Blog Note: Comments Are A Mess

I never thought I’d have ongoing discussions here, so I set Comments to nest only three-deep. This has made a mess of things.

Tonight I went into Settings to enable up to ten levels, but it seems either this template won’t support more than three or else it won’t automagically add the indentation that’s necessary after three.

So, Comments are one frakkin mess. You’ll have to parse out on your own right now which reply is directed to you.

Since this blog is likely to drop dead in one week, let’s try to live with this until the long goodbye.

How Corporate Drones Are Killing America

OK, now that the headline is cleaned up enough for people to use as a link, let me tell you what the actual post headline is:

How Corporate Bitches Are Killing America

RED ALERT: Turn OFF JavaScript In Adobe Reader!

Sophisticated, targeted malicious PDF documents exploiting CVE-2009-4324

This one is nasty!

Quoting:

the PDF document contains everything it needs to fully exploit the victim’s machine – it does not have to download anything off the net.

Boldfaced and red emphasis added by me.

And why you must turn off JavaScript:

Since this exploit has not been patched yet, I would like to urge you all to, at least, disable JavaScript in your Adobe Reader applications.

Here is how to do that.

Update Your Copy Of Adobe Reader Now!

I’ve been knocked offline for 24 hours, fighting a host of infections that broke through my line of defenses yesterday.

What’s interesting is that I paid for not updating Adobe Reader even after seeing all the warnings about PDF exploits.

One of the infections came via a PDF that I never downloaded.

It somehow got in and parked itself in a TEMP file folder and did whatever it wanted to do. Apparently part of that was inviting some friends in!

One of the eighteen things raping my PC yesterday was this.

I didn’t keep the names of the others. They’re in the logfiles of the program I used to remove the above as well as an Avast! logfile that snuffed the remaining four — one of which was an infected PDF the other program didn’t see.

I swear I got all this yesterday by clicking on a link to a legitimate site. Suddenly a popup about requiring a plugin happened and Fox just dropped dead. While it was frozen, I called up Task Manager and saw that Adobe Reader had been launched in the background!

Anyway, update that sucker right now to close one loophole.

Now I have to catch up on all the news.

I doubt if there will be any other posts today.

WordPress Malfunctionaries At Work?

After months of irritation, I finally emailed WordPress Support about a persistent menu bug in this blog’s Dashboard.

Perhaps this is an indication they are mucking about with the wiring:

I’ve never before had a Top Post appear twice like that.

So don’t be surprised if other strange things pop up here.

The Top Posts Here

This blog hasn’t been here for a full year (it was previously at Blogger), so the rankings are only a snapshot of part of 2009.

Still, something about them puzzles me.

Two Curious Trademarks From Hon Hai

Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. (Ltd) is best known to techies as Foxconn, a contract manufacturer of electronics. They’ve assembled devices for Apple, among others.

The company has only 67 trademarks filed. And these two are Published for Opposition with a date a month in advance: February 2, 2010.

It makes me wonder what they have up their sleeve.

Lenovo Smartbook: Skylight?

Will Lenovo’s upcoming smartbook be called the Skylight?

I saw that at Liliputing and immediately searched TESS.

Seth Godin: No Power Buyers Equals Death

It’s not the rats you need to worry about

Even though his posts are short, I don’t read Seth Godin because I think most of the time he’s full of it. Not his fault. He’s a marketeer. They’re paid to be full of it. And then to convince us we should be full of it too. The “full of it” being whatever it is they’re pimping.

The above post, however, is absolutely breathtakingly and spectacularly correct.

It caused me to coin the term “power buyer” for the type of customer he’s talking about.

These are people who want what they want when they want it and are willing to pay for it.

These are the people who see the value in the things they purchase.

As opposed to most of the louts on the Net who think everything “wants” to (read: should) be free.

Which group of people can help you pay your rent and buy your food? The first or the second?

When you lose that first group of people, you’re at the mercy of the second.

And then you go out of business.

Previously here:

Guy, The Bookstores Are Already Dead

Christmas 2009

Offline until Saturday. Enjoy the pretty picture of London, England. Taken with an iPhone by @zainyk.