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Single celled - check.
Size of a pancake - check.
Bacteria - no.
Two out of three isn't bad.

The library of congress can now fit onto 4 hard drives with room to spare. Assuming that number is uncompressed, one should do.

You can do your own web search for giant pancakes, it lacks sufficient challenge to be interesting.

Geez people. Why not do some research before jumping on the bashing bandwagon?

After 5 seconds of Googling (give or take, didn't have a stopwatch):
http://searchconsumerization.techtarget.com/Apple-seeks-to-better-iPad-iPhone-security-via-FIPS-140-2-compliance

"Apple has submitted three cryptographic modules that are in the modules in process queue for FIPS 140-2 compliance..."

Also, there are apps for that.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/04/prweb3829534.htm
http://www-05.ibm.com/no/news/events/tgif/tgif_lotus_in_a_mobile_world_070510.pdf

I used to respect this site and it's posters.

Aiming to break into the government market on an enterprise level, Apple has submitted three cryptographic modules that are in the modules in process queue for FIPS 140-2 compliance, according to Easter. Two of the modules in the testing process are specifically designed for iPhone and iPad security, and the third is a more generic module, he said.
Apple seeks to better iPad, iPhone security via FIPS 140-2 compliance

OS X has had a basic AV for 2 years now.

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/answer/What-are-the-Mac-OS-X-Snow-Leopard-antivirus-features

So, yes you have. You just didn't know about it.

That was just one of the GSD failures. There was the Texas Data Center fiasco, which is now being re-bid.

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/2240031466/Texas-rebids-IBM-data-center-consolidation-project

I'm sorry but IBM GSD is full of incompetent buffoons and making Ms. Rometty CEO will drive IBM into the ground. I would sell your stock immediately.

Template as in "base model" I simply used to do what I call "ReVeRsE-PsyChoLoGy" on your profanity with (& there's no doubt you resorted to profanity as trolls often do, illogical adhominem attack style that it is)... see this definition here & the pertinent quote to reinforce it to you:

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/definition/template

"A document in which the standard opening and closing parts are already filled in is a template that you can copy and then fill in the variable parts."

* So, do YOU get it now, thick-skull? I still invite you to disprove my original post you used an adhominem illogical attack against saying "Fuck off troll" to me in... disprove its points.... you CAN'T, you KNOW IT, & I know it.

APK

P.S.=> Because that's EXACTLY what I did to your profanity, putting it in the string portion to be reversed (your trollspeak/trollanguage, here -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2380246&cid=37107532 and YES, IT WORKED, PERFECTLY, despite your b.s. mistake it did not... lol! )...

... apk

Here's the actual article.

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/1140155/Massachusetts-CIO-defends-move-to-OpenDocument http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/massachusetts-open-source-fight-becomes-partisan/506 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/top-national-advocate-for-the-disabled-sets-terms-for-endorsement-of-opendocument-format/2163 (among many others)

Thanks.
You seem more reasonable than the other reply; I'll answer his question here: As a disclaimer to any encryption or "hiding" scheme, yes, man#1 hides and man#2 will figure out how to unhide, and thus no human obfuscation system is 100% unhackable. In the absense of DRM-like things (or deeper knowledge of Win32 API that must exist to undermine* 0123456's rebuttal) then Whac-a-mole what we'd end up playing with the hiders... a game where we win if we don't get tired of finding some new place that "they" can't think of hitting. In my primitive awareness, I would say 'have FF set up a new Windows system user like Microsoft's service named similarly to "RemoteLogin Helper object[random4digitID#]"' and remove rights to read that key except for that installer. To read the Firefox Key, FF can talk this custom engineered randomly-named service that would refuse to respond to anything but FF; many programs already use helper services like that.

Your run-of-the-mill company would NOT chase after fruit hanging that much higher than Mozilla's current model of "hey, someone left the door wide open, so we can't guess the neighbors left were the ones who put a newly hacked component here because we do no auditing and signed logging / tracking of our own." This is not making some NSA-level scheme; and we can claim that anyone still screwing with our 'encryption' is curcumventing DMCA and can be threatened with the feds. Though hackers will continue to break through like with any other browser, we'll ward off the legit intruders who currently think they're doing you a favor because the extension model is not yet turnkey-based. So we're making our own Apple-like walled garden. That works for them!

