Huge props to Estelle Weyl for alerting me to the fact that one of my websites (Don’t panic! Not this one!), alexisgo.com was compromised by sweepstakesandcontestsnow.

It looks like a number of people running WordPress on Dreamhost fell victim to this.

There is a great write-up of the issue here: http://www.travelswithakazoo.com/2011/09/how-embarassing/ and here http://sucuri.net/new-malware-sweepstakesandcontestsnow-com.html

To summarize, what seems to have happened is these lovely folks inserted a base64-encoded string at the top of every PHP file in your root directory. This string evaluates to some code that adds the following line (which I’ve modified) of JavaScript to every html file in your root directory:

script src="http://do not go to sweepstakesandcontestsnow.com/nl.php?nnn=1"

So, what about this site? It looks like I was saved by some of the custom tweaks I made to this particular WordPress install, as it appears that the malicious script tried to do the same to this site, but, well, failed (the script tried the wrong directory).

I haven’t heard back from Dreamhost on how this all went down, but I have since changed all my logins and thoroughly chastised myself. If you have visited alexisgo.com in the last 10 days, especially if you were running IE, you will want to do a full system scan. I deeply apologize for this.

If you use Dreamhost and run WordPress, you should check out your sites while running NoScript in Firefox, and make sure you don’t have cause to feel as embarrassed as I do right now. Here is the cleanup for the effects of this should your site have been a target: http://blog.sucuri.net/2010/05/simple-cleanup-solution-for-the-latest-wordpress-hack.html

HTML5′s Microdata allows us to use custom vocabularies to add better markup to our pages.  It allows us to tell search engines things like “Hey, Google! I know I’ve got twenty images on my blog but this image is my bio pic!” This is so important that Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft have teamed up to work together on these vocabularies at schema.org. They’ve created vocabularies for everything from Event, Restaurant, Product and Review, to Person, Organization, Corporation, and NGO.

So why haven’t you heard more about it? Well, if the google analytics on Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML5 online book are any indication, people are generally uninterested. Pilgrim’s book covers Microdata in a dedicated chapter. But if you look at his analytics, you’ll find that that is the least read chapter. Mark writes:

Seriously, the shit that nobody gives about my beloved Peeks, Pokes & Pointers chart is rivaled only by the shit that nobody gives about Microdata.

In my mind, that’s an edge for those of us who do give a shit. Read more »

Um, should I be worried that KitKats cause cancer? Because Nestle just acquired a company, Prometheus Labs, that makes products to treat cancer and gastrointestinal illness. Uh, since this smells like vertical integration, I should be worried, shouldn’t I?

I wrote a guest blog on HTML5′s Drag & Drop for Sitepoint.com. It’s a very simple example that builds a little Scrum Planning Board using a bit of CSS and the new Drag & Drop API. You can view the sample code up on github.

Three hundred people have died in the storms that ravaged the Southern part of the US this week. The pictures and personal videos emerging show the extent of the destruction.

You’d think now would be a time for kindness and charity. A time for companies, if they were to say anything at all, to offer to lend a hand.

But not SEARS! No, Sears looked across the south at all this devesatation, and you know what they saw? Big, fat dollar signs! So they sent me, and who knows how many thousands of other idiots that bought something from them once and receive their SPAM ever after, this email: “Affected by the storm? Sears can help you clean up.”

And here’s a handy graphic:

Yesterday, I was treated to the amazing article “Startup America needs to look more like America: The Minority Led Startup Gap” by Kalimah Priforce.

But Kalimah didn’t stop with the article. Instead, he took to twitter, where he issued a challenge, and was met with a few challenges back, from serial-entrepreneur Jason Calacanis:

Let’s sidestep for a moment the “I lived on the B train” comment (as tempting as it may be to question “what exactly is THAT supposed to mean?”), and focus on the positive: Jason’s willingness to engage and even change the panel given a list of “qualified black judges.”

Jason, to save you some time and research, I wanted to elaborate a bit on the suggestions I made, so you can get busy.
Read more »

Peter Greenaway is a filmmaker, an artist, and a firebrand.

He is known for his fierce views on modern cinema. He has said that “most people are visually illiterate” and that “Our educational system teaches us to value text over image. And that is one of the reasons we have such an impoverished cinema.” — Greenaway in Rembrandt’s J’Accuse…!

Now, you may think, here is a filmmaker lamenting the fact that people do not see films. But, Greenaway is quite the critic himself of the cinema.

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It Begins with a Story

In many ways, the most powerful thing we have is our stories.

In 2006, Majora Carter blew the roof off with her TED Talk on Greening the Ghetto. Why? She told a very small piece of her story, her truth as a Black woman in America. One of the stories she shared was what happened to her neighborhood, the South Bronx, from the time her father first bought their home in the late 1940s, to 2006. In 2006, the South Bronx was home to:

• 40% of New York’s solid waste despite having just 16% of the city’s population
• 100% of the Bronx’s waste facilities
• Two sewage-treatment plants
• Four power plants
• 60,000 trash trucks passing through every week
• One of the lowest ratios of parks to people in NYC: 0.5 acres per 1000 people

Carter asks, and answers, the important question: how did it get this way? She details, through the experience of her own family, the reality of many Black families in the 1940s: redlining.

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There has been a ton of lip service this year paid to the lack of women in technology. There have even been those who have questioned, “why do we even NEED more women, or diversity, in tech at all?”

For the answer, look no further than the four women engineers behind sOccket. A soccer ball with a magnetic slug inside it, that collects power as you kick it.

Fifteen minutes of play can generate three hours of light from the ball. In the developing world, 25% of children do not have electricity. It’s even worse in Africa, where up to 95% of the population lives without access to electricity, according to a 2006 World Bank Millennium Goals Report.
Read more »