The following two graphics are my seminal finds for the week. I hate using that word, seminal, but sometimes it is the correct one to use. Unfortunately the word oval has another meaning or I would be promoting that as a better word to describe items or ideas that are seeds for novel conceptualizations.
The first one, the conversation prism, may look like a color wheel at first glance, but it is much more layered and contextually rich with information about relationships between elements of common digital communication tools. Look at it, download it, study it. Most infographics do not actually add value or information to the subjects they depict. This one does. The linked site is well worth bookmarking and then checking out for updates every once in a while.
Malcolm Gladwell irritates some with the cultural condensations from which he spins off his books, but I adore ideas, patterns, and playing with explanations for correlations between the two. Thought is good. Observation is good. Reasonable conjecture is exercise for the mind. So I like Gladwell. His Tipping Point was best, in my opinion, but Outliers points out some generalizations worthy of note as well.
To become an expert takes lots of work. Success is more fickle.
Tech, Tweets, and the TARDIS: How to Embed a Tweet
Did you know you can embed tweets? You can!
Fifty years ago at 5.15pm on Nov 23rd 1963, a mysterious exile from another world appeared on @BBCOne in #DoctorWho. pic.twitter.com/XUmYQZn9QZ
— BBC One (@BBCOne) November 23, 2013
In the following image I have cropped part of a screen capture of a tweet by the Twitter Account @BBCOne to show you how to get the Embed Tweet button from a drop-down menu.
To get to the white text on blue background button that says, “Embed Tweet” just click under the ***More option that is the fourth of four actions always offered under the body of the tweet.
Once you click Embed Tweet you will see something very much like the following:
There will be a pop-up window that includes a text box with some code to cut and paste. Do that and voilà embedded tweet.
—
Note: I wrote up this little tutorial while awaiting the 50th Anniversary Special Episode showing of a new multi-Doctor episode.
We MUST Stop TPP Fast-Tracking
ALL we are saying is Stop the Fast Track and have the Congress do what it is charged to do per trade agreements. This “agreement” has been concocted in secret, and even our Congress is not allowed to see, without personal supervision, keep a copy, nor discuss what is in it. Over 600 corporations have access and input to the secret treaty and its crafting. We are confident that if it comes up for discussion, the American People will not allow it to be ratified. Agreements need to be agreed to by the people and our representatives.
This has been called NAFTA on steroids. Stopping this is something every American or citizen of a democratic country can agree on, left or right, we have to read, discuss, and decide whether this should even come up for a vote. Fast Tracking is in not in the interests of any biological human, any real human.
http://alangraysonemails.tumblr.com/post/53325968066/i-saw-the-secret-trade-deal
- There is no national security purpose in keeping this text secret.
- This agreement hands the sovereignty of our country over to corporate interests.
TPP Resources
Background info on TPP is available at:
http://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc
http://www.citizen.org
http://www.flushthetpp.org/trash-the-tpp-why-its-time-to-revolt-against-the-worst-trade-agreement-in-history/
More Info:
https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp
Electronic Rights and Intellectual Property impact
http://www.exposethetpp.org/
Pre-made graphics for sharing anti-TPP facts on Facebook
http://keepthewebopen.com/
ip rights chapter from the agreement (leaked)
http://www.occucards.com/tpp/
The occucard for the TPP from the Occupy Movement
http://www.itsourfuture.org.nz/
It isn’t just the U.S. that will be damaged beyond repair by this TPP
Talk about this, share the info, call your representatives. The message is simple, “Do not allow the Fast Tracking of the TPP!”
Breach of Trust
Andrew Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country
Reviewed by Rachel Maddow in the New York Times.
What we are steaming toward, at the end of more than 12 years of continual hot warfare, is not so much cold warfare or even peace, but rather a kind of high idle, with the expectation of constant overseas military involvement, at some level, somewhere.
If you don’t read the book by Bacevich, read Maddow’s review. It is fitting Autumn reading.
Photo credit: Penywise from morguefile.com
One of the things that most impressed me is that the author, Bacevich is both a professor and a veteran. There are not many of these guys who have served their country by serving and by teaching besides Hubby. I am always impressed when I find Profs who are Veterans. Of course this is a relatively new phenomenon beginning after the draft. Before that it was common.
There are individuals far more appropriate to talk about political science and U.S. Foreign Policy than me, but there are not all that many bloggers, women bloggers, who manage to talk about politics in a way that makes this topic seem relevant to women who are more inclined to read and write about topics other than what sort of seems like a male preoccupation. This is the primary reason I write about politics far more often than 98 per cent of bloggers.
I recommend watching Rachel Maddow on MSNBC . I just heard about this book on Andrea Mitchell’s MSNBC program. Rachel was a guest after Andrea talked to Bacevich.
Andrea Mitchell and Rachel Maddow talking to each other on MSNBC and proposing things akin to “we should just change things” and stating facts about the debt ceiling and the constitution makes so damn much sense. While Andrea Mitchell has always been a bit suspect in my book for being a bit too pro-Israel and because of her being married to Alan Greenspan who was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, she is obviously very informed and intelligent. Rachel Maddow is well, amazing, amazingly smart. She studied at Stanford then at Oxford for graduate work via a Rhodes scholarship. PhD, author, excellent anchor whose research behind the topics of the day make for the most informed, shouldn’t miss it, TV show for the last five years, at least that is the way I see it.
