Those Pesky Drones

So Gatwick Airport in the UK was shutdown for a long time (more than 24 hours) causing everyone to go nutty, because someone was flying a drone in the airports airspace.

The Reg has "A few reasons why cops haven't immediately shot down London Gatwick airport drone menace", which is a thoughtful discussion about the sticky issue that drones cause at this point.

Cisco's new Licensing and why I'm leaving Cisco.

Cisco's new "SMART Licensing" is anything but that.  It needs each switch to call home every month.  If it fails three months in a row, the switch will shut down.  (hows that for "never fail networking"!  This does a couple of things that are inexcusable.

(1) It creates a major threat to the stability of your network.  It becomes the most critical item to monitor in your network (you need to make sure that it's calling home successfully or you go down hard!).

(2) It forces you to do the one thing you NEVER want to do in a production system: allow your management network direct internet access.

(3) It breaks the value proposition you had with cisco when you originally purchased your gear.  I paid an extra penny for their poor TAC support because I knew that I could recoup some of that cost when I was done with the gear by reselling it.  Now when I'm done with a cisco switch, it becomes nothing better then a boat anchor.

You worry about this in your data center?!?!?

My favorite line in a legal agreement for a data center:

"The toilet rooms, urinals, wash bowls and other apparatus shall not be used for any purpose other than that for which they were constructed, and no foreign substance of any kind whatsoever shall be thrown therein."

NSA pwned DE-CIX

The Financial Times's reporter Chris Bryant is claiming that the report by Der Spiegel's Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach, Fidelius Schmid and Holger Stark, points out that the worlds largest exchange DE-CIX, has somehow been "working" with the NSA.  He claims that the NSA has been able to "obtained around 500m communications metadata a month from Germany".

Can't imagine that they are spanning/tapping any ports as the size of the network, number of peers and the number of data centers potentially included would make this a bit on the difficult side, They must be getting some flow data or something... (??)

On a side note, Slashdot notes MITs Immersion Project, that "constructs a map of your associations. Without opening a single message, it gives a clear view of who you connect with. It's a glimpse of some of what the NSA PRISM can do."

crapscatter X-ray

"TSAourOfOurPants" demonstrated how he got around TSA's backscatter X-ray system by simply putting the metal object to the side rather then the front of his body. 

At $100-$200k a unit, and all the hubbub over cancer and embarrassment, are these really the best method to keep public air travel safe?  A good string of methods and procedures should be used, but is this the best bang for the public's buck.  (ok... bang is maybe not the best word to use..)

How to Salvage a Sunken Ship?

With all the news about the wrecked cruse ship Costa Concordia, and the mess it has created, comes an interesting article from the past regarding the huge car transport ship MV Tricolor, who sunk in the English channel and how they salvaged her.

Google ponies up $1/2 BILLION fine to DOJ

As per JetLaw's June7th article, google is looking at coughing up some serious coin (even for google) for showing "illegal online pharmacy ads".

"Google is facing a $500 million dollar fine “in connection with a potential resolution of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice into the use of Google advertising by certain advertisers,” they disclosed in their 10-Q last week."

HuffPosts August 24th article points out that google chose to settle paying the full half billion so that they would not face criminal charges.

"It sends a clear message to both Google and to others that contribute to America's pill problem that they will be held to account for endangering the health and safety of the residents of this district and to persons all across the United States," said Neronha, who described the forfeiture as one of the largest in U.S. history.

It will be interesting to see how this will change how you get your adds included in Googles AdSense.

As a (Jan 24, 2012) followup, slashdot notes that

PC Magazine reports that the U.S. government used convicted con artist David Whitaker, owner of an online business selling steroids and human growth hormone to U.S. consumers, to help federal agents in a sting operation against Google when he began advertising with Google with advertisements that included the statement 'no prescription needed,' clearly violating U.S. laws.

GPS Jamming

David Hambling in New Scientist has a good read on how a $30 GPS jammer can screw just about everything up. Everything including the serious, like airports, to the odd, like ATM machine. GPS is so intertwined in our lives today, that one of these easy to get, very low power devices can do some major hosing. The cure? Bring back LORAN!

“The cost of setting [LORAN] up again would be a fraction of the cost of one GPS satellite, and there’s a total of 31 of them in orbit at the moment. So just for a, a very small extra expenditure it could make sure that that kind of catastrophe could be avoided.” [David Hambling]

Elsewhere:

• The Economist: No jam tomorrow (March 10, 2011)

• On the Media: How to Jam GPS (March 11, 2011)

Unicorn, the other white meat!

Eating Bacon makes you stupid. Or maybe working for the National Pork Board does. Or maybe just being a lawyer does. Or most likely, a combination of all of the above would, as noted today at NPR:

It's official: The National Pork Board says it knows unicorns don't exist.

The industry group says it was only protecting its trademark when it issued cease-and-desist warning to online retailer ThinkGeek for calling a fake unicorn meat product "the new white meat."

The fictional canned meat, described as an "excellent source of sparkles," was an April Fool's prank.

But the 12-page letter from the board's law firm was no joke.

[.... read on for more hilarity...]

- NPR

BTW, Thinkgeek is one of the best online stores out there. You can get cool toys, t-shirts, lots of things you never knew that you desperately need for your computer, and caffeine.

An Oops Moment

An older (April 12, 2010) Znet article notes: "Here’s a small safety tip. When you’re telling a 361-foot long, billion dollar submarine where to go, turn off your iPod. That’s what a Navy JAG investigation determined last week when it announced its analysis of the collision of the USS Hartford fast attack submarine, when the sub bashed into the USS New Orleans a year ago."