Sunday, September 19, 2021

WordPress Plugin Spam

So to make a website these days, you actually need quite a lot. First you need a domain name. Next you’re going to need a place to host the site, and of course you are going to need a content manager. Unless you made it your life’s work, you probably didn’t code your own theme, and who the heck writes their own plugins? Basically in order to make a website you have to rely on the millions of hours of coding that came before you.

There are a lot of content managers out there today, but unless you want to spend way too much time to get less than mediocre results, you are probably going to go with WordPress. WordPress is running a full third of the internet, works fairly well, is very user friendly, has thousands upon thousands of “good enough” themes, and plugins as far as the eye can see. It is the obvious choice for many wanting to run their own websites.

However, there is a downside to being the hottest platform on the web. Ethically deficient code writers are having a field day by writing plugins that take a rather baleful approach to coding. Upon opening the plugin, you might be greeted with prompts to sign up with a service. This means your website will have a substantial portion resting upon an indemnified 3rd party who will more than likely have a tiered system where the useful bits all require an expensive subscription.

Then there are the ones that use your site’s back end to promote their other software and services. Now I don’t mind a promotional sidebar on their own plugin’s settings page, but when you start placing your ads on my Dashboard or any other settings page, you have demonstrated that you are a piece of shit and your plugin needs to be deleted immediately.

The worst ones try to stop you from deactivating/deleting their plugin. I swear to god, one of them somehow managed to reinstall itself. This, quite frankly, is outright malicious code, but somehow they are still being promoted on the WordPress.org/plugins page with absolutely no way to know the good guys from the bad.

At the very least the plugins pages should have some kind key or legend to indicate the kind of plugin you are about to try out. Are they truly free? Are they committed to staying truly free? Is it software as a service? Does it require registration to work? Are their multiple service tiers that provide additional functionality? Is telemetry data being collected from your site, users, or visitors? Until the plugin is installed and activated, you really have no way of knowing what the actual terms are.

So basically, plugins are like phone apps but for WordPress, and like those apps there are a lot of privacy and security issues that makes using them hazardous to anyone trying to run a website. What is most disturbing is the lack of any meaningful effort on the part of the WordPress Foundation to rein in bad actors using their platform to spread malicious code.


Kudos

Speaking of bad actors, I had several submissions this week from a spammer. Nice try, but I review the submissions in the text editor, so your poisonous hyperlinks have no power here.

A happy thank you to TOR for his contributions, and of course we can all thank reddit for filling out this week’s jokes. As usual, the submission page is ready to receive any jokes you would like to include (and apparently spam as well), so keep’em coming!

I think it’s really important for the independent web to have a platform, and to the extent that WordPress can serve that role, I think it’s a great privilege and responsibility. — Matt Mullenweg

Pax,

-f2x

Alien

Two aliens landed in the desert near a petrol station that was closed for the night.

They approached one of the pumps assuming it was an earthling and the younger alien addressed it saying, ‘Greetings, we come in peace. Take us to your leader.’

The pump, of course, didn’t respond.

The younger alien was stumped. The older alien said, ‘I’d calm down if I were you.’ But the younger alien ignored the warning and repeated his greeting. Again, there was no response. Shocked and insulted by what he perceived to be the pump’s haughty attitude, he drew his ray gun and said impatiently, ‘Greetings, Earthling. We come in peace. Do not ignore us this way! Take us to your leader or I will fire!’ The older alien again warned his comrade saying, ‘You probably don’t want to do that! I really don’t think you should make him mad.’

‘Rubbish,’ replied the cocky, young alien. He aimed his weapon at the pump and opened fire. There was a huge explosion. A massive fireball roared towards them and blew the younger alien off his feet and deposited him a burnt, smoking mess about 200 yards away in a cactus patch.

Half an hour passed. When he finally regained consciousness, he refocused his three eyes, straightened his bent antenna, and looked dazedly at the older, wiser alien who was standing over him shaking his big, green head.

‘What a ferocious creature!’ exclaimed the young, fried alien. ‘He damn near killed me! How did you know he was so dangerous?’

The older alien leaned over, placed a friendly feeler on his crispy friend and replied,

‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned during my intergalactic travels, you don’t want to mess with a guy who can loop his penis over his shoulder twice and then stick it in his ear.’
🤓👀🤓👀😁😁

Duck Tales

A woman brought a very limp duck into a veterinary surgeon. As she laid her pet on the table, the vet pulled out his stethoscope and listened to the bird’s chest.

