Skip to content

Interweb

Facebook Fan Check Virus

I read an article today regarding an alleged Facebook based virus from the “Fan Check” application. I will admit I’ve been sucked into the Facebook, but to my defense I primarily stick to just a few applications. Reading about this makes me glad that I’m running Chromium browser on Linux. I think, between the two of those, my chances of becoming infected are pretty slim. The chances of becoming infected with any kind of virus are pretty limited by using Linux in the first place, but that is pretty obvious. What I found interesting about this article and the related “infection” is that, so far, there haven’t been any proven cases of the Facebook application actually directly infecting anyone. The infection is caused by third-party websites provided through search engine results, and then by way of social engineering. Whether from the Facebook application or the third-party websites, this infection does not rely on browser vulnerabilities or outdated software. Read more

Gregarius : Server Side Feed Reader

I’ve spent the last week casually hunting around for alternate feed readers. I’ve been using Google Reader for some time now. but I’ve been growing tired of it. Desktop clients just don’t quite cut it for me as, just at work, I’m regularly between three different machines. I think I’ve found one that I like! It’s small, simple to install and configure and Free Software. Gregarius. Gregarius has been in development for a number of years now, although has recently slowed down. I’d like to see things pick up again but, as usual in the Free Software world, that usually requires a community of users. It currently has a fairly thorough wiki, forum, devlog (blog) and a list of features and configuration options. The main reasons I like it are: Lightweight and responsive Very configurable. Includes plugins and themes. Simple feed management (categories, tags, etc) Very clean default theme Detailed search options more… For those that might be interested in trying out a server-side feed reader I thought I might outline some of the steps toward installing it. Read more

Install Chromium Browser on Arch Linux

Update: I’ve submitted a patch to the existing PKGBUILD in the AUR which brings the Chromium Browser up to yesterdays nightly build. Much improved from the previous. I saw a post recently on the Planet Ubuntu Users, again by Stefano Forenza, regarding installing and testing the latest daily Chromium browser builds. That got me curious so I started poking around and found an available package for Arch Linux by way of the Arch User Repository. Installation was simple enough and the browser works, but I should mention that it is *very* alpha quality. None of the menu buttons worked for me and I wasn’t able to make use of tab functionality. It is nice to see that some progress is being made though on the Linux platform. Download the chromium-browser tarfile from the Arch User Repository. tar xf chromium-browser.tar.gz cd chromium-browser/ makepkg -i At the time of this writing the Arch User Repository package is marked as out of date. Read more

Restrict Edit-Access to MediaWiki

I setup a personal wiki some time ago but it quickly was overrun by spam. Just about the point that I considered abandoning it altogether I figured out how to restrict edit access. This post, more than anything, is a note to myself… but as always it’ll end up on the Google machine and hopefully help someone else. The following changes should be added (anywhere) to your LocalSettings.php. Restrict anonymous editing: $wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false; Restrict editing by all non-sysop users: $wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;<br /> $wgGroupPermissions['user']['edit'] = false;<br /> $wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['edit'] = true; Restrict editing by absolutely everyone: $wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;<br /> $wgGroupPermissions['user']['edit'] = false;<br /> $wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['edit'] = false; Here’s to less spam on the interweb!