A common procedure at many companies is to send the backup tapes offsite, on the off chance that if the building burns down or something, the computers will be lost but the data can be restored to replacement hardware and business will pick up apace a day or two later. In the industry, this is referred to as 'disaster mitigation planning'. At smaller companies, either the tapes never get taken offsite (common) or one of the sysadmins takes the tapes home to put them into a safe or strongbox (a bit more common). Larger companies and organizations with more rules …
Gina Trapani over at Lifehacker posted this morning that at least some users of Gmail are showing support for IMAP in addition to the nifty-keen-like-wow AJAX web and POP3 interfaces to the service. Right now, only a small number of users have IMAP support available to them but Google's announced that it'll be opened up to everyone else within a couple of days. To see if you have support for it, log into your Gmail account, click on the Settings link (top-right corner, to the right of your e-mail address), "Forwarding and POP/IMAP", and scroll down to see if …
First off, expect to pay in the neighborhood of $10us per meal if you're in the St. Louis area. Budget about $30us/day if you'll be here on a trip lasting more than two days maybe $20us if you only eat twice per day.
The first restaurant I went to on my trip to St. Louis was the House of Wong (46 North Central; Clayton, MO; 63105; phone 314-726-6291), a new-school Asian restaurant within spitting distance of the hotel. The waitstaff is polite and attentive, the atmosphere very pleasant, and the food excellent. Our crab rangoon was cooked to perfection …
The SWAT team charged with the town of Lake Forest in Washington state was dispatched to the house of a local family after being informed that a heavily armed drug dealer had killed at least one individual and was in possession of a large stock of distributable drugs on the premises. As one would expect, they geared up for a full assault and hit the house like gang busters. There's one important fact which they didn't have at the time, and this fact made all the difference: The original 911 call that alerted police to this house was faked. Computer …
A land in which traffic in the heart of the city is sparse at high noon, there are restaurants on nearly every corner (woe to my waistline and coronary arteries), and the temperature plummeted from 85 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday to a chilly 55 degrees Fahrenheit by the time C- (cow-orker and metalhead extrodinaire) and I left the site and headed for the hotel.
Yes, this is the Doctor again, writing to you from the outskirts of St. Louis, Missouri. The company I work for has sent me abroad once again on assignment, this time for two weeks straight in the …
Gary McKinnon, the cracker famous for infiltrating NASA and United States military networks in search of information pertaining to UFOs was granted leave so that he could appeal his extradition to the House of Lords. McKinnon is facing multiple counts of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (18 USC 1030) as well as the USA PATRIOT Act.. if extradited to the United States, in all likelihood he's facing years at Guantanmo Bay as they try to figure out to their own satisfaction what he was up to. Knowing the state of cyber-law enforcement these days, it'll take …
In London, England, someone posted details about the birthday party of one Stephen Worthy, age 18, on the Net, which was summarily read by some number of people Out There... the day of the party the location was invaded by over one hundred teenagers, who not only crashed the party but trashed the house and sent the poor guy to the hospital via airlift. His father, 53 year old David Worthy, was put on the shelf with a broken nose, provided at the hand of one of the party crashers. It was supposed to be a private 18th birthday party …
Notorious BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay somehow came into possession of the net.domain of an organization called the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), which is said to be one of the Net's foremost anti-piracy organizations. The IFPI's been a thorn in the side of Pirate Bay for years, even going so far as to try to get hold of files on the 'tracker held by the Swedish police force, with no success. Supposedly, black hat tricks weren't needed to get hold of the domain (somebody probably sniped the domain the moment its registration expired), and as result …
For the past couple of weeks, my weekends have been busy enough that there hasn't been much of interest to write about. Not that they weren't interesting interesting, but to be frank talking about driving around all over the place running errands, going to appointments, and things like that doesn't make for terribly gripping reading. This weekend, however, stands out in memory because it was the first really laid back weekend that we'd had in a long while.
On Friday night Lyssa and I went shopping to get the stuff to make a lamb stew, some of which we'd be …
The notorious Russian spammer Alexey Tolstokozhev was found shot to death in his apartment just outside of Moscow earlier this week. Apparently, someone took rather violent offense at all of the advertisements for Viagra that he was hammering out and shot him a number of times, including one head shot. Supposedly, Russian police forces think that this is the trademark of a hitman employed by Russian organized crime, who don't take kindly to people muscling in on their territory (or declining "polite requests" to become part of their territory). It is thought that Tolstokozhev was personally responsible for roughly 30 …
