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…
Last spring, I resurrected my https://www.inoreader.com/ account to get RSS feed subscriptions for news sources. My email accounts are so over run that I’m not likely to track what’s happening local through them. So, I made a change. Today, looking through, I noticed an article about a suspicious death and police soliciting for more information.…
NOTE: I put this into the schedule, so don’t read too much into the post’s date in determining who inspired me to write it. Facebook has that “happy birthday” feature which I think is pretty neat because it encourages connection. Where it gets weird for me is people who are dead. I don’t feel comfortable…
I don’t get it. A few people shared posts claiming the same photo of a child from different cities was missing. It got me looking into the phenomenon. Law enforcement agencies are calling it a bait-and-switch scam. After the post gets widely shared, the creator will change it to the real purpose: malicious website, deceptive…
Someone copying the name of another person on social media is annoying, but I don’t think of it as hacking. Anyone can make an account. Social media companies made verification methods precisely because clones are easy to make and when do so about someone famous, it could lead to a devaluation of a brand. For…
A prior habit saved so many possibly interesting things that I mostly never returned to. Think of it like instead of hundreds of open tabs, I collected thousands of items. Most recently the tool to collect them was Pocket, but I’ve abandoned huge troves of items in other bookmarking sites or apps. Evernote, Diigo, Instapaper,…
My home router’s security feature blocked some things when I was web browsing in increasing frequency. It got really bad. The AP and NBC News both experienced redirects to a page spoofing my ISP asking personal questions to give me a smartphone in the same hour. Obviously fake. Obviously a scam. Maybe phishing. These were…
Months ago, Automattic acquired the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress that will publish on the Mastodon network as a federated instance through the ActivityPub protocol. The blog basically becomes a server of sorts in the fediverse. That sounded cool, so I installed the plugin. This post will serve as a test to see if it works.…