The political maverick from 2000 has reshaped himself in 2008. His appearances on The Daily Show have declined, and with the current concerns surrounding the fiscal solvency of the USA and corresponding financial system he’s suspended his campaign. There’s numerous bits of analysis, including what I find the most telling article over at The Huffington Post. If a major event like a fiscal crisis where concerns over how to spend up to $700 billion (at once, it could be more than that over the lifespan if some securities are sold) cause him to need a time-out, I’m not sure he’s up for a 4 year rollercoaster ride as President. While action vs a lengthy deliberative process can be harmful if not balanced properly, it sure seems the right debates are happening in DC, including one robo-dialer call today asking me to call my local congressman (including his name and local office phone number). If McCain is unable to get a grasp on the deliberative process on “The Hill”, how has he lasted so long in the Senate? The challenges we face as a country certainly require a long-view. There’s plenty of analysis regarding the bailout package that can be found. We shall see if this is a bright move, or as I believe, a desperate move on his behalf.
After doing some test work with some various types of trim, it turns out that the installation of Azek wood trim is the best thing to do these days. It avoids the challenges of painting and rotting that may happen with wood trim. Personally, I’m in love outside of the expensive nature of the wood trim.
If you are like me, and don’t want to watch streaming video in a browser window, and would rather use VLC, you can find links such as http://cnn-cnnlive-2-primary.wm.llnwd.net/cnn_cnnlive_2_primary?MSWMExt=.asf by carefully tracking the browser path. Looks like they’re using Limelight for this. Interesting.
Personally, I find the pick interesting because he has issues staying on message and can easily get himself in trouble with words, but it does provide balance to Obama who is well polished in his speaking and manners. Also, our current president isn’t exactly known for being a perfect orator. We’ll see if the Romney prediction is correct in the future.
Not shocking for those of us in the industry, but cybercrime (aside from trying to arrange underage sex and child pornography cases) get very little attention. There’s a report that was done by a few places, the report article is here with the Full PDF available for your perusal. Interesting to think about laws put on the books, but the lack of resources made available to prosecute new laws. Perhaps something like PayGo when it comes to these types of investigations. The assymetrical battle rages on. The internet brought you more than low-cost communications with family and friends, the cost is lower for the bad guys as well.
So, the long wait is coming to a close. It is expected that next Friday there will be a ruling from the FCC that comcasts actions with regard to blocking file sharing software is outside of the scope of regular network managment tasks. This will be interesting as we may see an increase in the peer to peer traffic on networks as the DPI p2p mitigation devices get removed from a variety of networks. It may also mean the death of a few vendors or at least consolidation in the industry. Article link can be found here.
So, our Apple TV started having some problems, would be laggy when playing video across the network (we have the “Smart” sync enabled). So I decided to do a Factory Restore since I did not hear the sound of the drive clicking or anything else that would indiciate a hardware failure.
After that, it restored with the 1.1 software, not the 2.0.2 software. So we needed to do a ~20 minute download to get that back in sync, following some major hatred with the device off-and-on over the next 24 hours trying to get the TV shows to sync again. Turns out amongst the other problems, the Apple TV thought it was in Canada as well as I needed to reauthorize the iMac it syncs with with ITMS. It didn’t count against our block of authorized comptuers (we have several, including two macbooks - the 14″ dual usb type, two intel iMacs and one MacBook Pro).
I’m utterly frustrated that the factory restore did not do the 2.0.2 software and the upgrade did not propogate a new factory install/reset ala TiVo. Lets see what happens and if the device wishes to actually die in the next few weeks. It would make me very sad since we stopped paying for satellite service a few months ago to save on costs, and instead shifted that expenditure to ITMS money.
Akamai has posted their State of the Internet report. Some of you may find this a worthwhile read.
I have come across two articles that have been well worth reading in the past 12 hours. The first is a general article on the possible security implications of international travel and your personal electronic devices. The second is related to two blackouts that may be related to network intrusion activity. Both are well worth the read.
Well, this isn’t exactly as bad as it sounds actually, but it’s worth noting that some people have not learned from the aol.com and other dns server redirections in the past. What happens is someone submits a web form or spoofs an email and it moves the dns for your domain to some other servers. In this case, the fallout will be felt for up to two days by some people. This can seriously hurt your reputation as folks may think that the security of your relationship with your registrar is congruent with your overall security strategy. Most (All?) registrars allow you to put your domain in some form of a locked mode. My domain (nether.net) has the following flag set: clientTransferProhibited, clientUpdateProhibited, clientDeleteProhibited
It may be time to review what your settings are and make sure history does not repeat itself on your domains.