Last night I got 2500 spam comments, which is a lot for me. Spam Karma 2 caught ALL of them, but I don't like giant logfiles of spam comments, so I have just upgraded to Bad Behavior 2. UPDATE: As the author of the plugin notes, this is a pre-release version.
I sometimes wonder if Bad Behavior blocks legitimate comments or prevents use of the email form. If you've ever been blocked from leaving a comment, please let me know. Otherwise I'll assume everything is cool. Thanks!
UPDATE: Apparently I need to also add a line to WP-CACHE to enable protection of cached pages with Bad Behavior 2. Oops...no. Very much no!
I've noticed a disturbing trend among American restaurants: the club sandwich has been downsized from three slices of bread to two, which in my mind makes it just another sandwich. I suppose it may be a return to authenticity, as this quote from food diety James Beard suggests:
[the club sandwich] is one of the great sandwiches of all time and has swept its way around the world after an American beginning. Nowdays the sandwich is bastardized because it is usually made as a three-decker, which is not authentic (whoever started that horror should be forced to eat three-deckers three times a day the rest of his life), and nowadays practically everyone uses turkey and there's a vast difference between turkey and chicken where sandwiches are concerned.
I was all set to complain about how restaurants like "Ruby Tuesday" and "Bugaboo Creek", two institutions which serve a particularly disappointing club sandwich, seem to be spearheading a move away from the three-slice stack of bread, bacon, tomato and turkey of my childhood. Authenticity be damned!
I first encountered the club sandwich as a displaced American kid in Taiwan. This was the late 70s, when the island was under martial law. This was well before any American franchises were allowed into the country; imagine a place without McDonalds, and that was Taiwan. In other words, a horrible place to live when you're a kid: no TV, no nice stores, no ice cream...nothing! Maybe it was actually good for me in some unspecified way, but it was rather depressing at the time. Our mom, sensing that we needed regular injections of Americana to bolster our spirits, took us to the only nearby Western restaurant, Foremost on (I think) Chung Hua Bei Lu in Shihlin, a suburb of Taipei. Foremost Foods was one of the only places that actually sold cows milk and western ice cream. The dairy was obviously reconstituted, watery, and a little funny tasting, but they also served burgers and club sandwiches. I don't actually remember eating many of them (sis might remember), but they anchored my sense of identity in some weird gastronomic fashion.
I often wondered how Foremost had come to be in Taiwan in the first place, a country not known for its love of dairy in any form; milk usually means "goat" or "soybean" (yuck). Well, the Internet is here today, so I found that the post-WWII US military presence in Taiwan probably had something to do with it; Foremost Dairies supplied milk to US forces abroad from 1932 onwards. Particularly interesting is this excerpt:
During World War 11, the U.S. military sparked Foremost's international growth and the creamery opened additional plants nationwide. Foremost Dairies became known as "the longest milk route in the world."
[...]
Wherever it set up a facility, the organization wanted to teach local people how to operate it and then share in its success.
While searching the Internet, I came across Foremost in places like Vietnam and Hawaii, the logo largely untouched. Taiwan itself benefited from the facilities and training Foremost introduced, creating a sustainable local business in a fashion similar to the Singer Corporation...or so I imagine. I find the remnants of foreign cultures fascinating, especially when they've established a foothold in a place where the original influence has disappeared. Asia is littered with this: Vietnamese cuisine, forks and spoons in Thailand, master sushi chefs in Taiwan...you get the idea. Then there's interesting ideas backwashing into the former colonial powers, like Cobra Beer importing Indian beer to go with curry served in the U.K.
Where was I? Oh yes, club sandwiches...I guess it wasn't about the number of slices of bread after all.
Chris Rhee publishes the highly-entertaining My Mean Girl blog, which is one of my favorite reads. Because of his blog, I have hope that someday I'll meet a suitable-crazy woman to fall in love with. And in the meantime, reading about his pain keeps me from being too anxious about it happening any time soon :-)
Anyway, he was helping a buddy shoot a film for a class in San Francisco, and while he was loading up his car he got ripped off. This puts a big dent in the My Mean Girl operation, and in the spirit of community I'm posting about it so people can be on the lookout for his stuff and lend a hand so he can get things going again. I just read that his girlfriend Annie has been learning how to shoot shotguns, so I'm sure anything we can do to keep his mind off that would be a huge pick-me-up. Hang in there, Chris!
Someone I had chatted with via email a few months ago apparently got some spam about "online bingo", clicked on the "unsubscribe" link, and it then exposed their entire gmail address contact list.
According to this post, through some Javascript trickery the entire contact list can be harvested by a spammer if you click on a special link.
I'm not sure if this has yet been patched or if this even was the method of attack (it's apparently pretty old, and Google has a reputation of fixing stuff quickly)...but in general don't be clicking any strange links on strange emails. Please.
Lately I've been getting email on one of my unpublished email addresses. It's the kind of fun mail that we all love, with email attachments of a mysterious nature. But what's really mysterious is how this email address got "out in the open" to begin with.
This is the address that's used by my contact form AND for comments out on the internet. They used to be separate, but I merged them by accident a few months ago and never switched them back. Doh. Wish I had.
It's possible this address was harvested from someone I wrote back to who hasn't scrubbed their computer free of viruses and other malware. This is a good reminder; I should be careful of which email addresses I use for public contact. I might even use an entirely-different email account and email program for this now, but it's probably inevitable that someone using an unsecured computer is going to have an accident.
It's possible that this address was harvested from a blog comment, if somehow that information was exposed on the back-end.
Maybe there's a security hole in my WordPress setup. The email address, though, is stored in a database which theoretically is secure, unless some kind of traffic intercept occured between me and the database. It's not otherwise stored in any static files on my webserver.
This is the most alarming thought: I may have replied to a contact email to answer what I thought was a genuine question, but it was actually a social engineering attack to harvest a return email. I just looked through the past emails I've received through the contact form that are the "fishiest", and one in particular triggers several alarms. Hindsight is 20:20. It's written as an innoculous inquiry about what I charge for design work. It could actually be a real inquiry, but as the sender hasn't replied to my email I'm now a little suspicious. In the future I'm going to be much more discerning between what looks like a serious inquiry versus one that may not be (or something worse).
A marketing person I used to work once told me that a certain number of sales calls are just fishing attempts from other agencies, recruiters, other sales people, or builders of commercial databases. When someone is dangling the possibility of work on the other end of the line, we're much more willing to extend the trust of providing our contact information. I may modify this policy and ask for the prospect to send me their contact information first, and schedule a callback if the circumstances seem a little odd.
This sucks, but at least the damage is relatively contained. It does mean, though, that I may have to retire an email address.
