48874393
submission
snydeq writes:
Stings, penetration pwns, spy games — it's all in a day’s work along the thin gray line of IT security, writes Roger A. Grimes, introducing his five true tales of (mostly) white hat hacking. "Three guys sitting in a room, hacking away, watching porn, and getting paid to do it — life was good," Grimes writes of a gig probing for vulnerabilities in a set-top box for a large cable company hoping to prevent hackers from posting porn to the Disney Channel feed. Spamming porn spammers, Web beacon stings with the FBI, luring a spy to a honeypot — "I can't say I'm proud of all the things I did, but the stories speak for themselves."
48765263
submission
snydeq writes:
Andrew Oliver offers further proof that drunk driving and on-site servers don't mix. Oliver, who had earlier announced a New Year's resolution to go all-in on cloud services, had that business strategy expedited when a drunk driver, fleeing a hit-and-run, drove his SUV directly into the beauty shop next door to his company's main offices. 'Our servers were down for eight hours, and various services were intermittent for at least 12 hours. Had things been worse, we could have lost everything. Like our customers, we needed HA and DR. Moreover, we thought, maybe our critical services like email, our website, and Jira should be in a real data center. This made going all-cloud a top priority for us rather than "when we get to it.",' Oliver writes, detailing his company's resultant hurry-up migration plan to 100 percent cloud services.
48741611
submission
snydeq writes:
Born or made, network admins share certain defining characteristics. Deep End's Paul Venezia offers nine: 'I hope that this insight into the extremely logical, yet consistently dangerous world of the network admin has shed some light on how we work and how we think. I don't expect it to curtail the repeated claims of the network being down, but maybe it's a start. In fact, if you're reading this and you are not a network admin, perhaps you should find the closest one and buy him or her a cup of coffee. They could probably use it.'
48679523
submission
snydeq writes:
Serdar Yegalulp offers a long view of the current evolution of Linux, one that sees the open source OS firmly entrenched as a cornerstone of IT, evolving in almost every direction at once — including most demonstrably toward the mobile and embedded markets. 'If Linux acceptance and development are peaking, where does Linux go from up? Because Linux is such a mutable phenomenon and appears in so many incarnations, there may not be any single answer to that question. More important, perhaps, is how Linux — the perennial upstart — will embrace the challenges of being a mature and, in many areas, market-leading project. Here's a look at the future of Linux: as raw material, as the product of community and corporate contributions, and as the target of any number of challenges to its ethos, technical prowess, and growth.'
48590371
submission
snydeq writes:
The U.S. health care industry is undergoing several massive transformations, not the least of which is the shift to interoperable EHR (electronic health records) systems. The ONC's Doug Fridsma discusses the various issues that many health care IT and medical providers have raised regarding use of these systems, which are mandated for 2014 under the HITECH Act of 2004, and are all the more important in light of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act , aka Obamacare. Key to the transition, says Fridsma, is transforming health IT for EHRs into something more akin to the Internet, and less like traditional ERP and IT systems. 'I think what we're trying to do is the equivalent of what you've got in the Internet, which is horizontal integration rather than vertical integration,' Fridsma says. 'We've done a lot of work looking at what other countries have done, and we've tried to learn from those experiences. Rather than trying to build this top down and create restrictions, we're really trying to ask, "What's the path of least regret in what we need to do?"'
48478781
submission
snydeq writes:
InfoWorld's Roger Grimes interviews a longtime friend and cyber warrior under contract with the U.S. government, offering a fascinating glimpse of the front lines in the ever-escalating and completely clandestine cyber war. From the interview: 'They didn't seem to care that I had hacked our own government years ago or that I smoked pot. I wasn't sure I was going to take the job, but then they showed me the work environment and introduced me to a few future coworkers. I was impressed. ... We have tens of thousands of ready-to-use bugs in single applications, single operating systems. ... It's all zero-days. Literally, if you can name the software or the controller, we have ways to exploit it. There is no software that isn't easily crackable. In the last few years, every publicly known and patched bug makes almost no impact on us. They aren't scratching the surface.'
48445465
submission
snydeq writes:
Changes in Microsoft's forthcoming upgrade to Windows 8 reveal the dark underbelly of Microsoft's evolving agenda, one that finds pieces of Windows 8 inexplicably disappearing and a new feature that allows Microsoft to track your local searches cropping up, InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard reports. 'As Windows 8.1 Milestone Preview testers push and prod their way into the dark corners of Windows 8.1 "Blue," they're finding a bunch of things that go bump in the night. From new and likely unwelcome features, to nudges into the Microsoft data tracking sphere, to entire lopped-off pieces of Windows 8, it looks like Microsoft is changing Windows to further its own agenda.'
