Update… We Were Hacked!
To make a long story short:
Friday afternoon, ex-Romeo Void singer Debora Iyall had discovered my overview of It’s a Condition at Music Is Like Oxygen and posted the link to it on her Facebook page. Since I’ve been Facebook friends with her for awhile and had participated in her Kickstarter campaign for her new EP, I knew about it because she had linked to my personal Facebook page in her status update about the post. I hadn’t told her about the post (I didn’t want to be spamming her page or whatnot) so I was happy that she had found it and was giving me props right back for giving her old band props.
For whatever reason (a bit of ego, maybe?), I went to click through the link on my iPhone (I was at dinner with my mother at the time) and found myself getting rerouted to a .ru page that was basically dead. What?
Thinking it was some odd Facebook quirk, once I got home I got on my computer and checked the link. Through Chrome, I got the same dead page. Through Firefox, I got a fake virus scan site that (thankfully) Norton had cockblocked before any damage could be done.
Yep – some fuckers — probably Russian hackers — had somehow gotten into the account that holds all of my music blogs (The Groove Music Life, Music Is Like Oxygen, my Reina Tanaka worship blog So Hot She Shits Fire) as well as the blog for Resonant Blue and a blog for a friend’s charitable work (Sounds For Scoliosis, a series of benefit shows in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area booked and promoted by my friend Lucia Peregrim). Going directly to the main sites was fine… but anyone clicking through a link from just about anywhere (Google, Bing, Facebook, whatever) was getting redirected to some Russian pecker’s malware festival instead – and making me look bad. So bad that one of Debora Iyall’s friend had gotten hit with that shit, forcing the link to be removed.
So, after a few phone calls to my hosting provider, here’s what happened – the hackers had gotten into a file called .htaccess that, in the case of these blogs, works within WordPress installations and makes sure whoever visits one of my blogs is seeing one of my blogs. The hackers had replaced it with their own version that, within its hardly-complicated code, tricks links from search engines and social networking sites into taking people’s browsers into the Russian assholes’s virus playground instead.
Thankfully, a little Google research – a few seconds worth, more than most Tea Party members do – turned up how to fix this shit, using only Notepad and an FTP program. But I had to do it for every WordPress installation on my account – a minor pain in the ass, but it had to be done. Now all links should be fine.
Now, I don’t know if this kind of thing can affect the “free” WordPress blogs hosted on their own server farm, but if you’re independently hosting your own WordPress blog elsewhere, here’s what you should do to make sure these hacker motherfuckers aren’t messing with your hard work. With your FTP program (like Filezilla), check the size of the .htaccess file on your server. If it’s a little more than 200 bytes, you’re fine. If it’s bigger than that – the hacker’s version was over three thousand bytes – delete it immediately, Google for “.htaccess wordpress” and you’ll find a proper code to get your blog back to normal. Boot up Notepad, cut and paste (or type it up) it exact, and use your FTP program to upload it to your server. Note that you can’t simply just upload the clean version over the dirtied one – some of their code in the dirtied one prevents that, so you have to delete just that file.
My apologies to anyone who had been affect by visiting one of my blogs – in fact, at the time of this writing there was still a malware alert for So Hot She Shits Fire, which I’ve already applied for a correction on with Google. (Right now a direct search in Google warns that the site might harm people’s computers, especially if they don’t have something like Norton installed.) Everything on all of my blogs should be safe.
So SNSD Made Their US Morning Show Debut This Morning…
I tend to loathe when a musical artist gets booked on what used to be Live with Regis and Kelly (previously Live with Regis and Kathie Lee). For one thing, when the show would start, one would have to suffer (or fast-forward if they recorded the show) through a babbling dialogue between Regis and Kelly (mostly pushed by Regis) that would take up at least 45 percent of the airtime. Secondly, musical artists tend to not get more than two minutes to pay a song, which is both jarring to the viewer and insulting to the artists. James Brown actually refused (and rightly so) to perform under such a ridiculous restriction and cancelled his appearance on the show at the last minute.
Girls Generation did a performance of “The Boys” on Live with Kelly this morning that I didn’t find out about until someone tweeted to me about it last night after my last post went up. I somewhat dreaded it because of how ridiculous the format of the show has been for decades, but I still set my DVR (and ended up watching it live anyway – thank god I have Wednesday mornings off). Regis is, thankfully gone (adios, you babbling idiot…), the monologue was thankfully shorter, and Girls Generation got off a relatively complete performance of “The Boys”, albeit one where there might have been one verse left out of the song (I didn’t replay the performance this time around). They did, however, perform over a backing track rather than use a live band like last night on The Late Show with David Letterman, which was a bit of a letdown.
They also got their first US TV interview courtesy of the show, with host Kelly Ripa being somewhat serious and guest co-host Howie Mandel being a slightly less obnoxious asshole than Regis Philbin. There could have been a bit more research and thought going into the questions asked of the band, but since the show was geared mainly toward a more general audience that is to be expected. The show’s producers also had a shot of the band’s tour bus and the crowd of hardcore Sone (at least one of them holding up a copy of the tin-packaged Korean edition of the new album) waiting outside, which was good because America got to see a crowd of discerning American pop fans who wouldn’t listen to thoughtless, overproduced, and undercomposed dreck like Katy Perry or Scotty McCreepy if you put a loaded pistol to their heads.
So, two for two as far as SNSD’s first two performances on American television go. Let’s see what happens from here (An album or EP with English versions of “Genie”, “Hoot”, and their other earlier hits would be a nice start…)
So SNSD Made Their American TV Debut Last Night…
…well, it’ll be last night when most of you will be reading this. As of this writing, Girls’ Generation’s network TV debut on The Late Show With David Letterman – pre-taped Tuesday afternoon – finished airing about ten minutes ago and I even re-ran it to watch a second time. Let’s get right to business:
PROS: Girls Generation and the session musicians backing them – a curious three-piece unit of keyboards, drums, and DJ – could have done a note-for-note performance of “The Boys”, but surprised me by switching up the arrangement a little bit, throwing in a new instrumental break that isn’t on the original recording in the process. Their vocals were live and not lipsynched, which was another plus (there were a few pre-recorded effected vocals running underneath the live mics – more on that in a moment – but those were there to help replicate the production of the original recording while SNSD sang live over them, not for them to mime to). They also handled their choreography well despite the relatively small amount of real estate on the stage floor they had to deal with (and even though Sunny, at least for a second or two, in danger of bumping her ass cheeks into Paul Schaffer’s keyboard stands).
CONS: Firstly, whoever David Letterman’s director is needs to be repeatedly pimpsmacked, as there were quite a few times when the cameras were focusing on members who weren’t singing. The vocal mix wasn’t 100% perfect as a few of the members seemed to have had their mic levels lower than the rest of the group, and at one point a pre-recorded effected vocal almost cancelled out one of the other members’s live vocal. And who said Regis Philbin (who had participated in a field-goal skit with Letterman and guest Bill Murray) could obnoxiously blow his referee’s whistle right after Girls Gen and their band stopped playing? Isn’t that old fart supposed to be completely retired from being on television?
So, that’s SNSD’s American TV debut in a nutshell. Are there going to be other TV performances to follow this one? Or are Interscope going to drop the ball and not push them any further this cycle, just like they unnecessarily delayed the American release of the album Girls Generation are supposed to be promoting for months after its original Korean release? Time will tell…
