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We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) – Director: Lynne Ramsay

 
Dancer in the Dark (2000) – Director: Lars von Trier

 
Requiem for a Dream (2000) – Director: Darren Aronofsky

 
 
* As with any of my ‘Top 10′ lists, upon publishing they usually don’t have 10 items in them as I like to leave room for future additions.

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• Top Ten Most Offensive Israeli Ads

In the ad, Israeli singer and comedian Maor Cohen talks about being pampered by his mom in the winter time. The camera zooms out just as a big masculine arm slaps Cohen, and we see a male actor playing the role of the mom whose pampering apparently involves delivering pizzas to her son. Now, you don’t need to hone your Hebrew skills to pick up on the pointy boobs, the crotch grab and the general macho quality of the mom character. Simply put, there doesn’t seem to be any plausible explanation as to why a cisman was cast to play the mom – except for the obvious one: “Whoosh, that’s the joke…” – and a very transphobic one, in my opinion.

P.S.
How can a first aid course make fun of trans people, you ask? Well, one needs to try very hard, as the EMT that taught the course proved: When he talked about snake bites and how you should never cut the bitten organ to extract the venom, the instructor held up a piece of paper which read “Do not cut” and had a photo of Israeli singer Dana International on it. Get it? Do not cut. Yeah, I know…

P.S.2.
Israeli telecom provider 012 Smile know how to create an ad without insulting trans people (or their friends). Read all about it here.

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Having said that, I take issue with all the brouhaha about the exclusion of women from advertisements: leading Israeli companies have come under scrutiny (1, 2, 3) for print ads that did not include women in them. Essentially, these people are demanding that women will be returned to advertisements – and I think that’s laughable:
Until the day comes when ad agencies are no longer havens for misogynistic men, portraying women in their stereotypical positions as secretaries and housewives – or seductresses; Until the day comes when women in TV ads will try to persuade us to switch banks or buy car insurance, and not just as gratuitous eye candy to hold the product up against their naked, heaving bodies: Until the day comes when women are shown as equal to men – until that bright day arrives, getting rid of images of women in advertising might just be a breath of fresh air; An extreme measure to combat an unbearable situation that have been going on for far too long. To quote the fictional Admiral Percy Fitzwallace: “[We've] got some real honest-to-god battles to fight. [We] don’t have time for the cosmetic ones.”

To prove my point, here is an assortment of newspaper ads published this week:

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The GAG Quartet are:
Gilad Chehover – Drums
Guy Bernfeld – Bass
Or Paz – Guitar

Recording, mixing, pianoing and feminine singing by Eyal Amir
Drums recorded by Martial Bouhassira
Photography: Dafna Sasson
Second Unit: Tamari Goddard
Editing & After Effects: Or Paz
Animation: Tom Trage

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Sure, novelty items can be hilarious, maybe even this one (not much of a basketball player myself) – it’s just that connecting this item to a workplace environment puzzled me, as I am pretty sure this might be a sexual harassment case waiting to happen. As far as I can tell from the photo of the item, the manufacturer uses no office-related wording on the package, which made me assume this is a case of creative freedom by the Israeli store. I expect better from a female-run business, as I am certain that sexing up the office environment is something corporate would not approve.

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Lemme ask you this: If a corporate graphic designer posts new homepage graphics, forgetting that Hebrew is spelled from right to left, not left to right, how long would it take before someone notices?

sthgisni wen naiG << Gain new insights
ysae edam secivres UPS << UPS services made easy
UPS Solutions tuo kcehC << Check out UPS Solutions

Aside: Executives concentrating on a project by Joshua Hodge Photography (iStockPhoto.com, GettyImages.com) – Selected keywords: Asian Ethnicity, Cheerful, Caucasian, Multi-Ethnic Group, Laptop, Friendship, Cooperation, Team, Teamwork, Pointing, White Collar Worker, Mixed Race Person, Office Worker, Smiling, Unity, Using Laptop.

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Yesterday I found out frgdr.com was injected with malicious code which redirected some visitors to discount-canadian-medshop.com, an e-commerce website selling pharmaceutical drugs (read: Cialis). This was a particularly conniving hack as only some posts were affected, making it harder to detect anything was wrong. If you are interested in such details, after the jump is a summary of the incident.

How did I find out?

So about two weeks I started noticing the visiting stats for my website had significantly declined, and that I was getting about a third of the traffic I was used to getting. I attributed this to my lack of new posts during recent weeks and figured Google recalculated my rank and decided to demote me. Fine, I said, so be it.

Then, yesterday I was ego searching and discovered something strange: some of my links shown by Google had Cialis-related titles. At first I thought my personal computer had some sort of virus that was making these link changes just on my own PC, but soon I realized this was not the case. In fact, I now know my website has been hacked for so long, Google and other search engines had already indexed the hacked posts and they were appearing for anyone searching for such products.
What made this hack particularly smart is the fact that only a third of the posts were hacked (242 out of 692 indexed results), which meant that many people visiting the homepage and other popular posts, did not even notice anything was wrong, hence could not alert me to that fact. During that time I also checked daily that everything is on the up and up, as I always do, visiting my website from different computers and using two separate website monitoring services. I figured if anything shady was going on, I will quickly find out about it. I was wrong.

What actually happened?

Reverse engineering the hacking, I now know that about two weeks ago, an eval (gzinflate(base64_decode( code was added to the end of my WordPress wp-config.php file, instructing WP to require_once a PHP file that was uploaded to a folder that was scheduled to be deleted for a while now. The uploaded PHP file named 2tre8e3e4r56e3f6ba4c5721d403e.php was apparently in charge of what posts were left unchanged, and what posts were showing the pharma site. Bear in mind, visitors were not redirected to that site but were actually shown an html file from my root directory, the second one to be uploaded to the server, named whois.dat. Yeah, that filename made me smile too…

What did I do wrong?

While I do believe this hacking was done manually by a pretty skillful hax0r, as always, leaving old folders is a bad idea. In my case, that folder included an outdated YOURLS installation, and leaving old PHP files around is a no-no.

What did I do right?

Following is a list of precautions I took before being hacked including WordPress plugins I use to make my website secure. This might be useful for people who self-host WordPress as vigilance is a constant battle. Bare in mind that with everything mentioned here I still got base64′d:
- passwords: I use strong passwords, up to 20 characters in length, and a different one for every service. Using RoboForm2Go to remember my passwords for me, I can be this restrict.
- file backup: The actual files are backed up daily by my hosting provider.
- database backup: Using WP plugin WP-DB-Backup to automatically backup and email me the MySQL database every hour.
- malware notification: Using WP plugin WP AntiVirus to monitor malicious injections and send an email warning of possible attacks.
- unauthorized logins: Using WP plugin Login LockDown to prevent brute force attacks.
- corrective measures: Using WP plugin WP Security Scan to detect novice-level vulnerabilities.

The battle continues…

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