48443979
submission
snydeq writes:
From the quiz: "Are you a devoted disciple of computational logic or just a chimp who types those funny brackets and variable names until the thing seems to work? Because, let's face it, only some of us can be artists who craft elegant, lithe structures out of data and logic. The rest are just throwing code together to see what sticks. This quiz — the third in our series of Programming IQ tests — is here to separate the former group from the latter. If you haven't passed our first two iterations, Round 1 and Round 2 are still here awaiting your acumen, as is our "Hello, world" programming language quiz, for testing your programming polyglot mettle."
47936097
submission
snydeq writes:
Open centers of grassroots innovation, hackerspaces offer opportunities to source talent, create goodwill, and push technology forward, writes Open Software Integrators' Phil Rhodes. 'I had the good fortune to be able to attend Maker Faire North Carolina this weekend in Raleigh, N.C. ... At this local Maker Faire, I was struck by the number of hackerspaces represented. The energy, buzz, and activity around their booths was captivating,' Rhodes writes. 'Amid all this buzz, it dawned on me that everyone should be excited about hackerspaces and what they represent, both for their local communities and the world. Although the hackerspace movement is growing rapidly, many people are still not familiar with them, where they are located, or what they do. So let's examine the hackerspace world and explore why you should give a crap about it.'
47891333
submission
snydeq writes:
InfoWorld's Riyaj Shamsudeen offers an in-depth look at Oracle Database 12c, which he calls a 'true cloud database,' bringing a new level of efficiency and ease to database consolidation. 'In development for roughly four years, Oracle Database 12c introduces so many important new capabilities in so many areas — database consolidation, query optimization, performance tuning, high availability, partitioning, backup and recovery — that even a lengthy review has to cut corners. Nevertheless, in addition to covering the big ticket items, I'll give a number of the lesser enhancements their due,' writes Riyaj Shamsudeen. 'Having worked with the beta for many months, I can tell you that the quality of software is also impressive, starting with a smooth RAC cluster installation. As with any new software release, I did encounter a few minor bugs. Hopefully these have been resolved in the production release that arrived yesterday.'
47795707
submission
snydeq writes:
Meetings, know-nothing managers, productivity metrics — InfoWorld's informal developer poll sheds light on what's standing between you and the next generation of great software. 'No one is happy with how quickly developers change the world, and everyone wants the code to flow like water from a fire hose, but no one wants to give developers what they need to get the job done. The same boss who wants the job finished yesterday won't hire more people, buy faster machines, or do any of the dozens of things that make it easier for programmers to just program. Here are 15 real-world roadblocks to programming progress, each of which is getting in the way of building the next generation of software. Our informal survey was surprisingly easy. When the developers suspected they were talking with a sympathetic ear, they poured out their complaints.'
47306681
submission
snydeq writes:
Colleagues can be both allies and adversaries, and InfoWorld's Dan Tynan discusses how IT can cope with the eight worst types of coworkers. 'These are people you deal with on a regular basis, largely because you have no choice. But even when their intentions are good, they can still cause you all manner of grief. They range from BYOD Betty, who insists on using her iPhone at work (but wants you to support it) to Cloudy Claudette, who's running her own shadow IT organization with the help of public cloud providers. And if Legacy Larry is your CEO, you might still be using hardware or software that hasn't been updated since the grunge era.'
47091585
submission
Freshly Exhumed writes:
Add another global crisis to the list, courtesy of the recently completed SCS2013 Conference in Reykjavík, Iceland: 'Each year, 12 million hectares of land, where 20 million tonnes of grain could have been grown, are lost to land degradation. In the past 40 years, 30 percent of the planet’s arable (food-producing) land has become unproductive due to erosion', according to a new paper released May 30 by the World Resources Institute.' Hard to have a sense of humus about that.
47091539
submission
snydeq writes:
First looks at Windows 'Blue' have revealed an upgrade composed of cosmetic fixes, suggesting that Microsoft may be blowing its chance to turn the tide on Windows 8 blow back, and make good on its promise to truly 'rethink' Windows 8 with the release of Windows Blue. As a result, InfoWorld has issued an open letter to Microsoft to consider Windows 'Red' — what InfoWorld is calling a 'serious plan' to fix the flaws of Windows 8, one that could rescue Microsoft's currently flagging promise to deliver a modern computing experience on both PCs and tablets.
46949883
submission
snydeq writes:
The Squeaky Wheel's Brian Katz offers a refreshingly simple take on the buzz around BYOD in business organizations these days: 'BYOD is only an issue because people refuse to realize that it's just about ownership — nothing more and nothing less.' A 'hidden issue' hiding in plain view, BYOD's ownership issue boils down to money and control. 'BYOD is pretty clear: It's bringing your own device. It isn't the company's device or your best friend's device. It's your device, and you own it. Because you own the device, you have certain rights to what is on the device and what you can do with the device. This is the crux of every issue that comes with BYOD programs.'
