Month: January 2013

Posted on
by

Emerald City Comicon’s website was hacked and deleted this week…along with all their backups.

Ouch.

Ticketing is all handled offsite by EventBrite, so tickets and financial info are safe. They’ve redirected their URL to the Facebook page while they rebuild their website.

Lesson learned: Isolate your backups.

I don’t just mean physically. Yes, you need to keep some offsite in case the reason you lost your server is that the building caught fire. But isolate the online access as well. If you back up your site by pushing the backups from your server to a remote location (either self-hosted or cloud storage like Dropbox or Amazon S3), those credentials are stored on your server somehow. What could an attacker do with them?

Consider: If someone breaks into your web server, what else can they do in addition to vandalizing your site? Can they access other databases? Can they hop onto your internal network? Retrieve or alter private files? Can they get at your backups? If so, can they get at all your backups including private documents?

The answers are going to depend on your network and backup setup. But they’re questions you need to start asking.

Posted on
by

You’ve got to love this headline: Giant goat-cheese fire closes Norwegian roadway for six days. Apparently, brunost burns really well, and when a truck carrying it caught fire in a tunnel, responders were unable to get to it for days.

(Incidentally, the stuff is also really good. My family discovered it on a vacation to Disney World, of all places, where they served it in the smorgasbord at the Norwegian restaurant in Epcot.)

This is even weirder than the truck full of meat that caught fire on the 5 near Camp Pendleton a few years back, blocking the entire freeway in an area with no alternate routes for most of the day and stranding all of the Orange County & Los Angeles people trying to get to the first day of Comic-Con.

I’m going to have to start using “flaming goat cheese on a truck!” as a pseudo-curse.

Posted on
by

I was kind of hoping Disney would pick Joss Whedon to direct the next Star Wars movie just to watch fans’ heads explode. But going with the guy who rebooted Star Trek? That’s what I call a close second.

J.J. Abrams Will Reportedly Direct the Next Star Wars Movie

Originally posted on Google+

Posted on
by

View 1: Jupiter is visible, but the moon oversaturates the camera. In the other: The moon is clear, but Jupiter is too dim to see.

I walked out to get the laundry tonight, looked up and saw the moon and Jupiter practically next to each other. I took a quick shot with the phone, then went back in to get a better camera. (Unfortunately, the best camera I have is in the shop right now.) The phone picture is at upper left, the camera picture at lower right.

Nothing makes you appreciate how bright the moon really is like trying to avoid overexposing it without making the second brightest planet disappear.