Off to Summer Weapons Retreat 2014

Blogging will be light and possibly nonexistent for the next week, as I’m off to Summer Weapons Retreat 2014 for fun and swordplay.

Keep out of trouble until I get back…oh, who am I kidding. Go make interesting trouble.

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Categorized as General

37 comments

  1. Eric, please check your website code, there might be some unwanted code (with links) on every page of your website after a donate button section. It is not visible in browsers but if you check the source code of the documents it starts with <div style="position:absolute;margin-left:-4213px;
    I stumbled upon your website and found out about this so I just wanted to warn you but if you are aware of the code then you can just ignore my message. Please delete my comment either way.

  2. @Yulia

    I think you have a point.
    It looks like link spam – the links are kept out of sight by the absolute position in the div style you mention.

    I wonder how it got there ….

  3. I see them there too. I think your WordPress instance has been owned, again.

    I take it this is not quite the sort of “interesting trouble” you had in mind?

  4. Your new comment preview plugin misbehaves on Firefox for Android. The preview box overlaps the submit button.

  5. The preview-overlaps-submit problem seems to be in every browser, not just Firefox. Also, the previewer allows a different set of HTML tags than WordPress itself does, which seems to defeat the purpose of a preview.

  6. Also of possible interest:

    Animals that live with or near humans — from house pets to lab animals to feral rats — have gotten fatter over the past few decades and it’s not because they were slamming Dew. Lab animals in particular have strictly regulated diets.

    All signs point to endocrine disruptors in the air, water, and soil.

    1. >All signs point to endocrine disruptors in the air, water, and soil.

      All signs point to a frantic ginning-up of the next massive statist enviro-fraud, now that catastrophic AGW is collapsing. I predicted several years ago that it would be endocrine disruptors.

  7. On Rekonq, I do not see the text of either the preview or submit button, only the right-hand edge of a button (going to click it to see what it does… real security conscious, right?).

  8. RE: Endocrine disruptors && fat animals.
    – Mammals that live near or with humans, from lab rats to pet pooches, have gotten fatter over recent decades.

    So have humans. Dogs and humans have been co-evolving for the last 16k years OR SO. We treat them like family, feed them from our tables and they exercise as much as we do. No surprise their getting tubby. Cats too, but less dependent on us for exercise.

    – Fatter lab animals are the hardest to explain, since their diet is tightly controlled and well documented.

    It depends on whether they’ve accounted for all the lab animals involved in obesity studies AND those involved in diabetes and related studies.

    – Endocrine disruptors, pathogens or temperature changes might play a role and could also factor into human obesity.

    My bet is diet, exercise and temperature. Up through the 1960s most homes did not have nearly as good of weather sealing (drafty) and HVAC. Today even most of those older homes have been sealed. As to diet and exercise, that’s well documented.

  9. >>I can’t find this string in either my static website or my WordPress PHP. Could someone supply actual URLs?

    crap, those line numbers change when comments are added

    point a browser to http://esr.ibiblio.org/
    view page source
    look for the part that says “Donate here to support my open-source projects. Small but continuing donations via gittip help more than one-time donations via PayPal.” Then read on.

    1. >Then read on.

      OK, I see it now. Somehow the PHP is generating this into the HTML without the PHP having the string ‘-4213’ in it anywhere. I have no idea how.

  10. RE: animal weight gain

    I’d never considered temperature before as a factor in weight loss/gain. It seems plausible as a factor. I wonder whether the obesity crisis can be lessened by turning heating down.

  11. So we meet again. I see you posted a couple of pictures from the retreat in your G+ page. They’re nice!
    BTW, each time I visit your G+ and see the “Lives in Philadelphia” caption, I’m reminded of Duck Soup. Do you happen to have four pairs of pants and never rain, but pour? :-)

  12. I think you have a point.
    It looks like link spam – the links are kept out of sight by the absolute position in the div style you mention.

    I wonder how it got there ….

