Like my Sony Bluray player with Java built in? Suddenly all these "smart" devices aren't looking so "smart".

UCLA's Cyclops is a great tool to monitor your own IP space and make sure you know immediately when this sort of this occurs.

Keep up. U32 was released in April. U37 was last week.

Java 6 Updates

Java 6 update 37 also broke the ASA ASDM interface. Works just fine with Java 6 update 33 (update 35 wasn't a real security fix for Java 6). TAC is reviewing and will probably post a bugid soon.

I think the smell factor depends on how used to bicycling and cooling off your body is. I've got 3 guys at work that I bike with, and they're in great bike shape (they do a few centuries a year). We often bike for an hour or so at lunch. They get back to the office and towel off or whatever in this offices, and have no problem during the summer months.

I don't bike as much as I should (once or twice a week usually, sometimes more, somtimes less, not very consistant due to needing to fit in a my work hours, etc.), I sweat a bit more and take a bit to cool off, so I do shower off when I get back.

However, the last week the weather has been plenty cool enough and by pacing myself for the 1.5 miles on city streets to slow down (after 4 miles on the paved and single-track bike trails), I manage to cool off and just towel off and put on some deoderant and I'm also fine.

Can we just enucleate the eyes of offenders? I think it'd stop pretty fast once this punishment was laid down. Worst case, it'd stop repeat offenders.

Don't have to kill them. Enucleation of the eyes would stop this problem for all offenders, and stops repeat offenders.

Found the technical solution, enucleation of the eyes for all offenders. Stops repeat offenders every time.

Sure there is, enucleation of the eyes would stop this problem for all offenders.

Red Hat Linux, Fedora Core, Fedora, MythDora, CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Long version of it:

There were a set of Red Hat Linux 5 CDs sitting at work - let me back up first - A buddy at work had played with Linux a little, but he was still a PC tech at the time doing printers and desktops, and I'd moved over to doing Novell and Microsoft server stuff for work and some Cisco work, but basically we were living paycheck to paycheck, living in studio apartments and no real spare PCs to dink on (each of us just with a PC and a dial-up modem).

I'd been tasked 6 months or so ago when I was a lowly PC tech to clean out this storage room. I'd found this PC, in an IBM AT case (with the big red switch power supply on the right side), that had been sitting there forever. The service tag was very old, and if I recall right, the person who had dropped it off didn't want to pay for the work or whatever, so it was just sitting there. I asked if I could have it, but was told that the customer might still pay for it (yeah right). I ask if I could put a Post-It note on it with the date or something saying I could have it in 6 months. "Sure." So 6 months later, I had a spare PC - 486 DX4-100 with like 4mb of RAM. These were the days of Win95, but this piece of junk had Win3.1 or something on it.

Where I worked had just opened a new office in a bigger city just north of our HQ. One of the things we offer was ISP services to commercial accounts - T1s and nailed-up (always connected) ISDN. We had some BIND DNS servers that had been installed at this office, but I wasn't in charge of them and couldn't touch them. But sitting on the desk by them was a set of Red Hat Linux 5 CDs.

I burned a copy, and my co-worker and I installed my first Linux install on that old 486. I'm pretty sure we didn't even install the GUI (storage and/or RAM limitations), but just CLI. We got Apache and an FTP server working on it.

Great, but we only had dial-up at each of our places. But by that time I was helping maintain the ISP side of things. I think I was stuck recabling and cleaning up the 3 racks of gear we had late on a weekend. I snuck the old 486 case in to one of the training office cubes and put it on the floor, wired up power and ethernet, and told the gal there to be quiet about it and it'd help keep her warm (that office had a bad HVAC setup and it was late fall / early winter). So I gave the Linux box ("Artoo") a public static IP connected to the public ISP switch, and that's how things started.

A little bit later one of the senior server and network engineers gave us two sticks of 8mb RAM (we're still broke these days), and we were able to get the server up to 20mb of RAM. I think about then we started running an IRCd and MUD game, payed $70 to register artoo.net (back when NetSol was the only game in town, and you had to pay for 2 years up front at $35/year). We started hosting domains for friends and family... it was an amazing time and we learned a ton.

We were so lucky too. We used plain auth for everything, including just telnet. Our setup was small enough and we were lucky enough that even with no firewall and horrible stock default settings that we never got owned for that first year.

Sometime during that first year the service center assistant manager (no kind words for him) was having problems with his PC. He blamed hardware, said he'd swapped all kinds of stuff out, and still it was flaking out on him. I asked if I could have his old desktop as he'd just gotten a new one from inventory (they build custom beige boxes). He smugly replied, "sure, but it's just going to keep locking up on you."

I don't recall if we just took the hard drive from the old 486 or if we reinstalled, but basically we got our same setup going on that "new" Pentium 166 (32mb of RAM?) and we just kept learning and hosting more and more. This was still on RHL 5 (probably 5.0, but I don't know, and didn't know anything about updating originally).

We kept getting used parts - but now it was out of retired servers and we had a SCSI controllers and hard drive or two (in the end we had 3 drives in the bays, and two drives sitting on card board at the bottom of the case). I started to earn better money, got nailed-up ISDN at my house a perk with my position, and started adding RAM to the server, eventually maxing it out to 196mb. About that time we really scored and got an old server, which became our second server, "threepio." This allowed us to start doing upgrades without downtime - we could move sites around change DNS, wait for TTLs to expire, and then do work on the original servers.