Self-hosted Blog cPanel Security Tips
Yesterday I covered some basic security tips for WordPress blogs. Today I am covering some of the very basic things you can do to make your site or blog more secure cPanel, the panel through which you set up the basic self-hosting service particulars of your site.
I am not a computer programmer or software specialist, but I tell such folks that I know enough to be dangerous. I do install and maintain much of my own site software. I have been using computers, dare I say it, since the late 1970s. I have learned a few things along the way and offer this information as is in order to familiarize my readers with some of the security problems and solutions that may inform them. But as a caution, if you are not comfortable changing something in your setup, don’t do it. If you do change something, keep a log of exactly what you did. As always, back everything up before you make any changes.
A Host You Can Reach
– panel often has a video tutorial available. Ask your hosting service if such a video is available if you do not know where to access it. Cannot easily get in touch with someone from your hosting company? Get another one. Make sure you have in person support, live cha
t, and a support phone number. Having the ability to submit a support ticket is not good enough.
What the Crooks Want
cPanel is essentially a dashboard through which you adjust and install software components of your website. It is the gateway to the physical server space you rent from a hosting service. Most hackers are trying to get to your server space where they can install their software to do all sorts of nefarious things.
How They Do It
Those pesky spam comments may be much more than a way to get stupid links on your site. The message could contain code you cannot see that, if you have not secured the files they want to get to, will inject code into your databases. Don’t have databases? Yes you do. They are created to manage user names, comments, likes, and a host of other information that it takes to have a pretty, shiny website or blog. So you want to secure as many files as possible.
Know Your cPanel
Per the image of the cPanel shown below, there are several parts of the panel that concern different functions of your site. When you log in and go to your cPanel, just click the arrow at the right on your panel to open or minimize the various sections.
Preferences: This is where you access tutorials, like the ones I mentioned above, and your basic access info.
Mail: if you have an email address associated with your website, you may want to enable “Spam Assassin and configure the options to fit your needs.
Files: Several things under this section of which you probably want to take advantage. Backups of your entire site is the best kind of security. You can create backups here. You can also ban people from loading files and retrieving their files from your server through anonymous FTP. FTP is file transfer protocol. Just disable it. If any hacker finds this FTP door open, they will let themselves in and turn your site into their play thing. Disable Anonymous FTP.
Logs: There is nothing here that you can enable, however the data that is available here, such as the ip addresses of all the computers that have visited your site (people, bots, and hackers) will be in these log files. If you scan the data, you know who is getting into, or trying to get into, your site. I recommend looking at these raw stats. Just don’t confuse these stats with Google Analytics or the like.
Security: While all of the options available in this section are worthwhile, I don’t recommend that basic users do much more than enable HotLink Protection to preserve their bandwidth. If you don’t do this people can link to you images and elements of your website and display your content on their sites while you are actually paying for the bandwidth they use to access and display it.
Domains: Don’t mess with this unless you know what you are doing. It really does not have much to do with basic security.
Databases: Again, don’t mess with these unless you know what you are doing. MySQL database injection malware resides in these databases, but unless you know what you are doing, just don’t mess with these.
Software/Services: Unless you know enough to install your own software, once again I don’t recommend doing much here. This is where most basic bloggy types access Fantastico and install WordPress.
Advanced: Unless you are advanced at cPanel configuration, I do not recommend accessing these functions.
Hope this helps someone. And really, if you don’t do anything else, disable anonymous FTP under the Files section. If someone else takes care of this part of the process of having a blog for you, talk to them about these things.
Is WordPress Security Oxymoronic?
Security again… sigh.
I am trying to figure out how to ip deny certain ip addresses from visiting (read: hacking) my blog as a bit of preventive security. I spent a couple hours yesterday cutting and pasting ip addresses from my cpanel stat files into an excel spread sheet so I could easily cut and paste individual ip addresses (from .ru and .vt) into the IP Deny Manager under the Security section of cpanel. Easy enough, right?
No, I know. For most people this is total gibberish. And this is just what hackers count on.
WordPress is the most hacked blogging platform on the inter-webs-cyber-grid-o-rama. Why, because next to Tumblr, WordPress is the most popular blogging platform. It only makes sense that villains would target the biggest market.
I will eventually move off of WordPress to a more secure platform, but I know that no platform is completely secure. Might I add that this is especially true now that we know that NSA is building and requiring backdoors into everything. Sigh again.
There are some things you must do right now to secure your WordPress site if you have not done so already.
- Go to Sucuri and scan your site(s).
- Change your passwords to log into your blogging dashboard and your cpanel on your hosting account.
- Install the Akismet plugin. Do this from your blog’s dashboard. It is about half way or so down the left side column. Pay them something, even a couple bucks, even though you can get it for free.
- At the very top of that same left column you can click at the top on Dashboard. You will see “Home” and “Updates” and maybe some other things dependent upon what you have installed on your blog. click on updates. You will want to install the latest version of WordPress and the latest version of each and every one of your plugins. But BEFORE you click update, do a backup of your blog. How? Simple.
- Go to that left column again. Under the “Tools” section select “Export.” Save the .xml file on your computer. In doubt about what parts to click to save? Just select them all.
- Now you can manually go through and update your versioin of WordPress and each Plugin. Do this immediately any time an update becomes available. You should always have the latest version of any and all software. Yes, you will have to check this out a couple times a week by going to the “Updates” section of you dashboard.
There is much more you can do, but that is enough for today. I will cover some other simple things you should be doing to keep you site safe in other posts later this week.
G’luck.