Your friendly reminder to minimize the WordPress plugins you deploy to what you actually need. BleepingComputer has an article: A critical-severity vulnerability in the Advanced Custom Fields: Extended (ACF Extended) plugin for WordPress can be exploited remotely by unauthenticated attackers to obtain administrative permissions. ACF Extended, currently active on 100,000 websites, is a specialized plugin…
When seeking assistance, the questions we ask inform the thinking of the machines or people giving answers. My initial work experience involved helping people research information. How to find books. How to search the internet or databases. One of the most important skills we taught was to locate salient terms as they influence the answers…
I see of late this blog gets weird traffic spikes. They are for older posts, so unlikely to be from subscribers or RSS fed. No referrer traffic, so not from search engines. Gotta be AI scraping the content. All the past week it was mostly China. Today, it’s the USA.
I’m sure my coworkers get tired of me. For someone who works in a bureaucracy, I often question the process. I want to balance efficiency and consistency and accuracy. There are tradeoffs, and navigating them through hashing out (debate and data) the way they function and dysfunction is why I like my work. Why things…
Since it is cybersecurity awareness month, I’m thinking more about how secure things are not. Big companies I expect capable of well resourcing their teams get breached. They are giant whales, so the Ahab threat actors really want to take them. The awareness stuff is all the same stuff with a twist: Be careful. Over…
While discussing an update with a colleague via Microsoft Teams about an Excel file he doesn’t have access to—an email referencing a tangentially related conversation in a channel he doesn’t have access to arrived—it struck me how fragmented our digital communication has become. Information is dispersed across emails, chats, and channels, making it increasingly difficult…
The New York City mayoral election is shaping up to make Ranked-Choice voting shine. They held the primary yesterday and the super progressive candidate won. The model where there’s a primary and there’s no winner with 50% triggering a run-off typically sees far fewer people show up for that run-off. I think that makes a…
At work, I post perhaps too many memes. I like them because a picture “says a thousand words.” And, sometimes, the picture works better in my haste to express raw emotion. Most of the time, these come from intense frustration, so the humor of a meme interjected into the seriousness helps me feel better. The…
A scene I love from The Hunt for Red October was the communication through sonat pings. Later, when I worked in IT, the use of SNMP pings became a core part of my troubleshooting an issue. I thought of this scene every time. These days, another form is most of my work with humans. These…