Standard Mischief

This is just the typical test post. I wasn’t going to upgrade yet, but there is apparently an exploit for WordPress 2.3.3 (or perhaps some earlier version, my source is a little sketchy with the details).

I though I caught the bug, and searched around for more info. This page talks about “hidden link injection,” while this page has a different exploit regarding a new directory. I seem to have neither of these.

What’s really weird about WordPress now (and before the upgrade), is that it seems that my blog is sending - in response to a request for my RSS feed - zip compressed content whether or not it’s requested or even supported by the reader doing the request. I have no idea why this started happening all of a sudden.

At least, thanks to cURL, I know what the heck is going on.

$ curl http://standardmischief.com/blog/feed/|head

About 50% of the time this will feed me garbage. The head command it there to limit the scope of the garbage.

$ curl --compressed http://standardmischief.com/blog/feed/|head

Nearly the same command, but the –compressed option actually requests compression and decodes it if it arrives that way.

Stumped.

Update, 10 minutes later: As I was composing the service request, the issue seemed to have disappeared. I’ll hold off and keep an eye on the problem. My feed has been off all day (I suppose my reader does not accept gzip), but it’s working fine now.

Update 2: Here’s a terminal screenshot: (179k)

Wednesday, I found an intriguing job posted on monster.com

Thursday, I attached a customized resume to a cover letter email and sent it off. I also placed my resume in Word and PDF versions on my (real name) website. Shortly thereafter HR emailed me back, confirming that they got it. Thanks for that, HR.

Friday, I received my first good sign, someone had hit my (real name) website. I did a whois on their IP address, and then did the same for their company’s website. The hosting provider names matched. The user agent string on the hit hints at an out-of-date (1.0) version of Firefox on a windowing Linux platform. I’m leaning towards this being a bot, either that, or it’s a savvy speed surfer who has images turned off by default.

Saturday, I got an interesting hit with a referrer string from a site called Pilp.com, which seems to be a search engine targeted to find people. Chatter on the tubez of interwebz suggest that the company is good at scraping social networking sites like MySpace and Xanga. They also seem to have some access to court records and such. Obfuscated access log follows:

0.0.0.0 - - [05/Apr/2008:00:00:00 -0700] “GET / HTTP/1.0″ 200 705 “http://www.pipl.com/search/?FirstName=FIRST&LastName=LAST&City=&State=&Country=US&CategoryID=2&Interface=1″ “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”

This one pulled the image on my page, so it’s likely a real human. The reverse DNS hints that this is a dialup line, so I’m going to assume that it’s a person, using Internet Explorer, from home, checking out a job candidate that they are at least seriously considering, via a link they found from the search engine at pipl.com.

Hopefully I’ll get a call for an interview on Monday.

Update 05apr08: I’ve attempted to find a bit more data on this, and while I can’t verify nor debunk this story, well it seems to taste a little astroturfy.

A commenter (Anonymous) over at Xav’s place says:

Has this been verified by anyone. The only report I can find anywhere about this is from Patricia A. Stoneking. She seems to be the only source of this happening that I’ve found at this point. With the N.O. incidents there was quite a lot of public outcry and even media coverage.

Anonymous seemed to sum it up well. I’d be really disappointed to find out this was some kind of hoax to advance legislation at the state level. The other guys, the bad ones, pull crap like that. Not us.

I’m going to assume, until better data comes up, that I went off half-cocked. I’m also going to apologize to the NRA for the bashing I gave them in this post. If any additional data turns up, I’ll be sure to post something about it.

The original text of this post is below:

I don’t normally like to post when I just have something to link to. I mean, usually I’d prefer to at least comment, however today I’m speechless. Please read this story about another Katrina-type gun grab posted over at Xavier’s place.

If this story is accurately portrayed, I would hope for an outrage from the RKBA community to be at least as large as the juggernaut that flattened poor Zumbo.

If there’s even a whiff of truth to this story, I’m going to sincerely hope that the NRA begins to air drop lawyers immediately instead of waiting for their surrogate brass balls, the Second Amendment Foundation, to kick them in the groin first.