FBI Seizes Datacenter Servers
What should be of great concern to all colocation service providers, the FBI has seized all servers colocated with Core IP Networks where (it would appear) unrelated servers were collected with the target ones.
From Slashdot:
“FBI agents have raided a Dallas data center, seizing servers at a company called Core IP Networks. The company’s CEO has posted a message saying the FBI confiscated all its customer servers, including gear belonging to companies that are almost certainly not under suspicion. The FBI isn’t saying what it’s after, but there are reports that it’s related to video piracy, sparking unconfirmed speculation that the probe is tied to the leaking of Wolverine.”
VLC 0.9.9 is Out
They’ve just released the latest version of VLC, a great multimedia player. You can get it here.
The Conficker Eye Chart
I like this.
Since Conficker blocks access to security sites, confickerworkinggroup.com came up with an eye chart that allows you to see if you’re infected, and with what version, based on which icons in the chart are missing (blocked by Conficker).
You can take your own system’s eye exam here.
The Right to Online Anonymity
I find this fascinating.
Rep. Mike Doogan (District 25, Democrat, Anchorage) seems to have become so miffed at the content and popularity of the themudflats.net blog that he took measures, over several months, to “unmask” the anonymous blogger that started the site.
The unmasked blogger appears to be just a regular everyday mom and Alaskan who preferred anonymity to protect those around her from the fact that she was “speaking out”. She’s written about her recent experience with Mike Doogan and summed up the situation nicely with this:
“An elected official in a position of power and authority utilized state resources to deliberately and with malice, knowing there would be negative consequences, impinged on the free speech and privacy rights of a private citizen.”
An exerpt from Bob Poe’s post:
The Legislature can change people. Having lived and worked in Juneau four times I’ve seen Legislators come and go. They arrive as idealists fresh off the campaign and sometimes leave members of the “corrupt bastards club”. Mike Doogan has changed, not in the corrupt bastards sense, but in a sadder, an angrier sense.
I consider Mike Doogan a friend of mine. I contributed to his campaign for the House. His recent behavior in regards to exposing the AK Muckraker is very disturbing to me, but not surprising. Late last year I had been discussing with a friend how angry and cynical Mike had become. Other Legislators had shared with me that he wasn’t taking on any of the real leadership in the minority or other heavy-lifting tasks that could easily have been available to him. And when I read the dueling letters early this year in the Anchorage Press, I really wondered why Mike was so angry.
Deep down Mike is a journalist of the old school variety, the Edward R. Murrow type. As a columnist Mike took his fair share of shots from politicians he took on, because his name was attached to the column. For Mike to see others able to do this under different, new rules must be frustrating for him.
[ ... ]
I’m not sure of what will eventually come of this trend towards blogging replacing traditional media, but this type of frustration will surely become more and more common as a percentage of anonymous writers become more powerful.
Videotron To Terminate Subscribers Over Copyright
From Slashdot:
“Quebecor, which owns Quebec’s biggest ISP, has thrown in with Hollywood interests by arguing for the ‘graduated response’ approach that would kick off subscribers based on three allegations of infringement. The company told Canada’s telecom regulator that net neutrality rules are not needed since content blocking has social benefits, including the potential for a three-strikes-and-you’re-out policy.”
Facebook Now Owns Your Data Forever
From Slashdot:
“Chris Walters writes about Facebook’s new terms of service. ‘Facebook’s terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore. Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.’”
Your Work & Online Services
I always recommend that client’s own their infrastructure, or if they can’t, that they only uses services that provide a method to backup everything they have uploaded or contributed.
As time goes on, the volume of data, effort, and interractions recorded by these online services has reached sometimes epic proportions. Hundreds of photos, comments, code snippets, opinions…the list goes on.
At times the sole digital trace of the information, organization or interaction is online and in the hands of a third party — a third party that one assumes will never go out of business, lose it’s data, or feel that it is in their own self-interest to delete your data.
Thomas Hawk is following the story of Shéhérazade who’s Flickr account that had been visited 150,000 times in the last six months, with 22 testimonials and 200 comments per image, was deleted “without any reason, and without warning”. Flickr may have been well within their right to delete the account, but it would seem that a small percentage of photos caused the entire account to be removed, and the user has no option to backup the content.
Apart from searching for cross-feeds, using the WayBackMachine, or checking for some Google archiving, as in this case the data can never be recuperated.
UPDATE:
This evening I noticed that Data Center Knowledge had a video of Alistair Croll (who I’ve known for quite some time) talking about cloud computing and in order to provide a specific example he mentions Flickr and correctly points out that Flickr “owns the metadata” associated with everything you upload. He goes on to explain that you may be able to move your image, but you cannot move the metadata that went with it, and this now causes us to re-examine what our original content has become and whether we’re willing to lose it’s associated metadata. Is it worth as much to us without it anymore?
His point was definitely specific to its application in cloud computing, but see the interview with Alistair below:
WarCloning: RFID Havoc
From Slashdot:
“After my legal skirmishes with HID a while back, The Register has coverage of my latest RFID work — cloning Passport Cards and Electronic Drivers Licenses from a moving vehicle. Full details will be released at Shmoocon this weekend, but in the meantime there’s video of the equipment and articles all over the place.”
