Haiku Speedbuild is moving to the 1st Saturday of the month at 10am at the Afar Sim in Second Life! For May 4th we’ve got prizes, treats, and epic poetry!

Haiku Speedbuild

• Saturday 4 May 2013
• Afar sim, Second Life
• Come watch or build
• One hour to create a sculpture / object / piece of architecture / landscape, in response to your choice of 4 poems by Sylvia Plath.

Prize Moo-lah!

1st Place: L$1,000
2nd Place: L$500
3rd Place: L$250

Don’t be intimidated! No experience necessary! All levels! Everyone can play!

3 types of free tickets available:
• Builder – participate in contest
• Spectator – watch the action & vote on the best work
• Assistant / Docent – help with event. Help coordinate builders. Give docent tours of Afar Museum after event. Help serve hot dogs, cotton candy & drinks to spectators & kids.

All ages welcome. Ice chests ok. No alcohol, tobacco, or firearms.

This week we’re at the just announced LEA11 (Linden Endowment for the Arts) project Alice in Cornelland. Haiku Speedbuild is lucky to be the first event at this new education / exploration region searching for a “virtual haptic.” Our March poems are from Beth Griffenhagen’s book Haiku for the Single Girl, and this week they’re read for us by 16-year-old slam poet & photographer Hanna Lee Reehl!

One night my mom asked,
“You do still like boys,” (pause) “right?”
Yes, Mom. Sadly, yes.

DJ Haraway & Gina Broono / inspired by Beth Griffenhagen’s Haiku for the Single Girl

I’m apathetic
About my chipped nail polish
Among other things.

Ami Tamura / inspired by Beth Griffenhagen’s Haiku for the Single Girl

I hope that men will
Forgive me for not being
Zooey Deschanel.

Fafner Hofmann / inspired by Beth Griffenhagen’s book Haiku for the Single Girl

Short machinima of projects by: Haraway & Broono, Tamura, Hoffman:

H A I K U . S P E E D B U I L D
• irez.me/haiku – posts about people and ideas
• xuefaith.co.uk/haiku – posts with weekly poems & sculptures

• DJ Haraway’s Tumblr
• Gina Broono / Journey of Life
• Ami Tamura’s Blog
• Fafner Hofmann / Pirats Art Network
• LEA11 / Alice in Cornelland

S K I L L . B O R R O W E R
• Music: Hack the Network / ccMixter

H A N N A . L E E
• Hanna Lee’s Tumblr
• Hanna Lee Reehl’s Business Tumblr
• Hanna Lee Reehl / Instagram
• Hanna Lee / Flickr

B E T H . G R I F F E N H A G E N
Haiku for the Single Girl
• Tracy’s New York Life / Photos & Author Interview
• Haiku for the Single Girl.com
• Haiku for the Single Girl / Amazon.com
• Beth Griffenhagen / Twitter

Beth Griffenhagen signing her book Haiku for the Single Girl

Haiku Speedbuild #1 – Afar, 3 March ’13

today’s Haiku Speedbuild poems were from Haiku for the Single Girl by Beth Griffenhagen

Huntress Catteno picked:

In my neighborhood
Even the homeless woman
Has a boyfriend. Sigh.

Huntress Catteno

Mia Wallace & Dr. Wiggles collaborated on:

I like trysts with guys
From other countries. It’s like
Stamping your passport!

Mia Wallace & Dr. Wiggles

Corcosman Voom worked with:

I am convinced that
All available men are
Somehow damaged goods.

Corcosman Voom

Corcosman Voom’s finished sculpture

Today was my first day hosting Haiku Speedbuild and we were fortunate to have Miso Susanowa come out and give us a little “Prim Twisting” demo for the first part of the hour. Thank you Miso! And of course, thank you Peri Afarensis for all your help and support!

Miso Susanowa & participants at Haiku Speedbuild

H A I K U . S P E E D B U I L D
• irez.me/haiku – posts about people and ideas
• xuefaith.co.uk/haiku – posts with weekly poems & sculptures

T O D A Y ‘ S . E V E N T
• Miso Susanowa’s Blog
• Miso Susanowa / Twitter
• Ayumi Cassini’s Ultimate Guide to Prim-Twisting

B E T H . G R I F F E N H A G E N
Haiku for the Single Girl
• Tracy’s New York Life / Photos & Author Interview
• Haiku for the Single Girl.com
• Haiku for the Single Girl / Amazon.com
• Beth Griffenhagen / Twitter

Beth Griffenhagen, author

Xue Faith & Miso Susanowa

Giant world map at David Rumsey’s Map Island in Second Life. The red pushpins are the home cities of visitors to the installation. Near the bottom is London, the city where I currently attend university, and near the top is me, standing on Taipei, the city where I was born, yet have never lived in.

It’s crazy to think that peeps thought that the internet would be the end of serendipity. That the magic of flipping through pages in an encyclopaedia or books on shop shelves would be lost. Yeah. Wut? I’ve got so much serendipity blowin’ out my ass it’s practically impossible to actually finish anything!

1. Maybe I should sign the sites I manage up at Google Webmaster Tools.
2. Go through verification steps.
3. Google wants a sitemap.
4. Google doesn’t like your lameass “html” sitemap, it wants a real “xml” one!
5. Find and install Sitemap plugin.
6. Plugin says: you should announce your new sitemap.xml with a new blog post
7. Xue is pathologically incapable of doing a blog post without snapping a new pix to go with it.
8. Look for suitable location.
9. Get sucked into David Rumsey’s incredible cartography sim.
10. Oh gawd, now it’s going to be cartography serendipity day. Hope I get back to webmaster tools eventually!

Anyway, maybe I’ll do a separate post on Rumsey’s amazing sim later in the day, but for now, here it is:

Dear Webcrawling Robots. I am here!