* Like what commercial Antivirus programs have been doing for years regardless of the yearly creation of thousands of new malicious programs. If AVs can to protect themselves against rogue programs, specifically meant to shut down and uninstall them prior to running amok, then somewhere in Windows there are APIs for that that you can be sure enforce Windows' own license integrity and validation. QED.

I may not be much of a grammarian, but shouldn't the title read "PC Era Forecast To End In 18 Months"? "Forecasted" just looks and sounds ugly to me. It's an irregular verb and thus disobeys some rules.
Cite: Forecast or forecasted? (itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com)
Cite: English Verb - To Forecast (writingenglish.com)

Apart from that pedantic observation, I concur with those suspicious of the source and methodology. Market researchers are interested in selling reports to those interested only in high margin expanding markets.

Anecdote: My father finally decided to upgrade his computing experience and after much thought and consultation we decided replace his ancient desktop PC with a 15 inch laptop. This combined the speed he wanted with a screen size which meant that he and my mother would not have to squint at the new screen.

BTW, as part of the consultation process, my father asked me "What's the difference between a program on my computer and an app?" Good question.

They got hardware which is what they've wanted for a long time. Sun has a wide range of great hardware and a very solid OS.

While Oracle got an OS, Solaris, Solaris like many other unices is losing marketshare to Linux, which may be why Oracle used Red Hat Linux as a basis for it's own distro.

Falcon

I'll answer my own question: http://media.techtarget.com/TheServerSideCOM/downloads/James_Gosling_Interview.mp3

Actually Ubuntu Server makes gains at SUSE Linux' expense. And Canonical, IBM: Expanded Ubuntu DB2 Cloud Partnership Coming.

While I'd use Ubuntu on my desktop, I plan on installing it on my MacBook Pro, I don't know which distro I'd use for a server. I've got a PC that's almost 5 years old and I want to upgrade it as a server when I do I may try different distros.

They run it as a desktop OS that replaces Windows and requires minimal fucking around to set up and use... And there are a lot of people (myself included) who would be running Windows now if Ubuntu weren't so functional out of the box.

I'd be using MS Windows if MS weren't such dicks. I switched from Windows, to Linux first then Mac OS X, because I was sick and tired of crashes and don't like being treated like a criminal. Which is what Activation and WGA/WPA do.

Falcon

... and totem is a GS cookie?

Because publicly traded companies are reactionary.

Until Google stoop up and admitted to getting owned, businesses would say it was only worthwhile to defend against automated worms and viruses. That targeted attacks can get your company owned is not news to anyone in the security space, but justifying the monitoring and defensive measures to detect and respond to malicious attackers was tough without datapoints showing that attacks like that actually happen.

Unless you're Richard Bejtlich, who wrote the book on that. http://www.taosecurity.com/books.html

Here's a great overview article by him on APT.

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/magazinePrintFriendly/0,296905,sid14_gci1516312,00.html

Actually, both of you are making distinctions that are meaningless. The true goal was to get bought out by IBM, same as Platform Solutions Inc

IBM Corp. and plug-compatible mainframe startup Platform Solutions Inc. (PSI) moved their battle from the courtroom to the negotiating table, and now Big Blue plans on buying its onetime adversary.

Since late 2006, the two have been engaged in a lawsuit in which IBM sued PSI for patent infringement on its z/OS operating system. In early 2007, PSI countersued, alleging that IBM had shut out competition by coupling z/OS with its own hardware.

Since then, motions have been filed back and forth, but nothing has been settled. Until Wednesday, July 2, that is, when IBM announced it would acquire privately owned PSI. Financial details of the deal have not been disclosed

Sound familiar?

