Art Recently I discovered and fell in love with Hale Woodruff’s block prints. They feel so energetic and modern and I love the white lines on black backgrounds that he has going on. It just adds so much to the energy. A while back, while looking up Folk Art on Wikipedia, I discovered Jose Guadalupe Posada, and let me tell you, his work is crazy cool. It’s very energetic stuff and while he often used skeletons as a theme in a lot of his works, their behaving and posing like everyday people creates a feeling of both being down to earth and otherworldly at the same time. He drew more “normal” stuff too, but man, those skeletons really stand out. Seriously, words can’t do either of these guys justice. Check them out. Car Problems? This weekend I was driving down the highway when I heard a loud, forceful, metalic “ping” in my rear driverside wheel well. When I had my summer tires put on for the year, the tire shop busted one of the wheel bolts. It turns out that for the FR-S they’re pretty crummy, so my first thought was one busted while driving. The family friendly auto-shop that does my car maintenance is closed on the weekends, so I dropped it off at the brake place near work, asked for a tire rotation, and asked them to check out the noise. All of the wheel bolts were intact. They checked all of the wheel wells, suspension, and undercarriage and there’s no sign of damage or impact. Car drives fine. No wobbling, shaking, or weird noises. I’m gonna assume that everything is fine, but I’m getting my oil change next week and I’m gonna mention it. kleinbl00 or lm, any ideas on if it could be something, and if so, what I should ask the guys to check for? Like I said, the ping was loud as fuck. Phone Malware? The fucking DailyBeast website on my phone kept on redirecting to a Free IPhone scam website last night, even after I did a system restore, so I ended up doing a second one just to be safe. Malwarebytes shows nothing on the scans. Not one to leave things alone, I looked all over the internet last night and came across two possible scenarios. The scary thing I came across was that maybe somehow the router for our wireless network got hacked and some program changed the DNS settings to exploit Andriod phones. That strikes me as . . . unlikely but it makes sense in a weird way. So I woke Dala up, much to her frustration, to have her reset all of the router settings. The DNS before the reset was (edited per Dala's advice but it looks like the default DNS address that comes with the router) and the DNS after the reset was the same. A little Googling shows me that’s a default DNS for a lot of routers out of the box. So I think we’re safe there. The more likely scenario is that its just a bunch of ads from some ad network being all fucky and jerk ass because people can’t leave shit alone. If that’s the case, it’s the ad server on the website and not my phone, so both it and the router should be fine. Unless I’m missing something. I called my dad and sister last night (two very tech savy people), explained the whole scenario before them, and they both say “Yup. Ad Networks being all fucky. Don’t worry about it.” Except, you know, it’s my phone. My E-Mail is on there. I Hubski when I’m on break from work. I need it for 2 Factor Authentication for literally everything I do. So. I’m worrying. kleinbl00 (again), Devac, bfv, all you other savy computer bros. Any thoughts? I’m wracking my brain here. With the exception of Malwarebytes on my phone, it’s running just Andriod and the apps that came with it from Google, Samsung, and my wireless carrier. My PC runs Linux Mint, nothing extra added. I go only to sites I know, double check sites I don’t know with Norton Safe Web and Google Safe Browsing before going to a website I don’t know. So I’m very careful. No clue what’s on my wife’s windows box. Same for my roommate’s tablet. My wife is the tech pro of the household, so I trust her. My roommate? Well, don’t get me wrong, he’s a cool guy and all, but I let’s just say really wish he’d listen when we tell him about being careful on the internet. House Gonna look at it this afternoon. Don’t know if we’re gonna pull the trigger. I’ll share my thoughts tonight or on next week’s Pubski. Hubski and its users This is just the occasional reminder that you’re all awesome. :)
So... I get ads from dailybeast if I look on mobile. When I do it full'o'cookies, it wants me to buy Underworld:Blood Wars from Best Buy (no idea why). Then the other popup wants me to watch Babylon 5. As I have never professed any interest in either of these pieces of entertainment, nor done any searching related to them, I have to assume it's not using much in the way of cookies. When I do it in incognito mode, it tries to sell me a Corolla. I don't know how old your phone is. I don't know what version of Android it's running. I know that I've never seen blinky popup iphone shit on anything I've ever run, but I see it on my inlaws' phones, which are Galaxy S4s probably running Android 4.3. My suggestion? You've done a factory reset twice already. Root that shit. Install busybox; install AdAway. It was almost worth the trade-off to have iOS emoji and zero fucking ads back when I was on a OnePlus but as soon as I went Google I figured being in the network and shit would make Google Fi work better (HA!). Now that I'm back on T-Mobile I might just root the fucker again. Adblock is so nice. ________________________________________________________________________________________ As to the car, it's possible you ran over something metal and it flung it up into the wheel well. You might have heard the object ringing, rather than the car. If you've been able to drive it around worrying about it, you're probably fine - damage from impact generally reveals itself within a day. I was on the Benelli once. Minding my own business, riding along. Heard a whang and felt something, but things were fine. Went to my gig, did 12 hours mixing Gordon Ramsay, got back to the bike, rear tire was flat. Rolled the bike, found a 4" lag bolt sticking dead nuts out of the center of the rear tire, began a 4-day odyssey to get superbike tires changed on a Saturday in Pasadena. It sucked. But two things became clear: (1) front tires are real good at arranging road detritus in rear-tire-penetrating configurations, particularly when they're only 5-6 feet apart (2) ridiculous damage makes itself known within a day.
It appears to be broke. I say throw cyanogenmod on it; at least that'll get you up to Android 6. I damn near went this way. I had a Oneplus One and aside from weirdnesses (you could not do a screencap on it for some dumb reason) it's a great little phone. Especially now that their whole Oxygen/Cyanogen dustup is in the past. Instead I discovered that T-Mobile would credit me $350 for having a Pixel so that was a no-brainer.
So you don't think I have a virus on my phone or router? If so, I'll look into getting a new phone ASAP and doing something with this in the meantime. As for the car, thanks for the advice. Since it hasn't been acting weird, I haven't been too worried. I'll still have the shop give it a look over, but it's nice to know I'm not overlooking something big.
Don't take this the wrong way, but that seems like a lot of work and I don't know how comfortable I am running a bunch of apps like those on my phone. Do you think I'm at a pretty high risk of being rooted? If so, I'd almost rather just go out and get a new phone. This one is really starting to show it's age anyhow.
I reckon it's the ad network. Somebody who writes the JavaScript probably missed a semicolon or parenthesis. Are you on Android? Firefox works on mobile and supports uBlock (don't use Adblock, they have a gross "acceptable ads" program which they are using to sell advertising space on other peoples websites).
Ad networks are a main malware payload route it seems. All sorts of legitimate sites will suddenly pop up into App Store and try to run other malicious code. It's really difficult to prevent and makes using an Adblock service almost mandatory. People who sell ads don't really seem to care and a bad ad can run for weeks before it gets pulled
It's an Android and I use Chrome on it. I have Firefox on my Linuxbox with U-Block and I am happy with it. If you think it's a good idea, I'll look into doing the same for my phone, though I didn't know you could get adblockers for phones. I wonder how well they work/use up wireless data.