast pictures, no luck. Print preview showed a black page. no photos, no nothing. I was like "what the hey?!". Then I thought "what if the website creator is a loon who wrote it only for IE?", which would be stupid. Are we still doing that nonsense? I mean IE has gone from 90% share to under 60% in 2 years. Firefox has between 22 & 25%, Chrome around 10% & Safari 5-6%.

So I closed Firefox 4 & opened IE8, went on the website & low & behold! I could print the page. Note to Time Warner & HBO: Get your act together. If your webpage designer doesn't want to code your page for more than one browser-get rid of him! It's just lazy. IE doesn't meet international browser standards, especially not version's prior to IE9 which just came out. FF, Chrome & Opera always have, not sure about Safari (never sure what Steve jobs thinks about them).

Yeah I was finally able to do it & printing actors photos for some show isn't that big a deal, but it's the over all lack of support for a major browser that is just silly. This should not still be happening. I used to have the same issue with PG&E & Verizon, but that has gone away, meaning they figured it out. for a major media company not to is a bad sign.

Buying Wallpaper For Prepaid Phone

I'm trying to spend some money on my prepaid phone because it has such a high amount on it. I will never spend the money because I only use the phone once a week. No one has my number. I don't want work to know it & my relatives don't have it. Maybe they should but this phone isn't the greatest. I have to move around to get the best reception. i don't know if that's because it's a cheap prepaid phone or because cell service isn't that good in my condo.

So I said "Oh what the hell, I 'll get a wallpaper". It cost 2 bucks so no biggie. Except when i tried to actually set it as the wallpaper. I kept doing what the website said. kept going back to messaging>inbox>options. Damn, it was confusing. I kept clicking on the picture(Golden Gate Bridge), clicking save, close phone open it up, still old picture. Finally I must have done something because now it's on the phone.

Why do they have to make things so difficult? I suppose I could add a ringtone, but since no one has my number it would never ring anyway. But at least I got the balance down to $150. That should last until July when I have to buy another card. Or will I? Again it's not like I use this thing.

Linux Loses Again

God I hate Linux. I have Ubuntu on a USB stick. I decided to use it tonight instead of just using Windows. Bad idea. Why? Because I tried to update Firefox to 4. It wasn't in the repositories. Huh? So I went to Mozilla to do it that way. Downloaded it, but guess what? The Tar file wouldn't work. Good god would you just go away. What a worthless OS. Never works right. Nothing ever downloads right. Downloads never work but the Linux fanboys contend that Windows sucks.

That's rich. When has any flavor of Linux ever worked. How about never. Video is awful, the music players are hideous. The filing system is a joke (try finding anything in there). You'd think after 20 years they could make at least an effort to make it usable. But noooh. I guess they want you to think you have to be a genius to use it. Actually you could use it if it was written properly. A 5 year old could code better than the fools that write this incomplete, badly developed non operating system.

Another reason to Use Firefox

I was trying to read comments on Gizmodo & they wouldn't load. One reason is because they ruined the website with the awful change they did to the UI. God knows what they were thinking. So I decided to see if the issue was incompetently writing it for IE but not Firefox.

Well guess what? IE won't even load. Nice. I never use it but really? A browser that doesn't work. How exactly am I supposed to get updates since they require IE? More incompetence from Microsoft. Would you please just get rid of this POS?

There is exactly no reason for a browser not loading. That is unacceptable. It doesn't matter if you don't use it. You can't have something that just plain doesn't work. All the jokes about IE aside, it is an outrage to have a program that important not work. I wonder about businesses. Most only allow IE, so they will be hurting if that browser is suddenly offline. How will MS explain the damage done to businesses that rely on their computers to stay in business. I will be interested in the explanation. BTW-I'm clearly online because I am using Firefox to write this.

TV Show Studies Genealogy

I have found a TV show to watch that I find quite fascinating. It's called "Who do you think you are?". It has just finished it's run on NBC & hopefully will come back next year. Like a lot of shows it's based on a british show of the same title.

What this show does is take a semi-famous person & look for ancestors. It has a link to the Ancestry.com website(which the celebrity is seen looking at at least once per episode). Obviously a TV show with a celebrity is going to find stuff out faster & easier than you or me could but it's still fun to watch.

I've been on the website once & since I didn't want to register & pay since I didn't know how much I could find out anyway I only did a cursory search. This only took me back a couple of generations but you could find out stuff. This is what technology does. There are now more ways to preserve & collect this kind of information. Technology haters don't understand this. Technology allows us to preserve records that would be lost otherwise. Every episode shows someone looking through microfiche files of pre-20th century documents.

Yes there are a lot of documents preserved by other methods but stuff several hundreds of years old still needs some kind of tech to preserve the item so it doesn't just disintigrate because of age. For instance in most episodes the celebrity is shown some hand written document that was an official record-a death certificate, a book that listed the ancestors name, maybe an army census. Ashley Judd was shown a series of papers from an ancestor's Kentucky regiment showing that he was captured by the Confederate Army twice. Tim McGraw was shown a diary with handwriting that showed that an ancestor of his hosted a 16 year old dinner guest named George Washington! Without tech these items would be long gone.

My family has nothing like that, but that's because both sides emigrated here only 100 years ago. Still it's an interesting field. I have cousins who have visited my grandmother's home island off of Sicily. I don't have the money to do that, so maybe a website is the best I can do.