The difference is that PSI had some proprietary stuff that IBM could use. Turbo Hercules doesn't so no buy-out.
from the USPO

United States Patent Application 20060085599
Kind Code A1
Woffinden; Gary A. ; et al. April 20, 2006
Processing of self-modifying code in multi-address-space and multi-processor systems

Abstract

A method and system of storing to an instruction stream with a multiprocessor or multiple-address-space system is disclosed. A central processing unit may cache instructions in a cache from a page of primary code stored in a memory storage unit. The central processing unit may execute cached instructions from the cache until a serialization operation is executed. The central processing unit may check in a message queue for a notification message indicating potential storing to the page. If the notification message is present in the message queue, cached instructions from the page are invalidated.

From IBM: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/24560.wss

ARMONK, NY - 02 Jul 2008: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it has acquired Platform Solutions, Inc. (PSI), a privately held technology company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. PSI's technologies and employees will become part of the IBM System z business unit of the IBM Systems and Technology Group. Financial terms were not disclosed.

PSI's technologies and skills, along with its intellectual capital, will become part of IBM's long-term mainframe product engineering cycles and part of IBM's future product plans.

"IBM's strategy is to continually evolve our mainframe technology to help our clients tackle the most demanding business issues," said Anne Altman, General Manager, IBM System z. "We will continue to move the mainframe forward through both IBM innovation and by acquiring new technologies. We welcome Platform Solutions, Inc. and look forward to collaborating with them."

"We are pleased to become part of IBM, knowing IBM has the industry's most comprehensive vision for the future direction of enterprise computing, and has the requisite technologies to realize that vision," said Michael Maulick, President and CEO, Platform Solutions, Inc. "This acquisition makes the most sense for our companies -- to collaborate on future technology offerings and maximize our combined knowledge and skills for the benefit of IBM clients globally."

As part of this acquisition, both IBM and PSI dropped their respective claims against each other.

From a few pages into the write-up (http://www.nanex.net/20100506/FlashCrashAnalysis_Part4-1.html):

What benefit could there be to whomever is generating these extremely high quote rates? After thoughtful analysis, we can only think of one. Competition between HFT systems today has reached the point where microseconds matter. Any edge one has to process information faster than a competitor makes all the difference in this game. If you could generate a large number of quotes that your competitors have to process, but you can ignore since you generated them, you gain valuable processing time. This is an extremely disturbing development, because as more HFT systems start doing this, it is only a matter of time before quote-stuffing shuts down the entire market from congestion.

Definition of a DDOS (from http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid14_gci557336,00.html):

a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one in which a multitude of compromised systems attack a single target, thereby causing denial of service for users of the targeted system. The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, thereby denying service to the system to legitimate users.

Quote stuffing looks like a DDOS to me, and should automatically be illegal. Of course, there are several technical differences that any lawyer could point out,thus making quote stuffing legal, so I'd recommend outlawing it just to be sure. Not often I get to say, in all seriousness, "There ought to be a law." {Most situations do not require new laws, only the proper application of existing laws.}

Well, since iPads don't use IBM hard drives, pixie dust won't help.

Unless you think Jobs is actually growing iPads, in which case pixie dust might work there, too. Or not...

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid14_gci1191993,00.html
A couple of years old but does anyone have an update? Or a better idea?
---
Duh.

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid14_gci1506909,00.html
Nothing really new, you just want your OS to be 'Unix' like when one app or new networked lifestyle cloud is compromised.
You really hope your fav 'application' does not open up your OS and start pumping your personal data out.
Apple seems itoy distracted, Windows seems Win7 PR happy.

>Ask any drone in a large company, Open Source is bad news because there are law suits against it.
There are lawsuits against every mega-tech company too.

IBM http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/mainframe-blog/ibm-faces-another-anti-trust-lawsuit-in-europe-over-mainframe-practices/

Microsoft http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20000597-75.html

Oracle http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/stock-market-news-story.aspx?storyid=201003291158dowjonesdjonline000278&title=rimini-street-files-countersuit-against-oracle

Lawsuits are practically a standard expense for most of these companies.

e (damn /. and its short subject field).

Our state CISO was fired when he got back from the conference because he spoke about a hacking incident to the state's DOT site which allows one to schedule driver's exams. Apparently, it was initially presumed the attack came from Russia but was later found to have come from Philadelphia where a driving school had exploited a vulnerability in the web site to schedule more driving tests than there were allotted slots.