    Perhaps that Mayhem malware that’s been creeping through PHP-based sites?

  13. I’d never considered temperature before as a factor in weight loss/gain. It seems plausible as a factor. I wonder whether the obesity crisis can be lessened by turning heating down.

    Paleo dieters have taken recently to “cold therapy” by immersing themselves in icy water, believing that this better reflects conditions in the ancestral environment and will induce more fat burning. My first thought was that for H. sapiens, the ancestral environment that led to our species was most likely profoundly hot. Modern man only encountered severe cold after migrating out of Africa.

  14. I’ve turned off comment preview.

    Updating WP and all plugins to the latest versions does not seem to banish the link spam.

    I have no idea what to try next, and am rediscovering that I hate PHP.

  15. Eric, If you send me a database dump and source tree I’ll poke at it. If you have backups of the same from shortly before and after July 5, 2013, that might help too.

    1. >Eric, If you send me a database dump and source tree I’ll poke at it. If you have backups of the same from shortly before and after July 5, 2013, that might help too.

      I have one from 2012. Can we rendezvous on IRC somewhere? I’m not quite sure how to bundle up what I should be sending you.

    1. dfranke and I troubleshot the problem together via IRC. We found no fewer than five files in the WP instance tree that didn’t belong there – one an unencrypted PHP rootkit, two encrypted files that were almost certainly rootkits, and two malicious .htaccess files.

      I removed the linkspam that a commenter originally noted. It turned out to have been inserted in the configured text of the tipjar widget. After dfranke located it I removed a second blob of linkspam that had been invisibly inserted in a recent post.

      dfranke has been scanning a copy of the instance database and has found surprisingly little damage; the linkspam already mentioned seems to be the extent of it. We’re going to dig further, but it now looks like the intrusion that created the linkspam was recent (as in, no more than two weeks or so ago).

      The unencrypted rootkit appears to have been installed late last year, but we cannot verify that anything was actually done with it. This was only a compromise of my WP installation, not of the hosting site.

  16. Having masterfully socially engineered Eric into giving me his database, I’ve proceeded to input Armed and Dangerous and the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft into Dissociated Press.

    First, a month; on the odds, actually making it . The more I see of
    this, the more it was 20 minutes before the game store’s closing time.
    No time for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever
    monstrous menace to be avoided in favor of full OS processes? Or has
    the situation. Knowledge of the past, secured through a kind of
    mind-casting outside the recognized senses. Sleep, I decided whether I
    should sign my name in this one.

    UPDATE: A commenter persuades me? The peaceful snoring below seemed to
    cast ridicule on all my suddenly intensified fears. Was brought to my
    attention as someone who
    could potentially be a contributor at Microsoft. I am using it mainly
    to play an on-line game called. All the long month since the doctors
    had taken him away, and clearly only beginning to guess. Would the
    shelf be reachable by a cave. Early in the latter, one in particular
    was very potently – even terrifiedly – recalled by the youngest son of
    an excellent family slightly known to him, who had reaction fire and
    overwatch bolted on as a sort of disturbingly strange
    appearance. These infants died soon after exposure to the bands and
    the purchase of such hybrid things as the ungainly Palmyrene
    sculptures fashioned in the selection set always comes closest analog
    of “morality”, in his culture, is a set of inherited customs and
    institutions which I shall describe more fully two hundred feet in
    diameter – strewn with debris and lyrical, proving once again that Joe
    doesn’t need effects of sound calculation. It had already begun as
    soon afterward shot once more into the sky, but there were no lights
    seen from his windows; they deployed store guards to follow her
    around; they sneered at my occasional martial enthusiasms and censures
    of supine neutrality. There that he wished to enjoy his wealth and of
    surface gestures, however, we made the plunge, and scrambled up over
    the rubble into a noose around their necks.

  17. The creepy thing is, while messages of that type date back to the dawn of electronic communication, their frequency seems to be getting larger. I’ve seen “professional” news stories that might has well have been generated that way… not to mention press releases. Though the humanity of PR flacks has long been questionable.

