A recent security breach exposed the plaintext usernames and passwords of almost 100,000 members of IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The usernames and passwords were discovered by a researcher in 100GB of log files inadvertently left open to the public on an IEEE FTP server. Leaving aside for the moment how incredible… Read More: How to misread statistics, ArsTechnica edition »
I have several domains on Go Daddy, including my blog and my primary email domain. As a result, both my blog and my email were nonfunctional for much of the day on September 10, due to the Go Daddy outage you’ve probably already heard about. For the record, I first started using Go Daddy simply… Read More: How not to apologize for a service outage »
In June, I wrote about a technique used by spammers to harvest names and email addresses of “live” targets for their spam. In a nutshell: you post an ad to Craigslist; the spammer sends you an automated email which makes you think that maybe the sender is interested in your ad; you send a response,… Read More: New technique from the Craigslist spammers »
Annie and Perry Klebahn had a horrible experience sending their unaccompanied minor daughter on United, very similar to the experience my wife and I had sending our daughter on Continental three years ago (before Continental and United merged). Just like I did, they are trying to agitate for change, to make things better in the… Read More: Please sign this petition for United Airlines to improve the… »
UPDATE [2012-10-03]: RightScale has ongoing issues with the stability of their command-line tools. In particular: rs_run_right_script sometimes fails with a timeout error. You can’t just retry, because sometimes the script you were trying to queue was queued despite the error, and there’s no way to tell. rs_run_right_script sometimes fails with an error “Failed to process… Read More: Auto-negotiation of pool updates in RightScale VMs »
Bob Sutton writes about how earlier this summer, United Airlines (which is the merger of the old United and Continental) lost a 10-year-old girl. Aside from the exact details of how they lost her, the story is surprisingly similar to what happened to my daughter in 2009. It is depressing, but not surprising, to learn… Read More: Continental (now United) up to its old tricks, losing children… »
UPDATED 9/4/2012: I accidentally had a hard-coded AWS_VOLUME_IDS setting in the script, which I inserted while debugging my own copy of the script and forgot to remove before posting the script here. I’ve removed it. D’oh! UPDATED 8/19/2012: The logic in my original script for determining which backups to preserve was incorrect. It is updated… Read More: My entry in the “nightly snapshot backups of EBS volumes”… »
At my current gig, we’re hosting our blog on Amazon EC2, at least until we have become so wildly successful that a single EC2 instance can’t keep up with our blog traffic. We wanted to make sure we wouldn’t lose our blog in case of an EC2 failure, so we configured our (Linux) blog instance… Read More: Yes, you CAN use attach a Linux EBS root volume… »
In 2008, I wrote about the Macular Degeneration Association (MDA), a questionable charity whose actual mission seemed to be more about lining the pockets of its founder and his cronies than about supporting macular degeneration research or people suffering with the disease. The charity doesn’t look any better now than it did then. Here’s an… Read More: What’s the Macular Degeneration Association up to nowadays? »
UPDATE [2013/01/08]: As of the recent Galaxy S III update to Jelly Bean (Android 4.1), most of the text below is obsolete. The connect-within-3-seconds limitation appears to no longer exist, and you can connect to and disconnect from the phone multiple times without unplugging and replugging it. I’ve tested mtpfs, go-mtpfs, and simple-mtpfs with my… Read More: Using the Samsung Galaxy S III with Linux »