By exploiting this vulnerability, the driving school was able to close all available slots EXCEPT for the school so everyone else had to wait up to 6 weeks to schedule a test.

He was a scheduled presenter with over 24 years in IT in both the public and private sector. He was recognized, according to the RSA schedule, as "one of the most high-profile experts in the field of securing the data of American citizens today."

As you read the comments after the article, it's clear that some folks with knowledge of the subject insist he went out of bounds on the subject while others consider what he did to be a normal part of the IT security process.

I'm only posting this as it does relate to the overall RSA conference. Note that the web site indicated will probably prevent reading the article after a certain time has passed so read it now. In addition, here are two other sites which talk about the firing:

Site one

Site two

Further, here is an article which talks to the firee after he became the state's first CISO and what he had to contend with.

Linux is for the desktop, Solaris is for servers. You can't use Linux on servers, because it has too many bugs.

At least that's what this NASA administrator said in 2006: http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid39_gci1157924,00.html

In fact, during the same time period a guy named Craig Gentry solved a major open crypto problem --- namely, how to compute on encrypted data --- and it got a fraction of the press coverage.

This was nothing fundamentally new; google "secure multiparty computation." Or, FTFA, Gentry's technique requires a "trillion times" more computational power than existing techniques.

Not that I think his work wasn't awesome-- I've already queued the paper in my reading list. All I'm claiming is that he didn't "solve a major open problem".

As a researcher in the academic side of the Information Security field, I can't help but notice a significant increase in the level of puffery and misleading promotion of research results. Self-promotion obviously isn't new, it's just that as the amount of newspaper-assisted promotion increases, the level of accuracy has dropped significantly. And more importantly, researchers seem much less apologetic about it. It's generating some real blowback.

The best recent example I can think of is Vanish, a cryptographic system for "destroying" data that was proposed out of University of Washington. It's not just that the system was broken a few days after it was presented, it's that this relatively minor result got more press than all of the perfectly legitimate crypto-systems research that was going on at the time. In fact, during the same time period a guy named Craig Gentry solved a major open crypto problem --- namely, how to compute on encrypted data --- and it got a fraction of the press coverage.

Not that I'm saying these researchers specifically asked to have their invention described as an "effectively perfect" solution to preventing spam --- which I guarantee you 100% it is not --- but that by going out on a University-encouraged PR junket, they've more or less encouraged this kind of coverage. This kind of stuff is damaging; people should describe their work as what it is. They've developed a technique that is highly effective at filtering /current-gen/ spam generators, in the lab. It won't stop all spam, and it's not effectively perfect, since spamfiltering is by nature an arms race. But of course that's not how it's going to be presented. In the long run this'll just make people more jaded with our field.

Alcatel-Lucent's 802.11 wireless access points and controllers are OEM'd from Aruba Networks. This is interesting and relevant because Aruba also has a big "green island" initiative.

It's all documented in the Library of Congress. In fact, a lot of information is contained in the Library of Congress. Ten Terabytes: and if each bit was a "0" or "1" in 12-point font, laid end-to-end, it would stretch to the Apophis asteroid and back nine times (at its closest point to Earth).

Seriously, what's this "1 in 250,000" chance of hitting the Earth? It's only going to pass once, and it'll either hit or miss. So it's one in 2.

That's why it's important for lottery money to go toward education. These scientists can't calculate probabilities!

Ironic then, that as I win the lottery every other time I play (the odds being 1:2) the education fund will no doubt go into the red delivering my payouts... Take that, book learnin'!

It's all documented in the Library of Congress. In fact, a lot of information is contained in the Library of Congress. Ten Terabytes: and if each bit was a "0" or "1" in 12-point font, laid end-to-end, it would stretch to the Apophis asteroid and back nine times (at its closest point to Earth).

Seriously, what's this "1 in 250,000" chance of hitting the Earth? It's only going to pass once, and it'll either hit or miss. So it's one in 2.

That's why it's important for lottery money to go toward education. These scientists can't calculate probabilities!

Unable or unwilling admins is more like it.

