Eric

In case it's a message quota issue, I've increased PM quotas from 300 to 1000

Anyone who says violence isn't the answer hasn't given it an honest try.

2 minutes ago, Jack from Ohio said:

There are NO SNOWFLAKES on this discussion board!!

 

4 hours ago, Abby Normal said:

 Done!

Edit: Almost done.  I have a few more things to take care of before those last two bullet points are finished.

Testing emojis.  Modifying style sheets to increase their size a bit.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aenean aliquam in dolor vitae condimentum. Nullam tincidunt mauris eu congue ornare. Integer sit amet diam nunc. Vivamus vestibulum aliquam neque ac congue. Proin et nibh vitae risus faucibus viverra rutrum id arcu. Phasellus vulputate sem vehicula nisi ullamcorper lacinia.  Pellentesque vehicula scelerisque est et sollicitudin. Cras viverra, dui et tristique blandit, quam urna scelerisque lacus, nec semper sem massa quis odio. Nulla vulputate ut ligula at aliquet. In congue mi purus, a molestie tortor congue eu. In mattis gravida egestas. Aenean pharetra pretium  hendrerit.

Edit2: Alright, seriously this time, all done.

I'm going to be installing a medium-sized forum update in the next few minutes, as soon as my backup has completed.

There are lots of new features, but most of them aren't relevant to our community.

• Emojis will be added, lots of them. They are the standard emojis you are used to seeing on mobile devices.
• I've installed a security certificate and the whole site will default to https.  
• I'll be implementing Google's newish invisible Captcha service as an additional layer of protection against spammers. It works by magic.

Unless something goes horrifically wrong, there shouldn't be more than a few minutes downtime.

Thanks!

6 hours ago, Margaret CPA in OH said:

I just checked - I'm one of the other 36 who joined April 11.  Following the best crowd EVER!  I was also part of the group that sent a picnic to the original ATX group (William Tasker, where are you?)  in gratitude for their great support and, well, humanity helping us get through tax season year after year.

I hope Eric shows up in June in TN.  Love to give him and family a picnic, too!  In the front yard, of course...

I probably won't be in TN for the party in June (sorry), but I was there for that picnic at ATX!

Haha, thanks Judy! 

Yup, my join date is the date the forum software was installed.  I just checked and that's also the day I registered the atxcommunity.com domain.   It probably took me another day or two to get everything set up, and I think KC was the next registered member on the 11th. 36 other members followed that same day, thanks mostly to KC's network of friends.  

On 2/28/2018 at 1:29 PM, Abby Normal said:

We have a locked, deadbolted, windowless storage room

What a terrible waste of prime office real estate.  That's where my desk would be.

Could it be that it's just the point of Antarctica furthest from the pole?

"Northern tip of Antarctica" is such a weird thing to say.  That's the kind of phrase that will give you an aneurysm if you think too hard about it.

On 1/14/2018 at 1:25 PM, Abby Normal said:

Turn off your security software, all of it.

After that, download all of the free poker games and wallpaper apps you can find.

On 1/10/2018 at 10:44 AM, Medlin Software said:

I can see where you might think so, but you are mistaken.  I take what any expert would consider realistic steps.  The basic step is to use my grey matter at all times, before firing off signals to my fingers.  I also keep nothing online which is embarrassing to lose.

For the average person (a non keeper of valuable mass data), data recovery is the bigger threat.

You said yourself that long passwords can make password hacking reasonably hard, and encryption makes internet sniffing a bit tougher.  Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple don't expend that additional processing power encrypting all of their site traffic for the heck of it.

Taking long passwords as an example, every time some website or service is hacked and a huge collection of email addresses, usernames, and passwords is liberated from their servers, almost half of them are very quickly cracked because they're weak. It's often not worth the time required to brute force the remaining passwords.  That's what I mean by low hanging fruit.

I mean, I have a database (stored locally) of my hundreds of passwords.  I can't imagine why I would store that information in plain text when it's trivial to add a significant layer of protection by encrypting the whole database.  Sure it's relatively safe on my network, but sometimes  happens, you know? 

EDIT: Speaking of poop happening, sorry about the site going wonky for a while this morning.  There were some issues that may have been brought about by my host patching the server against meltdown and spectre late last night or early this morning.

15 hours ago, Medlin Software said:

I do use encryption and passwords, but only for overall access, and when doing certain things online.  Long passwords can make password hacking reasonably hard, and encryption makes internet sniffing a bit tougher.

And not doing it makes you the low-hanging fruit.

Merry Christmas

holidays are awfully hard on an introvert.  I am so tired.

On 11/10/2017 at 6:28 AM, FDNY said:

Sometimes I can't see the street signs.  Especially when there is a corner of one in a box, does that count or not?

Have you considered that maybe you are a robot?

Alright, added a bunch of emoticons/emojis/whatever.

Nevermind! I had to remove all of the new emojis.  I checked the roadmap for the forum software, and a new emoji system is in the works for the next version, and it looks like full unicode emoji support will be added.  I want to avoid conflicts, so for now I'll have to get rid of the new ones.  Sorry

This isn't really big news, but it came up in another thread so I thought I should explain this feature a little bit.

