Anybody that will be coding publicly-accessible SQL-based web applications needs to be aware of the threat from SQL Injection attacks. SQL injection attacks are attempts made by a malicious user to gain access to the SQL back-end database and can occur from, for example, a PHP front-end. One way for the attack to work is to input unexpected data. If it is formatted in a way … [Read more...]
MyFreeCopyright.com on WordPress.com blogs
Upon request, and tangentially related to my post titled "My Brush with Blog Scraping", I'd like to provide a quick step-by-step guide on getting MyFreeCopyright.com to work with your blog. I'll specifically be using Wordpress.com, but I can't imagine the steps would be too terribly different for other blogging systems. MyFreeCopyright.com subscribes to your feed and watches … [Read more...]
My Brush with Blog Scraping
While many people have resigned that spam is just a fact of life--they will get it, it will fill their inboxes, they will waste valuable time each and every day deleting it--having someone steal your written words to make their spam look legitimate is much worse, much more personal, and nothing of which to resign yourself. The DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) is in place … [Read more...]
Mediawiki Evaluation Results
Continuing my search for a decent KB, I'm concluding my evaluation of MediaWiki. This name might be familiar to you because it is the wiki engine running Wikipedia and sister projects. I first began looking into MediaWiki despite my giving up on wikis as a whole because I had decided that the overall format and objective of wikis didn't line up with how I perceived my knowledge … [Read more...]
Block a country from your server, period.
If you're running a server and would like to prevent a particular country, that's right a country, from accessing the server, visit this site for help configuring your .htaccess file. You might find that you're getting a lot of spam or malicious traffic from a spam-heavy country and find it easier to block the entire nation than fighting to keep up with the never-ending … [Read more...]