K-Squared Ramblings

Nasty Ebay “About Me” Phish

Someone I know encountered a really sneaky eBay phish this weekend. It arrived through eBay’s official “Ask seller a question” system, and consisted of a simple request: Was his auction the same as the auction at the following About Me page?

The URL was a normal eBay URL of the form http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/_____. Pasting the link into another browser brought up the user’s About Me page… which consisted of a spoofed eBay login form that would submit the username and password to a page hosted at Yahoo.

So it not only came through eBay’s official messaging system, but the form appeared on eBay’s own website, meaning it bypasses many of the usual cues. It’s not a secured page, but use of SSL for login pages is still spotty enough that a user could easily miss that. And how many people have noticed that eBay only puts login forms on signin.ebay.com? You have a slightly better chance if you have a browser like Opera, which shows you the target* of a form when you hover over a button. If you think to look at it. Read the rest of this entry »

Aeire Returns

Woo hoo! The long-awaited Queen of Wands spinoff has launched! Punch an’ Pie is written by Aeire and drawn by Chris Daily of Striptease (which I have to admit to never having read). The main character is Queen of Wands’ Angela.

There’s only one strip up so far, but it’s funny.

(via S*P)

Sci-fi mommy

I can’t believe nobody’s made this comparison yet……it looks like the producers of “Lost” picked the wrong SF TV-show lead to be Alex’s mom:

Of course, it’s entirely possible that they might be able to land Claudia for a recurring guest spot as her “mother” (flashbacks maybe?), and thus call into question through visuals alone whether Danielle is even as right in the head as she seems to be.

WordPress Broken on PHP 5.2 Again

Upgraded to WordPress 2.1.1. Supposedly should’ve fixed the PHP 5.2 problems. In reality, they’re worse unchanged. Bug 3354 is marked fixed, but it seems to have only been fixed on the 2.0 series. Read the rest of this entry »

I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning

Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times ran an article on Justice Antonin Scalia and how his opinions may represent the majority as the Supreme Court hears cases about race, religion, abortion and campaign finance. Apparently, conservatives are really looking forward to the possibility that the court might restrict abortion, outlaw affirmative action, strike down the separation of church and state, and get rid of limits on campaign finances.

In other words, conservatives are hoping for a bunch of activist judges to legislate from the bench.

Below the second page of the article, there’s a short bit about Senator John McCain appealing to the religious right by saying he wants the court to overturn Roe vs. Wade…but that he doesn’t like judges who legislate from the bench. Sorry, Senator, you’re going to have to pick one or the other.

I liked McCain back in 2000. He seemed to be a moderate Republican with some integrity, and a more interesting person than Al Gore. Over the last year or so, he’s leaned more and more rightward. Either he’s changed his views, or is finally showing his true colors, or he’s sacrificing his integrity for power. In none of those cases would I want him as President.

Heroes Genetics

Genetics has been built into the show concept for Heroes from the beginning. Mohinder’s father was tracking a genetic marker, and it’s all about humans evolving powers (in response to what selection pressure, I don’t know, but it’s comic book science). So the question of what can be inherited is built into the show’s premise. And the potential for powers is clearly inheritable, though it’s not clear how.

We only have two examples of characters for whom both parents have powers—Claire and Micah—and both of them have powers themselves. In each case, the child’s powers are unrelated to either parent’s, though one can certainly see the advantage invulnerability might provide for someone living with a pyrokinetic.

We also have three cases of full siblings where neither parent appears to have powers: Read the rest of this entry »

Two Sunsets

Just after sunset on Wednesday, February 7.

Just before sunset on Monday, February 12.

Would you believe it?

With a name like that, it had better be!

I Wonder where that Woman is?

For all the griping and complaining about the way DC Comics managed the Flash relaunch, I’m beginning to think maybe Wonder Woman fared even worse. At least Flash has stayed monthly, and has never been delayed by more than a week (unless you count the shipping mishap in December that prevented the book from reaching the west coast).

Wonder Woman launched with a 5-part story, “Who is Wonder Woman?” involving both Diana, Amazon Princess of Themyscira and Donna Troy. Flash launched with a 6-part story, “Lightning in a Bottle,” setting up Bart Allen to take over as the Flash. Flash is already up to #8. Wonder Woman has gone bimonthly, and is only up to #4. And it’s so far behind, DC has scheduled a fill-in story for #5. The conclusion “will be rescheduled at a future date.” Naturally, the book collecting the story has been delayed as well.