I've added a couple "reactions" to the list.  So now, in addition to Like, Thanks, Haha, Confused, and Sad, we also have Thumbs Down and Angry. 

There is a point system going on behind the scenes associated with this feature, and those points are what determine who shows up on the Leaderboard.  Like, Thanks, and Haha all contribute +1 points to a user's total.  The rest are all neutral.  There is an option to add negative (-1 point) reactions, but they're not currently enabled.

I have chosen to keep Thumbs Down and Angry "neutral" because the could be used in different ways, for example:

• You might be annoyed that there is a new botnet or bit of ransomware floating around the internet, which you might want to give a thumbs down to show your annoyance with that news.
• You might want to show that you disagree someone's assessment of a particular tax-related situation.

There is a possibility that I'll bring back the Downvote (-1 points) option for that second bullet point, but I haven't decided yet.

I'm adding more emojis next.

I'm still tweaking the reactions.  I've removed the downvote, and added Thumbs Down and Angry.  I'll create a new thread soon to explain the additions instead of derailing this one any further 

44 minutes ago, Medlin Software said:

This is something I deal with as well.  I block for certain countries.  It does take some manual handling (not just using an IP list service), since some desired users will have non US IP addresses for various reasons.  For instance, I have a customer who lives abroad for 1/2 of the year.  When blocked, I show a special page, with contact info, so those who are human, and actually customers, can send me an email with their IP address.  Some on the northern border will have a Canadian IP address, some on the southern border will have a Mexican IP address.  Some may have randomly placed IP addresses, such as when a VPN or other masking service is in use (have one customer who uses a non US IP s they can stream videos - such as TV sports feeds - which are blocked for those in the US).

Since I only have to worry about the people who want to visit this forum, a lot of those edge cases won't apply here.  Blocking China will take care of 90% of the junk traffic.  Your suggestion to show a special page to those who are blocked is a good one.  I'll do that.

43 minutes ago, cbslee said:

I think you should block those addresses as soon as possible ! 

Although, I am sure there are ways to get around the block.

It's not difficult to get around the block, but I don't need it to be air-tight either.  Like I said, spam registrations haven't been an issue since implementing that service, and I'm confident in the server and site's security.  I just don't need those types of people eating up precious CPU cycles while they poke around.

Using a combination of Kodi and some third party plugins is a popular choice.  You can buy a box pre-configured for plug-and play too.

There are also some websites you can visit to stream tv and live sports, but they're like the online equivalent of visiting a crack den.  Without a good ad blocking plugin and some intuition about what is safe to click, you'll end up getting infected with something.  

At any given time there are a number of people from China and Russia on the forum, about a dozen on the low end, and Judy mentioned that she noticed that there were 150+ guests on recently.  Some are trying to register to spread spam, others are probably probing for security vulnerabilities.  The anti-spam service I subscribe to seems to be doing a great job of keeping spammers from registering and while I'm not too worried about security, the constant traffic does put additional load on the server.

This site is very US-centric, so I can't think of any reason why I shouldn't restrict access to the site from problematic countries / IP ranges.

I'm not going to make any changes immediately, but it wouldn't hurt to take note of the URL of the Facebook Group if you haven't already, or my email address ([email protected]) in the case that you suddenly find yourself unable to connect to the website.  I don't expect any such issues, but a huge number of addresses will be blocked and I want to make sure people have some way to contact me outside of the forum just in case.

Quote

There is no excuse for not following basic cybersecurity hygiene

This really can't be emphasized enough.  I have seen so many websites and servers get hacked due people being lax about applying security patches--it is by far the most common way for an internet connected system to be compromised, and the easiest to avoid.

On 9/12/2017 at 2:32 PM, FDNY said:

I always believed the paper should go over the top, not under, but that's just my preference.

My wife explained to me, when she was in college and working at Pizza Hut, that the toilet paper goes over the top for a very specific reason: so that your hand doesn't accidentally touch the wall behind the paper roll when you reach to pull.  

In other words, you gain a buffer between the wall and the paper you grab which is greater than or equal to the diameter of the paper roll (depending on the design of the holder)

I don't know if Pizza Hut affects everyone's digestive system the same way, but during her time there, she had witnessed some incredible scenes in that restroom not unlike a painting by Jackson Pollock.  Call it PTSD if you wish, but she prefers to touch as little of the environment as possible when using a public restroom.

On 9/9/2017 at 2:32 PM, cbslee said:

According to the Equifax website, neither my wife or I had our information exposed. Yea !

The feature on the website that tells you whether or not your information may have been part of the hack can't be trusted.  Making up a last name and putting in 6 random digits for the end of the SSN returns a random response... at least that was my experience over the weekend. 

Other people have reported that they have checked their own information multiple times, only to get different answers each time.  I think it's safe to say that the website isn't returning results based on actual data.  I guess that explains why they suggest you proceed as if your information has been compromised, no matter what the results of that query are--I expect they have no idea who has been affected.

29 minutes ago, Catherine said:

Translated:  we got caught covering our own hindquarters and are back-pedaling as fast as we can!  Just don't take away our insider trading dumped stock gains - those are for campaign contributions (to *all* the legis-vermin)!

Oh yeah, no disagreement here,  but It's hard to feel outraged every single time some stinking rich a-holes do something like this without consequence. It's just the world we live in.