I just spent an hour figuring out whether our website had been hacked into sending Viagra spam, so the least I can do is to share what I learned.

The panic started when Kyeli and I received 30 emails in the space of 5 minutes, all of them things like “Out of Office autoreply” or “Delivery failure notification”, you know, like what you often get when you send email to a nonexistent email address or someone who’s busy or on vacation. But the emails were all sent to random email addresses like 9asinine@freakrevolution.com, apparently as autoresponses to emails from random email addresses like 9asinine@freakrevolution.com.

Kyeli panicked and thought we had been hacked. I told her not to worry, that it was just email spoofing, that it happens all the time, and that there’s nothing you can do about it.

But how could I be sure? If our site was actually hacked, we could get deindexed, and it could totally hose our website and our business. So it deserved some investigation. Here’s what I found.

1. Don’t panic. 99% of the time it’s just spoofing, not hacking.

2. Check your sendmail logs.

Sendmail logs are in different places depending on your web hosting, so I can’t tell you where they are or how to find them on your hosting service. But if you’re hosted with a company that doesn’t let you access them directly, you can ask them to check the logs for you.

3. Check the mail headers of the emails sent “from you”.

Look for the Received header and see if it’s from your hosting company (e.g. something.lunarpages.com) or from some random place, in my example vorlagen.domain.invalid (h199.244.19.98.dynamic.ip.windstream.net [98.19.244.199]).
This will only work if some of the autoresponders are kind enough to include headers when they bounce back the email to you.

Thanks to @kristinab, @FontSiteDiva, @rose_w, @soupwiththefork, and @soniasimone for helping me figure out what to do and/or helping me stay calm. (:

When Google Chrome came out, I was inspired. I read the comic and thought to myself, “This is awesome. This is what a web browser is meant to be.” So I switched. I’ve been using Chrome as my default browser since it came out, and I’ve only been using Firefox for FireFTP and a couple of finicky sites that don’t work perfectly under Chrome.

Chrome is slick and fast. It made me feel cool to be using it, because it’s Google and it’s a geeky thing to do. It also made me feel good about myself to be using it, because I was supporting design principles I believe in.

Today I switched back to Firefox. Here’s why.

1. Add-ons. Tab Mix Plus (Duplicate Tab!), Greasemonkey, Adblock Plus, DownThemAll, All-in-one Gestures (Right-drag to go back a page!), Googlepedia, Word Count Plus, the Remember the Milk extension, FireFTP, and many more.

Each one of these add-ons makes my life a little simpler and a little more pleasant. I’ve been getting by without them. But I’m breathing a sigh of relief now that I’m using Firefox again. I’ve been choosing the browser that was better in principle instead of the browser that’s better in practice. Today, I don’t need the browser that best supports good web development standards. Today, I need the browser that best supports me getting my work done efficiently and happily.

2. Compatibility. There are a few sites that don’t work perfectly with Chrome, like the registration for AmazonConnect, Neilsen BookData, and the pop-up window at the Kitchen Table. I sometimes ended up having both browsers open when I visited one of those problematic sites. But I’ve encountered zero sites that work with Chrome but not Firefox, so I won’t ever be using Chrome again, unless I really can’t remember a password I created during the last few months. (;

Chrome made me feel cool.
Firefox makes me feel happy and productive.

It’s like I’m dumping my glamorous, glitzy, Gucci-wearing girlfriend for a woman who wears overalls and has some dirt on her knees, but knows how to wrestle a pig to the ground, solve differential equations, paints watercolors in her spare time, can kick you in the face with her mad Krav Maga skills, and does a little sysadmin work on the side.

That woman is hot.

I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting you, baby. I’m back.

NOTE: This is completely off-topic and will probably only interest you if you’re interested in recording podcasts or creating other audio products. Commence geekout in 3… 2… 1…

At this Tuesday’s Communication for the Holidays course, Calliflower failed to record the first two-thirds of the course. We re-recorded it ourselves using Audacity and stitched the two halves together, but it became super loud when it switched to the second half.

We tried using Audacity’s normalize function, but all that does is soften or louden the entire file by a fixed amount, based on the loudest part. Listen to how loud it becomes all of a sudden:

Normalized MP3 (13 seconds)

But The Levelator solved the problem. It softens or loudens the file smoothly, and can soften or louden different sections independently. So if a loud person is talking, it’ll soften them a bit, and then later if a soft person talks for a while, it’ll louden them. It’s awesome. Listen to how much clearer the first half is, and how much smoother the volume transition is:

Levelated MP3 (13 seconds)

You can see the difference visually, too! Normalized is on top, Levelated is on the bottom.

Hooray for the Levelator!