After a moment or two, the vet shook his head and sadly said, “I’m sorry, your duck, Cuddles, has passed away.”

The distressed woman wailed, “Are you sure?” “Yes, I am sure. Your duck is dead,” replied the vet..

“How can you be so sure?” she protested. “I mean you haven’t done any testing on him or anything. He might just be in a coma or something.”

The vet rolled his eyes, turned around and left the room. He returned a few minutes later with a black Labrador Retriever. As the duck’s owner looked on in amazement, the dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table and sniffed the duck from top to bottom. He then looked up at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head.

The vet patted the dog on the head and took it out of the room. A few minutes later he returned with a cat. The cat jumped on the table and also delicately sniffed the bird from head to foot. The cat sat back on its haunches, shook its head, meowed softly and strolled out of the room.

The vet looked at the woman and said, “I’m sorry, but as I said, this is most definitely, 100% certifiably, a dead duck.”

The vet turned to his computer terminal, hit a few keys and produced a bill, which he handed to the woman..

The duck’s owner, still in shock, took the bill. “$150!” she cried, “$150 just to tell me my duck is dead!”

The vet shrugged, “I’m sorry. If you had just taken my word for it, the bill would have been $20, but with the Lab Report and the Cat Scan, it’s now $150.” 🤣🤣

Teacher

One day in class the teacher walked to the black board and noticed someone had written the word “penis” in tiny letters. She turned to the class, scanned the boys and girls, looking for the guilty face. Finding none that looked guilty, she quickly erased it and began her class.
The next day she entered the classroom and noticed, in larger letters this time, the word “penis” on the blackboard. Again, she looked around the classroom in vain for the culprit, but found none. And so, the teacher quickly erased it again and proceeded with the day’s lesson.
Every morning, for about a week, she found the same word written on the blackboard, each day, written larger than the previous day.
Finally, one day, she walked into the classroom expecting to be greeted by the same word on the board. Instead, she found scrawled in its place:
“The more you rub it, the bigger it gets.🤣🤣

Boy, I Had it Tough!

“I’ve just had the most awful time,” said a boy to his friends. “First I got angina pectoris, then arteriosclerosis. Just as I was recovering, I got psoriasis. They gave me hypodermics, and to top it all, tonsillitis was followed by appendectomy.”

“Wow! How did you pull through?” sympathized his friends.

“I don’t know,” the boy replied. “Toughest spelling test I ever had.”

Phone call

“Hello?” said the young girl over the phone.

A man calling home from work said, “Hi honey. This is Daddy. Is mommy near the phone?”

“No, daddy. Shes upstairs in the bedroom with Uncle Paul,” replied the young girl.

After a brief pause, the man said, “But honey you don’t have an Uncle Paul.”

“Oh yes I do,” said the girl. “He’s upstairs in the room with mommy right now.”

There was a brief pause. “Uh ok then I want you to put the phone down run upstairs knock on the door shout to mommy that daddy’s car just pulled up.”

“Ok daddy just a min.”

A few min later the little girl came back to the phone. “I did it daddy.”

“And what happened honey?”

“Well mommy got scared, jumped outta bed naked ran round screamin then tripped on the rug, hit her head on the dresser now she isn’t movin at all!”

“Oh no! What about your Uncle Paul?”

“He jumped outta the back window into the pool. But I guess he didn’t know you took out the water last week to clean it. He hit the bottom of it I think hes dead!”

After a long pause the man said, “Swimming pool? Is this 486-5732?”

The little girl replied, “No I think you have the wrong number.”

Sunday, September 12, 2021

So How’d That T-Mobile Thing Work Out?

OK, so recently I mention that I signed up for the T-Mobile Home Internet. No this is not a paid promotion for them, and no one is compensating me to say this… I can’t believe I’m actually uttering that cheesy line, but yeah… This is my own personal experience and not a sponsored promotion.

OK, so I have had a bit of a beef with my local ISP’s over the years. Mainly it has to do with the price. I personally don’t think that a low end connection to the internet (like an uncapped sub 25 Megabit per second connection) should cost more than $35/month, and that should be a forced available option for every hard line ISP in the US.

Sadly, the local offerings are about $70/month, but they advertise lower prices if you are willing to bundle, which I am not. After AT&T decided against being reasonable, I told them to piss off.