  18. Jeff:

    “We” spent 2 million years evolving in and out of Africa (recent data shows that the human genome migrated in and out of Africa a few times, and we picked up some genes from closely related species (neanderthal etc.) along the way).

    It is simply a biological fact that when a human being gets cold there is a mechanism in the body to create more heat–it’s called homeostasis. Shivering is one mechanism, but there are others.

    Either you’re misunderstanding what the Paleo types are saying, or they’re misunderstanding what they’re reading (given your history and theirs, either is possible), but these mechanisms ARE in the body, and cold water immersion has been used for a while as a mechanism for weight loss/fatburning.

    The problem is that it’s INTENSELY painful for most people, and frankly if you’ve got the self discipline to fill your bath tub with ice and water and then soak for 15 minutes, you’ve got the discipline to put the fork down a few minutes earlier.

  19. Well, the most recent update to the spam links was no more than a few weeks ago, but the earlier database dumps and Wayback Machine snapshots show that some are much older than that. Anyway, I haven’t located any more of them since we cleaned them up last night.

    OK. You have an economy. Some of the resource allocation mechanisms are doomed to fail. Such economic ignorance is toxic, because it might have to use GPSD to SF will recognize that much but not dare court further publicity by a violent resistance or refusal to talk about several
    different categories which are contingently but not necessarily related hideous things, not mentioned in print, which one is actually adapted for this sort of disclosure. If they require assistance in third-generation Android phones, the parts count the herd that grazed precariously on the steep hillside above the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint. He awaked on the morning I read the entire majority opinion from the Supreme Court of the Jade Emperor because nothing else could explain their cooking. That and the thunderstorm we reach , a step and through a narrow door into a room of fair size, provided by them or their smartphone share has declined not just in relative but absolute terms; they have fewer and fewer. Then came the whole morphology seemed coarsened and simplified. Moreover, the nerves and organs just
    examined held singular suggestions.

  20. A couple of points wrt lab animals:

    1. The diet of lab animals isn’t as “tightly controlled and well documented” as you might think. They’re normally fed “ad lib” – as much as they want to eat – and even the amount eaten isn’t usually measured unless there is a reason for it. (E.g. studies on potential appetite-suppressant drugs.)

    2. There are indications that lab mice are chronically stressed due to being kept too cold. http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/12/18/lab_mice_are_being_kept_too_cold_apparently.php

  21. @esr –

    That missing blog post I had mentioned to you in email a couple of weeks ago (…..?p=3731) is still missing. You might want to look in the backup copy of your DB for it; not because I have to look at it again, but because it might be another symptom of crapware, etc.

    1. >That missing blog post I had mentioned to you in email a couple of weeks ago (…..?p=3731) is still missing. You might want to look in the backup copy of your DB for it; not because I have to look at it again, but because it might be another symptom of crapware, etc.

      Nah. As dfranke says, I probably just fat-fingered it. If it looks worth the effect I’ll figure out a way to patch it back into the database.

  22. @John D. Bell: I just checked said backup and that’s the only post that’s missing. Smells more like Eric fat-fingered something than like crapware involvement.

  23. dfranke:

    You need to put that bit on a t-shirt.

    People will spend HOURS staring at someone’s chest trying to figure out exactly what’s going on there.

  24. Ever tried this “butterfly sword” thing that the Wing Chun folks use? I don’t know why, but I really like the looks of that weapon. It just looks “comfortable”, although I am not sure that is a proper term for a sword.

  25. @William @Jeff

    I’d be more concerned about the heart attack aspect of cold baths or showers. Once I tried a cold shower in a gym, chest pain ensued, the doctor said that it was probably just the breathing muscles getting tight or something, as he could not find any heart problem, but since then I am kinda worried about experimenting with it. Too bad, already the Spartans figured out that cold water is the cheapest way to boost testosterone. I’d really want to get into cold showers if it would not feel like playing dice with death.

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