Day: May 8, 2021

The more things change, the more they stay the same

I’ve been fine-tuning things on the site for the last couple weeks, particularly security-related stuff as WordPress remains under constant threat of l33t h4x0rs. Here’s a screenshot from a recent report of attempted activity on the site:

Could you not?

I found this to be kind of amusing – Turkey’s at the top of the list, and when this site was hacked back in late 2009-early 2010, the person who defaced it put up some text that was in Turkish. Not saying it’s the same person now, because it probably isn’t; just a funny coincidence.

Another thing the security software is reporting is all the failed login attempts:

Keep guessing, guys

The interesting thing about these logs is that they show what people are trying, and I’m going to hazard a guess that people try these because they’ve worked in the past. So that should be a clear warning not to use usernames like Admin, demo, test, or whatever name your posts publicly show as having been written by. (The attempts using my name are interesting in that they only just started today, even though all the posts on this site since the revival nearly two months ago have been under the same name.)

Of course, having 2FA is more important than obscuring your username; even if the username gets out, without the security token, you aren’t getting in via the front door anyway.

This place isn’t exactly Fort Knox either though; I’m sure WordPress has a vulnerability in some spot or another that someone can take advantage of. In that event, I’ll just have to make sure the database is backed up. It won’t do to have to put this site back together again.

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Don’t stand in the red stuff

Small Final Fantasy 14 update this weekend. I’m starting to get caught back up on all the stuff that’s happened over the last year and a half. The main story is caught up, the normal raids are cleared, the normal trials content are almost cleared. I haven’t touched alliance raids yet, but plan to do so before too much longer. Word has it that they’re based on Nier: Automata, which I enjoyed the hell out of back in 2017.

Come to think of it, 2017 was an interesting year all around – Persona 5, Nier: Automata, the Stormblood expansion (although in hindsight it seems to have been less well-received than Heavensward or Shadowbringers), Breath of the Wild were all worthwhile time investments. Went back to Japan for the first time in seven years; had a mini-college reunion for a few weeks over the summer with one of the Australians; found my footing at the job I’d taken after moving out here, which I’m still at five years later. Sometimes everything just hits on all cylinders, right?

Anyways, here’s some more gameplay footage. The nice thing about being late to the content is that the player base is largely already familiar with everything, so I can focus more on studying the environment and the patterns and less on scrambling to keep people vertical. That’s quite a contrast to the last video I posted where I mentioned I literally had to save the attempt myself. Not that I don’t mind being ahead of the curve, but sometimes half a workload is better than a full workload. The interesting thing about this encounter is that the boss actually stores attacks up for execution a minute or two later while also running through everything else it’s going to run through. I’m continually impressed/amused that Square-Enix has been able to keep churning out interesting ideas for raid content after all these years.

One more note about this video; it seems the PS5 records things at 1080p and 60FPS. The quality is quite nice, I like it.

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