Mr Mist’s Blog

There seems to be growing evidence that the XSS vunerability in versions of WordPress before 2.8.2 is now being exploited for real in the wild. The manifestation seems to be that, after recieving a maliciously-crafted comment, affected blogs display a login panel

Title: Authentication Required
Text: The server (yourserver) at Magic requires a username and password

It would appear at the moment as though the malicious content can be removed by replacing wp-includes with a fresh copy from the WordPress source for your version. But if I were you I wouldn’t take that chance. I’d upgrade to 2.8.2 now. Otherwise you can’t really be sure that the hack hasn’t stolen any credentials, or caused other changes.

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Retired F1 legend Michael Schumacher looks set to return to behind the wheel of a Ferrari F1 car for the European Grand Prix as a stand-in for the injured Felipe Massa, who was knocked unconcious by a spring in Hungarian Grand Prix qualifying.

Schumacher will now undergo a preparation exercise (though no F1 car practice) to be ready for Valencia in a few weeks’ time. His return, I think, is likely to increase Button’s chances of taking the championship this season, as another contender for race wins will take points away from Vettel and Webber’s potential totals.

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More nannying today as we are told that Iced coffees are bad. Some of them apparently contain over five hundred calories. Arrgh! Of course they contain a lot of calories, they’re a rich, sweet, treat. How is this news? The charity behind the figures is telling us that we should avoid the sweet, sugary flavours and instead go for the skimmed, unsweetened (and, presumably, less enjoyable) versions instead. Sigh. How about letting people enjoy themselves and, ooo, go on, live a little. Have a sweetened coffee without feeling guilty about it.

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A progress update on the hatching alien egg can be found here. As cheap plastic stuff goes, this one isn’t going to win any awards from me.

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Oh dear lord. McAuley Catholic High School in Doncaster has proposed a move to clip-on ties for their kids for “safety reasons”. Apparently, there is a concern that kids might be strangled by ties that get caught up in “something”. Hmm. Funny, kids have been wearing real ties to schools for, what, hundreds of years now. I wonder what the number of tie-strangulation incidents actually is. I suspect it’s somewhere close to the zero mark. Sigh. Apparently this is a growing trend.

There’s a facebook group protesting against the introduction of the ties. It’s good to see that some folk actually agree that it’s a stupid plan (their stance seems to be more of a waste of money, which is also true.)

Really though isn’t this just typical of today’s nannying state?

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