This is where I started using a wireless modem and a SIM card from a cheap MVNO such as Mint Mobile or more recently, Tello. That worked out pretty good, but I had to watch my data usage. With Tello I got 25000 Megabytes for around $40. Ultimately I was spending about $60/month and had to watch YouTube videos on 240p. Not ideal.

Enter T-Mobile Home Internet. It is a wireless home internet service that costs $60/month, but as of this writing is being offered for $50/month with what seems to be a permanent $10/month discount for being an early adopter. It is not available everywhere, but it is available where I live, so I signed up.

They called me back immediately and started asking me all sorts of uncomfortably personal questions like my SSN, driver’s license number, and the last 12 people I slept with. The process got a little hung up when they encountered my credit freezes. I had to temporarily unfreeze them. I was not happy about this process, and I think it would be a major turnoff for a number of potential customers.

But in the end everything went through, and after waiting for a month or so I got the cylindrical modem in the mail and set it up. Honestly, it just works like any other internet service, so nothing to write home about there.

But that is also where this service shines. I am paying $50/month for an unremarkably reliable internet connection with no data caps. The speed varies a bit, but I never have any problem with streaming HD video or keeping my smart home running, and it has impressively low latency that would make any gamer envious. Surprisingly, my home security cameras actually work better for some reason.

So for now, my internet seems to be doing fine. If T-Mobile Home Internet comes to your neighborhood and you are tired of being gouged by your local ISP, you might want to give it a shot. Other than the overly nosy background check, I really do not have any complaints.


Kudos

OK, so I’m not really sure if it was Big D or TOR who sent in the last 4 jokes, but thanks. As usual, here’s the link to the submission page, and be sure to check out the merch in our online swag shop.

Oh wait. We don’t have a swag shop… or merch.

Let me know if you think a Flush Twice T-Shirt sounds like a good idea.

Pax,

-f2x

Husbands For Sale

A store that sells husbands has just opened in New York City, where a woman may go to choose a husband.

Among the instructions at the entrance is a description of how the store operates.

You may visit the store ONLY ONCE!

There are six floors and the attributes of the men increase as the shopper ascends the flights.

There is, however, a catch ….
You may choose any man from a particular floor, or you may choose to go up a floor, but you cannot go back down – except to exit the building!

So, a woman goes to the Husband Store to find a husband.

On the first floor the sign on the door reads:

Floor 1 – These men have jobs and love the Lord.

The second floor sign reads:

Floor 2 – These men have jobs, love the Lord, and love kids.

The third floor sign reads:

Floor 3 – These men have jobs, love the Lord, love kids, and are extremely good looking.

‘Wow,’ she thinks, but feels compelled to keep going.
She goes to the fourth floor and the sign reads:

Floor 4 – These men have jobs, love the Lord, love kids, are drop- dead good looking, and help with the housework.

‘Oh, mercy me!’ she exclaims,
‘I can hardly stand it!’
Still, she goes to the fifth floor and the sign reads:

Floor 5 – These men have jobs, love the Lord, love kids, are drop- dead gorgeous, help with the housework, and have a strong romantic streak.

She is so tempted to stay,
but she goes to the sixth floor and the sign reads:

Floor 6 – You are visitor 4,363,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor.
This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please.
Thank you for shopping at the Husband Store. Watch your step as you exit the building, and have a nice day!

Seminar

A group of women were at a seminar on how to live in a loving relationship with their husbands.

The women were asked, “How many of you love your husband?” All the women raised their hands.

Then they were asked, “When was the last time you told your husband you loved him?”

Some women answered today, a few yesterday, and some couldn’t remember.

The women were then told to take out their cell phones and text their husband – “I love you, Sweetheart.”

Next the women were instructed to exchange phones with one another and read aloud the text message they received in response to their message.

Below are 11 hilarious replies. If you have been married for quite a while, you understand that these replies are a sign of true love. Who else would reply in such a succinct and honest way?

1. Who the hell is this?

2. Eh, mother of my children, are you sick or what?

3. Yeah, and I love you too. What’s wrong?

4. What now? Did you wreck the car again?

5. I don’t understand what you mean.

6. What the hell did you do now?

7. Don’t beat about the bush, just tell me how much you need.

8. Am I dreaming?

9. If you don’t tell me who this message is actually for, someone will die.

10. I thought we agreed you wouldn’t drink during the day.

11. Your mother is coming to stay with us, isn’t she?