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Excerpt: … for spammers, anyway. Upgrading WordPress often might just help!

On the other hand, you could still wake up and find out your blog looks like this after a zero-day attack —

That's probably a bad thing. But, in fact, many of us in the blogosphere have enjoyed this particular problem.

And it's not quite as much fun as the blue pill.

In the worst case, it's not just spam, it's badware or viruses. And then Google won't want to cohabit with you ever again.

Well, you'r…

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Excerpt: At least not necessarily …

Anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty would notice the following highlighted copyright headers in the widely circulated "embarrassment" that everyone (even those who can't write a lick of C/C++ or ASM) criticized.

Unfortunately, too many people blame Microsoft without actually thinking. Freescale may have actually been caught red-handed and with its pants down. Notably, the bug did not affect the Zune models above 30GB. So Freescale knew about the …

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Excerpt: You thought cheap webhosting was a bargain. Maybe … but bad webhosting isn't just a bummer — it can get you delisted, added to badware lists, etc.

And it doesn't have to be your fault (directly, anyway).

Use IX Web Hosting | ixwebhosting.com web hosting at your own risk. One day you might just get hacked and/or defaced. Even worse, you might be — courtesy of some Turkish hacker — installing malware on users' computers by proxy. The hackers seem to be pretty good…

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Excerpt: PHP doesn't come with native support for making SSH connections via the libssh2 libraries. You must use the PECL SSH2 extensions. Installing them can be tricky, but Kevin van Zonneveld does a great job explaining how to install them over here. So I won't go there. The new version, 0.11.0, also seems to be compiling more reliably for everyone.

Unfortunately, the library is sparsely documented, and still buggy in some places. And most of the comments posted on http://www.php.net/ssh2 are j…

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Excerpt: WordPress is great. So are most other free and/or open-source applications. The only problem with these applications is that no matter how secure the other parts of your web site are, using such a popular application makes you an easy target for their widely circulated exploit scripts. There are lots of prying eyes on, say, WordPress. And exploiting popular open-source applications is interesting, because you get more bang for your buck. Upgrading helps, and of course we do it. But it stil…

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Excerpt: … or how to avoid needing this shirt.Your boss sucks, and so does this economy. I try to be a good boss, but realistically I probably suck too. Since I'm that guy … and I'm the guy who decides things, let me tell you 5 ways — at least in my mind — that will help you keep your job at a smaller IT firm.

0. Learn to be useful in another IT capacity
If you stink at HTML, learn it better. Developers frequently won't know all of the pains of cutting HTML pixel-perfect or dealing…

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Excerpt: One of the things that irks me most about programmers getting involved with marketing is that most of them just don't know grammar.  SEO Black Hat mentioned "Google are," I mentioned "then vs. than," and now I'll mention one more thing — "a vs. an."  This one is a little different.  Most people know this rule intuitively.  But programmers frequently get lazy and do not look programmatically at the following word to decide which indefinit…

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Excerpt: This function, comprised of a simple regular expression, will remove most of the bloat from larger CSS files.  Not that the effects are very substatial or groundbreaking, but it does save quite a few kilobytes to run things like this over your CSS and HTML.  Using mod_gzip also has a favorable effect, but this cannot hurt either.  If you find any real bugs, let me know; if it's something completely pathological and contrived, don't let me know.  I have another filter …