Your Website & Foreign Arrests
From Slashdot:
“According to a story in the IAPP’s Privacy Advisor, Google’s Paris-based global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, is facing criminal charges in Italy for defamation based upon a user’s posting of a video to Google Video. Mr. Fleischer was on his way to the University of Milan for a speaking engagement when he was met by Italian law enforcement officials. As with the 1997 case of Compuserve’s Felix Somm and the 2006 arrest in Texas of BetOnSportsUK’s CEO during a layover on a trip to Costa Rica, this case once again highlights the risks faced by executives and employees of online companies whose activities may be legal and protected in their own countries, but illegal elsewhere in the world. Troubling, and worth watching.”
“Private” Data We Offer To “Public” Sites
It bugs me. All the job & social networking sites that ask for “public” data and then additional “private” data (that will be shared with “supposedly” no one) that is essential to provide us with some form of customized matching or viewing that we just can’t live without.
What brings this to mind? Monster.com, for a second time, has been compromised.
Not only that, but they can’t inform any of their users by e-mail that their e-mail address, username, password (which we ASSUME they’re not using elsewhere with the same e-mail address), name, telephone number, birth date, gender, ethnicity, and in some cases their state of residence have been stolen, for fear of promoting fishing scams.
While I aplaud the posting of this warning by Monster, the bottom line bothers me — particularly because I’ve shared more than I should on more than one occassion…and I, uh…have this blog.
Western Digital 2TB Drive Coming
Looks like Western Digital will be releasing their WD20EADS hard drive which sports 2TB of space with 32MB cache and a 8.9ms seek time at 7200RPM.
With music, photos and video storage becoming an issue (for me at least) this is a welcome newcomer.
Entourage 2008: Omitting the Obvious
I have to admit, I’m slightly baffled.
How exactly the Microsoft team that put together Entourage 2008 for Macs didn’t think to close the window you’ve just hit reply on…I find it hard to believe.
Entourage 2008 is essentially Microsoft Outlook for Macs. When you open a message as a window (you double-click the message in the list) and then you hit reply or forward, it opens the new reply/forward window as you would expect…but it doesn’t close the original message. The message that you obviously no longer have any use for. Just plane odd, and annoying. Hit Command-W to close it.
For anyone making the leap, the o2m software provided by Little Machines works extremely well. If you have massive quantities of e-mail like I did, I wouldn’t try making the move without it.
Why so passionate about Macs?
The question never seems to go away: Why are people so passionate about their Macs?
The answer is simple: Because Apple is passionate about their products.
Well, from a consumer perspective, Steve Jobs is. And this shows through in his passionate keynote speaches at MacWorld. It also explains why Apple’s future is perceived to be linked directly to Jobs’ health.
Today’s keynote speach at MacWorld (symbolized of course by the closing of the online Apple store) will be a lithamus test of how well Apple will do once, eventually, Steve Jobs steps down. We should know the answer to that by tomorrow morning once everyone has had their say.
People like passion. Passion for quality, passion for excellence, and passion for innovation. People want to buy from vendors that care, and it shows. Once you’ve had a vendor that truly cares, it’s hard to go back.
Your New Year’s Resolution: Backups!
Rarely do we see people as on top of their backups as they should be.
Whether corporate or personal, the fact that you may (and I stress that point) only ever need your full backup once or twice, the tendency is for people to deprioritize and cut-costs on backup solutions. The vigilance required to ensure that backups are working every day is another turn-off, but an unmonitored backup is almost guaranteed to be worthless. What some people wouldn’t give to have a month of error-free Backup Exec logs.
The corporate need is clear to everyone, but sometimes the personal need is not. If you have five or ten years worth of personal photos, photos of children, trips and events that can never be replaced, the loss can be devastating.
At home, my MacBook Pro’s Time Machine backup grabs everything that’s current several times a day. Weekly, I backup and archive all the photos and video I’ve taken to a 1TB RAID-1 Gigabit network attached storage. From there, a backup to offsite USB disk is done once or twice a month — that I actually keep offsite.
How can you lose your home data? One customer had a problem with his Windows XP and to correct it, he inserted the HP CD that came with his laptop. That helpfully reinstalled the OS and he lost all of his family photos. It was devastating, his wife was in tears. In spite of the formatting of the drive, we were involved early enough to have him stop using his laptop and send it to us. From there, we recovered at least 80% of the images and videos that had been erased. A happier ending than for most.
Business case in point, six year old blog hosting service Journalspace just lost their entire business (yes, they are shutting their doors) when their database server’s content was erased. They relied on RAID-1 disk mirroring only, which is unbelievably not the first time I’ve heard of people thinking RAID-1 is a backup solution. Ironically, it’s the same disgruntled sysadmin that most likely erased the database that had decided on using RAID-1 for backups. They also have full backups of the HTTP information, which is useless without the database to go with it.
Despite how you may feel about the supervision of the employee or the lack of a disaster recovery plan, the most important thing to come from this is that half a backup, or omitting a portion of your network that should be backed up, can be as much a disaster as if you had no backup at all.
Admirably, Journalspace has been honest about the incident and is now considering open sourcing the code that ran their site. The URL of their site redirects you to a directory named “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper“.
If you were looking for one New Year’s Resolution to stick to this year, this would be it.
Apple OS X 10.5.6 Update Bug
So it looks like 10.5.6 can cause problems for MacBook Pros.
It’s being reported that you can experience a dead backlit screen two reboots after the update. To resolve the problem, use an external display. You’ll need the MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update from April 2008 v. 1.5.1 and to delete the /System/Library/Caches, {user}/Library/Caches and /{Volume}/Library/Cache to get it to work.
Quite the headache.
