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 …
One Jerry Miller, head of the payroll team for the Administrative Knowledge System project of the Ohio Department of Administrative Services screwed up in a pretty major way - he let one of his interns take a backup tape containing, among other things, data on better than 130,000 employees of the state of Ohio, former employees and contractors of same, and sundry Ohio residents. Seeing as how it was payroll information, I'll leave it to you to guess what kinds of information were encoded on that tape. The tape was stolen from the back of said intern's car in June …
If you've read my website for any length of time, you're probably aware of the fact that I am very much a privacy advocate - I think that it is none of anyone's business what you search for on the Net, what you read, or where you go. Furthermore, it is also a closely held belief of mine that so long as you aren't bothering anyone, aren't causing trouble, and aren't doing anything to anyone of legal age in your country of residence that's hurting anyone (or if it is, it's consensual and has been negotiated for in advance), it is …
When all else fails, try doing what you know shouldn't work. I don't care if the docs say it doesn't work, if the FAQ says it doesn't work, if the books say it doesn't work.. try it anyway. Stuff like BIND is like that.
In trying to get a domain working with BIND, what I wound up doing was changing a record for a single host (www IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) to the FQDN (fully qualified domain name - www.promiseofiris.org. IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx), incrementing the zone's serial number, and then kickstarting the daemon. Lo …
Here's an interesting website that I found during a random search: Have you ever wondered how far the information you've generated has travelled in the universe? Now you can find out - this website will calculate all of the known starts within your light cone, which ones have been reached, and which ones that information has yet to reach, and displays it in the form of an RSS feed that you can import into a reader or aggregator. Nifty.
Here's an interesting website that I found during a random search: Have you ever wondered how far the information you've generated has travelled in the universe? Now you can find out - this website will calculate all of the known starts within your light cone, which ones have been reached, and which ones that information has yet to reach, and displays it in the form of an RSS feed that you can import into a reader or aggregator. Nifty.
Physicists at the University of Rochester have made a breakthrough in data storage technology, namely, they've been able to store an entire image within a single photon using holographic techniques. An image of the UofR logo was cut into a stencil and a beam of laser light was passed through a beam splitter (classic holographic imaging technique); then a single photon from that beam was passed through the cut out portion of the stencil. Due to the nature of quantum mechanics, that photon passed through every region of the cut away part of the stencil (or at least, that's how …