Anyone remember cheapbytes.com? They're gone now, but I believe we bought unofficial RHL 6 CDs from them.

RHL6 is where we started doing upgrades, but since we didn't have subscriptions it meant we continued to buy the upgrades from cheapbytes.com. We moved to RHL 7, 8, and 9. About that time I actually started convincing customers to use Linux instead of Novell Groupwise or Microsoft Exchange. They'd buy boxed RHL with subscriptions, and we'd set up sendmail and whatever the pop3/imap daemons were in those days. That was a pretty cool time for me - making money with Linux skills (instead of just my Novell CNA and Microsoft MCSE skills).

I'd been dual-booting my work ThinkPad (another nice perk, as otherwise I'd not have been able to afford a laptop) with RH7 & then RH8. But when RH9 came out, I went all in an wiped the drive except for RH9. I was doing almost all Cisco by this time, so I didn't need Windows for most things - we had Citrix servers to remote into and do our time sheets and other corp-specific work. I stuck with RHL9 well after EOL (never had subs anyways), but eventually tried out FC1 at home. I recall it broke a few things - Apache 2 didn't work the same, etc., so I stuck with RH9 until FC3 came out and was found to be really stable (FC2 had big issues as well, so I skipped it).

Everything was upgraded to FC3, and then I continued to skip releases, but partly because I went to CentOS releases based on Fedora release. FC3 to EL4, then FC5 (MythDora somewhere in here for my TV PC) FC6 to EL5. I've kept on EL5 for the majority of my servers. EL5 was getting long in the teeth for desktop, so I went to F9. I skipped F10 except for the MythDora release, then went F11, F12, F14 to EL6.

There are times I'm tempted by Ubuntu or something else (and I check them out briefly in a VM), but I've never installed a distro that wasn't RH-based (RHL, Fedora, RHEL/CentOS) on bare metal. I'm pretty happy for the most part. I just want things to work, and I don't dink nearly as much as I used to. The Fedora releases always annoyed me because of the short lifespan and constant install. At this point I'll probably be on CentOS for a long time - however I nearly jumped ship to Scientific Linux 6 with the very long CentOS6 release delay.

But right now I'm very happy with RHEL6 at work and CentOS6 at home.

Single reason to stop using WinXP: end of vendor security patch support on April 8, 2014. Unless you have air-gapped systems with no sneakernet either, you need to have plans to remove WinXP by that date.

Your math is off a bit. Two oldest Irrigation Districts (MID & TID) in the SJV are 125 years old. Still the best place to grow fruit and nuts.

Too many things make this not possible to not have connected (air gapped). One is OATI and in California there is the CA ISO. Both use the Internet for the agencies to connect to them and both are essential for the Energy Sector to function in an inter-connected grid. Agencies have to get SCADA information into billing/historical systems and conversely schedules have to get into SCADA systems. Both of these intermediate business networks need Internet access to OATI and CAISO. So while SCADA systems are not directly connected to the Internet, through the right amount of vulnerabilities/compromises, they can in theory be remotely accessed. Yes, there are dozens of protections that can and should be in place, but it's not the same as a true air gap.

Can you name one router or switch vendor with which you can get 100% made in the USA. It's impossible these days.

Agreed. The Whitehouse needs to keep their hands off of the Electrical sector and let us continue to do what we're doing.

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff is pandering to Congress and the Whitehouse with untrue statements such as:
“No. 1, I don’t have an effective way to confidentially communicate [cyber threats] to the utilities,” Wellinghoff said. “And No. 2, I have no effective enforcement authority, and I’ve said this for six years now. And I’ve also said I don’t care who has the authority, but Congress should give someone the authority.”

#1 is untrue in regards to the Electrical sector. FERC can communicate confidentially via NERC Cyber Alerts. Additionally NERC has the ES-ISAC private alerts that can be issued for lower-priority items. I received a draft alert from the ES-ISAC just yesterday which will be released in a matter of days
#2 is untrue in regards to the Electrical sector. FERC via the 2005 legislation received the ability to fine $1MM/incident/day and has delegated this to NERC which enforces the FERC Orders 693 (Electrical) and 706 (Cyber CIP) via NERC standards.

There is the Water ISAC which my Irrigation District also has alerts from. I'm not in the Oil or Gas industries, but I imagine FERC should have the same authority over them and they have the Energy ISAC for communications.

Actually, I do. I started my own one-man consulting business and took a quick accounting class. This topic came up (Use Tax). I wasn't aware of this prior to this time, and mostly because I wanted to track everything accurately (as I was claiming business expenses, etc.), I tracked all purchases. This included tracking all purchases which didn't have sales tax so that I could pay use taxes.

Anyway, long story shortened, I was offered a full-time position at one of my clients, and shut down my business.

I still pay Use Tax since that time, as it's the law. It's really not hard to do. I PDF all my purchase receipts, and a side benefit is that I have record of them for tax reasons. I put a copy of all of them without sales taxes into my "Use Tax" folder and total them up at tax time.

Side note: electronic deliver (where there is no physical product delivered) has no tax responsibility.