Category Archives: My Blog
Hacked!
Shit.
The MKX® along with several sister sites (The MKX® Photo Central, La Polla América, etc.) were all hacked sometime in the last two days.
It looks like it was done through a security flaw in tinymce, a WYSIWYG text editor used by zenPHOTO, the photo gallery software I use extensively. Google blacklisted me (the horror!) but after I cleaned things up (or rather, Moi did) I can be visited again without raising any flags.
The extent of the damage is still unknown. So far I know that
- The hack occurred on 2011-11-07 at 18:48.
- Every .htaccess in my sites were injected with malicious redirects. Moi got rid of them. Here’s one sample .htaccess file (as text).
- A malicious file class.images.php with obfuscated code was created somewhere inside the zenPhoto installation. I have no desire to reverse engineer it. Here’s the link to the file (as text).
- An empty index.php file was created next to it.
Looks like I have quite a bit of work ahead of me. Those damn russian hackers! More info here.
Over 1000 posts served
I completely missed it, but the recent Exploratorium post was the 1000th post in The MKX®. That’s a lot of online garbage. A big thank you to all my readers.
The Browser Wars III
I wanted to see how the readers of The MKX® compare to the rest of the world once again. We have compiled statistics in 2006 and 2009, so might as well check again.
| Browser | Internet June 2011 |
The MKX® April 2006 |
The MKX® Dec 2009 |
The MKX® July 2011 |
| Explorer | 54% | 59.32% | 38.57% | 23.03% |
| Firefox | 21.67% | 27.12% | 34.84% | 28.73% |
| Safari | 7.48% | 9.32% | 18.55% | 13.00% |
| Chrome | 13.11% | No data | 5.68% | 28.94% |
| Opera | 2.98% | 2.54% | 0.49% | 1.95% |
| Other | 1% | 2% | 2% | 4% |
That’s right: The #1 browser around here is now Google Chrome, then Firefox, then IE (warning – disturbing domain name), and then Safari, who’s share has disturbingly fallen since we last checked in spite of growing in the Internet as a whole. A mystery.
Twitter sidebar
I still don’t fully “get” Twitter, and I’m not much of a user. But some people do. People who are toppling governments and stuff. Still, I decided to add a little bit of Twitter magic to The MKX® in the form of a widget sidebar (look to the right, below the Google Reader shared items). Another possible idea: Automatically publish new posts on Twitter. Or include my posts in the RSS feed. The possibilites are endless. Follow me: @marcoskirsch
One added bonus: Mention me on Twitter, and you get automatically posted on the widget to the right. So feel free to extol my virtues in 140 characters or less – if you can.
Eight years of The MKX®
That’s right! Today is the 8th anniversary of The MKX®, the premiere destination for all things inconsequential. Man, time really flies. People that weren’t yet born when we published our first post are now of reading age.
It took Google less than eight years to become a multi-million dollar business, and it is now apparent that we are growing at a slower pace. Our financial experts predict we will hit the figure in no less than eight and a half years. So be it.
Thank you for your continued support. And Happy New Year!
Destroy The MKX®
Countless rogue hacker organizations have tried and failed, but now it’s your chance to destroy The MKX® once and for all, and you get to do it in style…. Asteroids style!
Here’s how you do it:
- Click here to show your spaceship which will appear above on the page.
- Use the up key for thrust.
- Use the left and right keys to turn.
- Use the space bar to shoot elements of this blog to oblivion.
This amazing little demo is by erkie.
Site redesign
It’s been almost two years since our last redesign, which caused an uproar among our readers: violent protests outside of our headquarters, a Facebook protest group, a heated poll, and flag burning.
Well, the design team of The MKX® is happy to announce a new look for our website. Among the improvements:
- Post-specific banner images.
- Full text articles on RSS feed.
- A cleaner and more attractive look based on the Twenty Ten theme.
- A cleaner side-bar
But in spite of the new look, you can still count on the accurate, unbiased, hard-hitting, no-nonsense news reporting that we are known for.
You can see previous designs in this old post.
Comments not going through
A while ago I installed a captcha-based system called reCAPTCHA in my comment system. CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) work like this: Some garbled text is diplayed that is very hard for a spam bot to read, but relatively easy and only slightly annowing for a real human to type. It worked well. reCAPTCHA is even better because the hard to read text is not computer generated, it actually comes from real books that are being digitized but on those words the computers are having a hard time reading it. So you do a little bit of useful work and I get no comment spam.
Lately, it worked too well. Turns out that a pretty serious bug shipped in a recent version of reCAPTCHA that marked every comment as spam. I went into my comment spam folder and manually approved a few of these comments. I also installed the fix. I apologize and I hope I didn’t miss anything.
Your comments are very welcome and highly encouraged. They make me feel like someone reads the stuff I post here. Sorry about the bug!
Kirsch Industries
A reader sent me this screenshot of TV show Leverage, which I had never heard of. Turns out that my top choice for the name of the online publishing empire I’m building, future parent company for The MKX® is already taken… and they specialize in pigments. Most people think that a last name with 5 consonants but only 1 vowel would be rarer. They’d be surprised.
Feel free to suggest what I should call my online publishing empire, because I’m out of ideas.