• Google XML Sitemaps / WordPress Plugin by arne
• Arne Brachhold.de

• David Rumsey.com
• Map Island / Second Life

Standing on Taiwan. Or as the vintage map says, “Formosa.”

As I posted recently, all wordpress blogs I’m involved with have been seeing lots of spam: Comment Spam, User Registration Spam, and Login Hacks. Here’s a log from the Stop Spammer WordPress plugin showing the last hour of login attempts at the iRez blog. As you can see it’s a lot of “weak” lowercase passwords applied against the “admin” account (which, fortunately, doesn’t even exist)

Stop Spammer

In my recent “Delete Your Admin Account” post, I noted the steady stream of login attemts, most often against the username “Admin” on numerous WordPress blogs that I’m involved with. The highest traffic, and hence the most spamified of these blogs is iRez, and so I recently installed the “Stop Spammer” plugin there.

Agent Xue is on the case, stylishly putting hackers behind cyber bars in this dashing “G200 Executive Dress” by Jackie Graves.

The comment and trackback spam is to get links to whatever site a person or bot is promoting. The login hacks, well who knows what mayhem that might lead to. The Spam User Registrations are kind of puzzling as I don’t see what they could accomplish. At least the blogs I’m involved with, you don’t have to be a “user” to leave a comment, so the spam registration isn’t required to leave a spam comment, and registration as a “Subscriber-level user” doesn’t come with any sort of power on the blog. I haven’t been able to dig up a “Why?” for this, so the temporary answer is simply that bots are made to crawl and stick their bot-fingers in every crack they find and so they do.

The Stop Spammer plugin works on many different issues, (read the documentation) and as you can see in the printout above, we have a steady stream of, I presume, bot login attacks, that listing just from an hour.

Be Safe!

Twitter Password Security

Can you believe it, I’ve seen FOUR different Twitter accounts hacked in the past 3 weeks! All had “weak” passwords (short, all lowercase) and luckily the damage was only some bogus posts, nothing too terrible and the passwords weren’t changed thereby stealing the account from the owner. Still, a hijacking is pretty creepy.

Agent Xue examining a body at the Chaos City SIM in Second Life. It’s easy to look hot in Jackie Graves “Poison” paramilitary uniform, but as the poor corpse reminds us, it’s all fun and games till some creeper hacks your account and then Twitter Password Security isn’t so funny anymore!

I don’t believe any of these accounts were phished, I think it was just bots cracking simple passwords. Believe me I know complex passwords are a pain, and having a different password for every account is a nightmare, but none of those precautions seem like such a big deal when you wind up with “Internet STD’s.” A few years ago the net was a fun sandbox and the creepy guy in the trench coat didn’t really even come by that often… those days are gone. Face the facts: the sandbox is surrounded by creepy guys in trench coats now. We can still play, we can still build awesome sandcastles, but you’re going to have to finally break down and get a real password.

6 lowercase characters that were probably your former pets name just don’t seem to cut it anymore. Yes, you’re going to have to do the upper, lower, number, special character thing. Instead of the old reliable “fluffy” or “princess” or “psychogirlfriend” how about a phrase you know, that you can take a letter or two for each word from – that generates a string that’s actually easy for you to remember, but a lot less hackable than “fluffy”. But remember that even a “good” password can still be phished, and it’d be great if that didn’t compromise ALL your accounts. A unique password for each account is so much to remember, but what about splitting the difference? Take your acronymISH base and add a piece for the specific website, so if your phrase is:
remember, remember, the fifth of November

then your Twitter password might be:
re,REM!t5Ntwtr

A bot won’t crack that so fast, if it’s ever phished you might not lose all your other accounts, and yet it’s easy for you to remember.

• Twitter: Keeping Your Account Secure
• TechCrunch: Twitter Accounts Compromised

DISCLAIMER:

I’m way not any sort of security expert, nor a Twitter Security specialist, and since it’s pretty important stuff, as always, see a professional! This is just some info that might be useful as observed from my little mini-trench in the field.

Good Luck! Play Safe! But still Adventurous!

WordPress Security

I’ve been seeing a lot of bot login attempts on a number of different WordPress installs lately. Almost always (but not exclusively) they’re attempts to login to the account “admin”. There’s a pretty good chance you have a user with this name since WordPress often creates one when you initially do the install.

I got to wear a sexy paramilitary uniform in this summer’s performance of VB41 – Rock the Casbah, who knew that a few months later I’d be giving WordPress Security tips! (WordPress security is definitely harder than virtual base jumping!

My advice: delete your “admin” account. Of course you need 1 or more “admin-instrator” level users, but none of them need that username. It might actually take you a minute to do this, since if you created the WordPress Install, you may well have
USER: admin
EMAIL: my.self@something.com
PASS: hopefullyNotSomethingReallyShort&allLowercase

This means that you won’t be able to create a new user account with your my.self@something.com email since it’s already in use. So if that’s your primary email, you’ll have to create a new admin-level user with a different email, then delete the “Admin” admin-level user, and THEN you can make
USER: meeeee
EMAIL: my.self@something.com

It’s a little bit of a nuissance, but we’ve all seen peeps, maybe ourselves, crying about data on a crashed hard drive, and thought, hmm, I guess backing up really isn’t that much hassle. Deleting a user named “admin” isn’t going to solve everything in the world, but it’s a pretty easy step to help diffuse a real and current problem. Shout if I can help or say anything more on it!

DISCLAIMER:

I’m way not any sort of security expert, nor a WordPress Security specialist, and since it’s pretty important stuff, as always, see a professional! This is just some info that might be useful as observed from my little mini-trench in the field.

Good Luck! Play Safe! But still Adventurous!