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The Push For Colbert's "Restoring Truthiness" Rally Screenshot-sm 703

Posted by samzenpus from the giving-truth-the-bump dept.
jamie writes "A grassroots campaign has begun to get Stephen Colbert to hold a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to counter Glenn Beck's recent 'Restoring Honor' event. The would-be rally has been dubbed 'Restoring Truthiness' and was inspired by a recent post on Reddit, where a young woman wondered if the only way to point out the absurdity of the Tea Party's rally would be if Colbert mirrored it with his own Colbert Nation.'"
Security

Searching For Backdoors From Rogue IT Staff 328

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-left-you-a-present dept.
WHiTe VaMPiRe writes "When IT staff are terminated under duress, there is often justification for a complete infrastructure audit to reduce future risk to a company. Here is an exploration of the steps necessary to maintain security." Of course the first piece of advice is to basically assume you've been rooted. Ouch.
Crime

Music Festival Producer Pre-Sues Bootleggers 422

Posted by samzenpus from the nipped-in-the-bud dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, if you even have been *thinking* about bootlegging the Mile High Music Festival this coming weekend in Denver you've already been sued. No joke. Event producer AEG has already filed trademark infringement claims against 100 John Does and 100 Jane Does in anticipation that they're going to bootleg the event. Since none of the sued parties have actually done anything yet, no one's showing up in court to protest the lawsuit either, so it moves forward... meaning that AEG can use it to get all sorts of law enforcement officials (US Marshals, local and state police and even off-duty officers) to go seize bootleg material."

Comment Our Cost (Score 4, Informative) 420

by duplicate-nickname (#33076398) Attached to: Internal Costs Per Gigabyte — What Do You Pay?

Our data center provider offers storage on their FC SAN ( > 150mbps I/O) at a cost of $2.50/GB/month and an additional $2.50/GB for backups. This includes 24x7 support, 99.99% uptime, and is hosted in a tier 3+ data center. My guess is that smaller SANs cost more per GB, but you are getting boned at $30/GB.

On the other hand, if you are requiring some sort of high performance DAS with off site replication, then I bet the cost is considerably higher.
Space

A New Take On the Fermi Paradox 388

Posted by Soulskill from the drake's-game-of-life dept.
TravisTR points out some new research that aims to update and supplement the Fermi paradox — the idea that if intelligent life was as common as we expect, we should have detected it by now. The academic paper (PDF) from scientists at the National Technical University of Ukraine is based on the idea that civilizations can't expand forever on their own. The authors make the assumption that an isolated civilization will eventually die out or go dark through some other means, which leads to some interesting models of intergalactic colonization. "In certain circumstances, however, when civilizations are close enough together in time and space, they can come into contact and when this happens the cross-fertilization of ideas and cultures allows them both to flourish in a way that increases their combined lifespan. ... Bezsudnov and Snarskii say that for certain values of these parameters, the universe undergoes a phase change from one in which civilizations tend not to meet and spread into one in which the entire universe tends to become civilized as different groups meet and spread. Bezsudnov and Snarskii even derive an inequality that a universe must satisfy to become civilized. This, they say, is analogous to the famous Drake equation which attempts to quantify the number of other contactable civilizations in the universe right now."

Comment Not surprising... (Score 4, Informative) 135

by duplicate-nickname (#32849884) Attached to: Hotels Lead the Industry In Credit Card Theft

I recently had a hotel leave one of those quick check-out forms partially slid under my door. The problem was that it had my credit card information printed on it. It would have been quite easy to walk down the how and grab a dozen names, credit card numbers and expiration dates. On top of that, who knows what happens to the forms once you sign them as I highly doubt they go through a shredder.

Submission + - Droid X Has Landed 9 Days Early? (stoopiddog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Well just as with the HTC Droid Incredible, it looks like some lucky ducks have gotten their Droid X over a week ahead of schedule. This of course could just be a fluke, or an order that got changed from an Incredible to the Droid X. It remains to be seen if anyone else will be seeing the Droid eye staring them down ahead of schedule,
Books

Submission + - Why don't we buy sysadmin books anymore? (standalone-sysadmin.com) 4

Submitted by Bandman
Bandman writes: Our needs for good information and documentation have not changed, but the way that we get it has. The ebook revolution has made physical shelves of sysadmin books endangered species. A bigger issue may be that even ebook sales of books related to system administration have not been selling. Somewhere along the line, people stopped buying things like "DNS and Bind" or "Sed & Awk".

Has our need for documentation changed, or just our sources of it?
Businesses

Computer Competency Test For Non-IT Hires? 369

Posted by kdawson from the first-prove-you're-a-human dept.
wto605 writes "As computers are used for more and more vital business functions, small businesses must have office employees who understand the dangers of, and how to recognize and avoid, malware, spam, and phishing. After having been stung by monthly virus cleanups (at $75 an hour) due to an otherwise competent office manager, my parents have realized they need to be aware of their employees' computer skills beyond the ability to type a letter in Microsoft Word (currently the closest thing they have to a test of computer competence). The problem is, as a small business, they have no IT expert who would be able to judge a potential employee's competency. I'm wondering if anyone knows of a good way to test these security/safety awareness skills, such as an online test, a set of questions, etc. I have already pointed them to Sonicwall's Spam and Phishing test, but it definitely does not cover all of the issues facing computer users."

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