GhettoWebmaster.com

I’m insanely ill at the moment so excuse any typos and whatnot. Here’s the skinny…

1. I booked a round-trip flight with US Airways to spend my birthday with the girlfriend.

2. On Saturday morning (Feb 2) I woke up feeling like absolute shit. Body aches, chills, and a fever which broke 104 at one point. I was supposed to be leaving the next day so…

3. I called US Airways and rescheduled my flight home for Wednesday (today). There was a $20-ish price difference for the new flight. And, they were waiving a $100 fee normally associated with changing your flight.

4. My girl brought me to the emergency room where they pooh poohed my I have Pneumonia theory. They said it’s a “viral illness”. So, it’s a common cold on steroids kinda thing and is contagious.

5. Wednesday is here and I’m still in bed. My girlfriend is sick now too. I called US Airways to see about getting the flight rescheduled again. I was told that the $100 fee could not be waived a second time. I asked if they’d rather knowingly have someone with a contagious illness on two of their flights today. That question was met with silence. So, I asked if a manager could override the charge. After being placed on hold I was told once again that they wouldn’t override it… “Well, I’ll see you guys later today.”

If they were dealing with flights that were near capacity I would be more sympathetic. That’s not the case though…

So, what should a ninja do???

Update (5pm):
In spite of all the votes saying I should catch that flight and cough on people, I’m simply going to book with a different airline once I’m feeling better.

Sometimes when I’m alone, I Google myself. I have no shame. :P

I’ve seen duplicates in the SERPs before, but a search this morning left me scratching my head with a dumb look on my face. Results number 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 57 are all the same for the term “ghettowebmaster” at the moment:

WTF?

The skinny:

1. Some eTards decided to harass Officer John Nohej for having a MySpace friend who linked to adult content when he was simply trying to reach out to kids at the middle school he is assigned to.

2. Hilarity ensues as netizens rip the eTards apart for this retardedness. The school he works at? They had a link to a domain parking page from a belly up clip art site they linked to. What ads were splashed across that domain parking page? Gay porn, seriously. It got worse for them when I pointed out that the technology-challenged “elite cyber crimes task force” investigating Officer Nohej is guilty of all sorts of stuff that also doesn’t matter on MySpace.

3. In their infinite wisdom, they decided to (screw up while trying to) hide their own “misdeeds”…

Their friend list from a few days back:

Their friend list and comments now:

What the hell?

They ran to another third party site and got code to hide their friend list and comments. And, once again… they didn’t remove the extra code included which links to a site pushing adware:

What kind of places does that site link to?

Yuppers, the ad network that site does business with serves up a ton of Zango banners. Nice.

I think it’s time for this “elite” interweb task force to go ahead and ask one of the kids they are supposedly protecting to help them out with their MySpace.

Update:
They went ahead and deleted every comment from their MySpace page. lolz

I responded to Alex’s blog entry about this with the following:

Ouch. I’ve sent plenty of people their way over the years. This stinks the same as weight loss, penis enlargement, and other nonsense being allowed to make ad buys from Discovery, History Channel, etc.

“We are known to deal with facts and provide the best information possible.”

“Here’s a bunch of money. Let’s exploit that trust you’ve built up.”

“Hells yeah.”

Seriously:

What really pisses me off is that I know FastClick has category options for their publishers. And, I’d bet PaperGhost’s underoos that a site producing as many impressions as Snopes can get them to filter ads from their rotation. Bottom line: they aren’t idiots and are intentionally serving such ads on their site. It’s obviously all about the big bling bling for them.

Might as well find a similar site, with ethics:
Urban Legends (minus Snopes)

If you want to send Snopes a message about this mess, here’s their contact page.

Update:
You probably shouldn’t even bother contacting them. Here’s a thread on their own forum with members bitching about such practices from September of 2005. I saved a copy of that just in case they delete it ;-)

Friday morning I got an interesting email…

Looks like a typical phishing email, right? Sure. There were two things that got my attention though…

1. It got through Gmail’s spam filter.
2. The link went to PayPal’s real login page. WTF?

Usually, a phishing email will use the correct address as the anchor text of a spoof log-in page link. Simply mousing over such a link reveals the true link in your status bar though. So, it’s fairly easy even for a novice computer user to spot as BS.

Example:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run

Viewing the source code of the original email revealed an epic fail.

<a class="Style5 Style2"
onmouseover="window.status='https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run'; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''" target="_blank" href="http://pimpyaho.com/functions/us/"> <font size=3D"2">https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=3D_login-run</font></a> </font>

The above shows that this retard was trying the old use JavaScript to make the status bar display whatever you want trick. Too bad for this idiot, modern email clients filter JavaScript. In both Gmail and Yahoo that code ended up looking like the below.

<a href="http://pimpyaho.com/functions/us/" target="_blank"><font size="2"></font></a>
<font size="2"><a href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run" target="_blank">https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run</a>

So, the link ended up pointing to the real PayPal login. Epic fail, indeed.

Digging further, I saw that the phishing page he intended to send people to was on a porn site. The site is part of a lucrative network owned by a guy whom I made an ad buy from in the past. His ad system requires a person to sign up as a regular member of his site before making a purchase. This explained how I ended up getting that email. His user database had obviously been compromised.

I posted some info about this mess on a forum he hangs out on to make sure he knew what was happening and to get more info.

Here’s the skinny:

1. Homeboy hired an outside company to develop a bespoke chat solution for one of the sites sitting on that server.

2. Said company was given shell access to speed up the delivery of the product, etc.

3. A shoutcast server magically began running on the server – pushing 25Mbit of bandwidth.
Side note: The files had been removed so there was no shoutcast config. Once shoutcast has been started, it doesn’t require its own files in Linux to continue to run, so they were obviously removed in an attempt to hide it.

4. “[After discovering / removing the phishing setup] the files popped back [within seconds]… I then shut down pimpyaho.com, so the site physically wasn’t running… still the files came back. This meant the user HAD to have some sort of shell access.”

5. “Have now sorted the breach and made sure it can’t happen again. I can tell you that they managed to get hold of around 16,000 email addresses, however the [other site's user] database is up around 80k, so at least they didn’t get hold of that.”

Ouchness++