So here we are, nearly a year out from One Year Later, and one of DC’s flagship characters is still mucking about with a semi-origin story. It’s kind of sad, because I picked up #1 out of curiosity, and thought they did an admirable job of simplifying Donna Troy’s backstory for new readers. It’s complicated—but it doesn’t have to be, if you can focus on just what’s necessary.

On the plus side, Wonder Woman fans knew where Diana was by the end of issue #1, unlike us Flash fans who had to wait until #6 to get a hint of Wally West’s fate, and it’s been clear from Justice League of America and other books, that Diana would be coming back, so they probably haven’t had to deal with the great schism that’s divided Flash fans over the past year.

Power of Suggestion

Surfin’ Safari posted an interesting remark that highlights the power of suggestion.

There’s a tip floating around to speed up the Safari web browser by changing a hidden setting, “page load delay.” There are testimonials by people who are really impressed with how much faster Safari is after making this change. Only one problem: The setting doesn’t exist anymore in current versions of Safari (1.3 or later), so changing it has no effect.

The author of the shareware tool in question responded, saying that he honestly had no idea that the setting had been removed, and offering a refund to anyone who wanted their money back. And there are a couple of other optimizations it can make.

There are some things that the human mind just isn’t good at measuring objectively, and perception of time depends very much on circumstance. “Time flies when you’re having fun” and “A watched pot never boils” have been known for ages.

Thoughts from a Redesign

Last weekend I did a redesign of my comics fan site, Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning. It was prompted by two goals:

• Get rid of the non-working compatibility cruft for Netscape 4 (some of it was actually making things worse in NS4)
• Make navigation easier.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comic-Con Hotel Booked! (2007)

It took an hour and four minutes, but I managed to book a hotel for Comic-Con International this morning. (Yes, it’s not until July. And I still want to call it San Diego Comic Con.) Last year I was unable to get through online or by phone, but had no problems faxing the reservation request.

Reservations went on sale at 9:00 AM. I hit the website, started calling, and started faxing.

Phone: I couldn’t get through for the entire ~50 minutes of redialing. Just “no answer” over and over again.

Fax: Busy signal, over and over again. Occasionally the circuit would connect, and it would start making fax tones, but it never actually completed the handshake.

Web: The convention website loaded, very slowly, just enough to get me the link to the Travel Planners site. I could get that first page to load—again, very slowly—and occasionally I could get into the second page, where I selected the check-in and check-out dates and preferred hotel. From that point on, it was timeouts, and a bogus error page about how either I had been inactive for 12 minutes or my browser was not accepting cookies (neither of which was true), and I should hit refresh to start over.

Around 9:50 I finally managed to get to the hotel availability page.* My first choice wasn’t available, so I went back and selected All Hotels (which I should have done in the first place). My second choice wasn’t available either. In fact, there were only about three hotels in the downtown area that had rooms left for the full length of the convention.** Read the rest of this entry »

Flash: The Greatest Stories Ever Told?

In 1991, DC released The Greatest Flash Stories Ever Told, part of a series of hardcovers collecting classic stories about their signature characters. It was reprinted in softcover a few years later, but both editions have been long out of print. When DC started releasing new “Greatest Stories…” books last year, I figured it was only a matter of time before they released a new edition. Yesterday, DC announced that Flash: The Greatest Stories Ever Told will appear in July of this year:

THE FLASH: THE GREATEST STORIES EVER TOLD TP
Writers: Robert Kanigher, Gardner Fox, John Broome, Cary Bates and Mark Waid.
Artists: Lee Elias, Carmine Infantino, Ross Andru, Irv Novick, José Luís Garcia-López, Kurt Schaffenberger, Alex Saviuk, Mike Wieringo, Joe Giella, Wallace Wood, Joe Kubert, Frank Giacoia, Mike Esposito, Murphy Anderson and José Marzan Jr.

Collects stories from FLASH COMICS #86 and 104, THE FLASH #123, 155, 165 and 179, DC SPECIAL SERIES #11 and THE FLASH (Second Series) #91.
$19.99 US, 208 pages

I pulled out my copy of the 1991 edition, and it’s fair to say this is an entirely different book. There are only two stories in common: “Stone Age Menace,” and “The Flash—Fact or Fiction?” The new book is also about eighty pages shorter than the old one.

Here’s the character breakdown:

Both books are very heavily focused on Barry Allen, and each includes just one story with Wally West as the Flash. Flash: The Greatest Stories Ever Told includes two crossover stories: “Flash of Two Words” features both Barry and Jay, and “Beyond the Super-Speed Barrier” features all three during Wally’s days as Kid Flash.

So, assuming the contents are final, do they hold up to the title’s promise? Read the rest of this entry »