Recently in the news
Jed | August 9, 2008I realize not everyone listens to as many podcasts or scours the blogs as fervently as I do, so I figured I’d highlight some of the recent news items I thought interesting:
US Customs & Border Control can steal your gadgets without needing a good reason. This is really scary; not only can they confiscate, but they can keep it as long as they want, look at everything on the device and even share your data with other private companies. And they don’t need reasonable cause to do any of it.
Comcast gets hand smacked by the FCC, wallet not affected. The FCC ruled that Comcast violated federal policy when they degraded users’ bittorrent traffic. The commission, however, chose not to impose any fine or other penalty. Basically, they just said, “Hey, cut it out”. I’m sure Comcast is quaking in their boots.
Amazon Web Services experiences massive outage. The loss of Amazon’s various web services, like it’s S3 storage service, EC2 cloud computing platform, and various other cloud computing services, sends shockwaves through the SaaS world. Maybe building your whole business on the back of Amazon’s services without any uptime guarantee isn’t so smart after all.
Delicious finally gets a facelift and an easier URL. The webpage is pretty slick now and you can use http://delicious.com instead of their old url, http://del.icio.us (I could never remember where the dots went). If you’re not already using Delicious for bookmarks and web clippings, now you have no reason not to start (you can find my Delicious profile here).
System administrator in SF goes “rogue” and refuses to relinquish control. Sorting out all the facts about the Terry Childs vs City of San Francisco case has been tricky. Some say he was holding the system hostage, others hail him as a hero who refused to let management mess up the perfectly tuned and well-running system.
Security researchers discover major internet vulnerability. The problem involves the internet’s DNS servers which are the backbone of the ‘net. DNS servers translate URLs (like “jedfonner.com”) into IP addresses that computers understand. The vulnerability allows hackers to cause a corruption on a DNS server, so that an end user would be rerouted to an arbitrary site. For example, a user could type in Google.com but end up at a location of the attacker’s choosing. DNS server operators are rushing to patch their boxes to close this vulnerability. Click here to see if you are vulnerable.
As the Republicans push for more oil drilling, the NRDC took out a full page ad in the Washington Post (pdf) to further explain the danger and futility of additional undersea drilling. Opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and America’s coastlines to oil drilling will have no real effect on gas prices. It will only boost profits for the oil giants and put our coasts and national forests in danger. If you feel as strongly about this as I do, please help by acting now.
And of course, this bizarre news piece from Santorini, where Nicole and I just vacationed: Santorini “butcher” beheads his girlfriend, steals a police car, runs over some doctors, and then gets gunned down. Oh yea, and he tried to behead a cop and killed his girlfriend’s dog too. But I swear, normally Santorini is a lovely place to visit.
Any other big news items worthy of mention? Please link to them in the comments.
