The cover story of the current issue of National Journal reports in depth on China’s cyber-aggression against US targets in the government, military, and business. We have discussed China’s actions on numerous occasions over the years. The news in this report is the suggestion that Chinese cyber-attakers may have been involved in major power outages in the US. “Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of US companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to US government officials and computer-security experts…”
[From China's Cyber-Militia ]
Browsing Posts published on May 31, 2008
CNet story about a discussion from Google’s Jeff Dean spotlighting some of the inner workings of the search giant’s massive data centers. Quoting: “‘Our view is it’s better to have twice as much hardware that’s not as reliable than half as much that’s more reliable,’ Dean said. ‘You have to provide reliability on a software level. If you’re running 10,000 machines, something is going to die every day.’ Bringing a new cluster online shows just how fallible hardware is, Dean said. In each cluster’s first year, it’s typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur; thousands of hard drive failures will occur; one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours; 20 racks will fail, each time causing 40 to 80 machines to vanish from the network; 5 racks will “go wonky,” with half their network packets missing in action; and the cluster will have to be rewired once, affecting 5 percent of the machines at any given moment over a 2-day span, Dean said. And there’s about a 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat, taking down most of the servers in less than 5 minutes and taking 1 to 2 days to recover.”
[From A Look At the Workings of Google's Data Centers ]
While rootkits for common operating systems, like Windows, are well known, they haven’t been a security issue for Cisco’s IOS until now.
Get the most from your TomTom, Garmin, Magellan, or other GPS device by learning how to speed satellite lock, send maps from your PC, create POIs, and more from our GPS expert.
[From Top 10 GPS Tips And Tricks]
Did China’s Hackers Shut Off the Lights?— Hackers working on behalf of China’s People’s Liberation Army have penetrated networks controlling electric power grids in the United States, computer security experts believe. And that may have precipitated a massive blackout …
[From Did China's Hackers Shut Off the Lights? (Updated) (Noah Shachtman/Danger Room)]
Dr. Jim writes “The good folks over at the Gartner Group have revealed the top 10 technologies that they believe will change the world over the next four years. The usual suspects including multi-core chips, virtualization, and cloud computing are on the list. Multicore servers and virtualization will mean that firms will need fewer boxes, and apps can be easily moved from box to box (and right out the door to an outsourced data center). Workplace social networks and cloud computing means that the need for a centralized IT department will go away. Firms will no longer need to own/maintain the boxes that they use to run their firm’s apps. With no need to touch a box, there will be no need to have the IT staff co-located with the boxes.”
[From Gartner Reveals Top 10 Technologies For Next Four Years]
One of the most interesting features in Solaris is its ZFS filesystem. Read on for a quick guide to ZFS administration.