A side effect of buying into the so-simple a monkey could run it sales pitch from Microsoft: You end up with monkeys that can only stroke the big boss telling him or her to sit tight till the next free t-shirt^H^H^H^H^H^H^H service pack. As these monkeys are able to bullshit their way into training positions, they will do what any other weak or insecure monkey will do: bogart their already limited knowledge. Thus with each iteration you get progressively more ignorant monkeys, that have to rely and specialize more and more in social engineering and keeping the managers away from real it staff to keep their jobs. That same level of skill and knowledge permeate that one vendor's products and services. When the products or services get enough bad press, they just rename them. Enough of that though.

There are some good interviews about the DNS flaw, like the one at Black Hat. For the details of the 2008 flaw, not the x.509 cert flaw, Steve Friedl has An Illustrated Guide to the Kaminsky DNS Vulnerability. If you played with DNS during 2006 or 2007 you probably at least spotted symptoms of the flaw as it seemed to be in growing use.

Frustratingly, the solution has been there in front of us for many years and most systems have been more than capable of deploying DNSSEC, either as part of IPv4 or IPv6, for many years. Except for one vendor that can't. Take a guess which one. Take a guess how much it has cost us to let them hold back the net.

Zero-day means just that.

What's that? An exploit released today? I couldn't find a single source backing up that definition.

However, there's two definitions I found googling zero day exploit:
A zero-day exploit is one that takes advantage of a security vulnerability on the same day that the vulnerability becomes generally known.
An exploit of a vulnerability for which a security update does not exist.

The exploit was released when the flaw was revealed and there's no fix, so both definitions apply. Perhaps you have some alternate definition of zero-day exploit I haven't heard yet.

I don't even know why Sun paid a billion for it in the first place.

easy .. to screw Oracle over (who was in turn screwing over their customers to turn more licensing revenue on CMT, HT, containers etc) .. if you look at statements McGnarly made just this past spring (before the IBM deal fell through) you'll find his references of Oracle as a cheap heroin dealer - which falls in line with their misguided tactic to try and take on the oracle empire .. of course now that they've accepted Larry's "drug money" - i don't understand why they don't just spin the whole thing off again .. unless they can't afford to, or there's no other tinkerbell investors who believe enough with their wallet ..

The problem is that most Windows programs don't have any installation method other than the installer, so if Windows decides the installer needs admin rights, there's usually no way to do it without them.

Most Windows programs I've installed did not use the Windows installer, nor did they include an uninstaller. I don't know how many tymes I had to wipe my disks and do a clean install of Windows, in part because a program left or altered keys in the registry. Using Norton System Works to uninstall didn't always help. On the other hand every tyme I installed programs in Linux I had to log in as admin and on the Mac I'm typing this on now even when I'd logged into the admin account I still have to enter the password to install software. And yes, I've owned and used all three OSes.

here's no reason to prohibit the user from installing software locally to their home directory

Viruses, crapware, and spyware are very good reasons to require admin privileges instead of allowing users to install software. As I said earlier employers are even disabling or removing CD/DVD drives and USB flash drives.

Falcon

From TFA:

The network effect means that Skye is the only cloud DNS service that has as its foundation half the broadband internet already using the same software. Nominum has 170 million broadband households worldwide that already go through our software.

In other words, software monoculture is the basis of Nominum's business plan. Even though it is very much a hotly-debated topic in recent years whether software monoculture is actually better or worse than diversity, for security, e.g. http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid14_gci991178,00.html

Closing the basement shades will do wonders on the privacy front.

Translated into /. language: Either operate exclusively through a watertight alias (use a proxy, don't share photos of you groping the office slapper at the Christmas party, don't engage in identifying talk), or just assume that everything you say and do on social networks will be cc'ed to your boss(es), appended to your CVs for the next 50 years and plastered all over your cubicle walls.

Of course this could be an advantage if you are looking for a career change to the porno industry. Or maybe a jopb with Fatwire (web CMS).

Apparently, "2P" does indeed mean dual processor in adspeak.

Citation: http://searchoracle.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid41_gci1362417,00.html

Bottom line: that is NOT good security practice. Show me one citation where this is recommended.

http://searchnetworkingchannel.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid100_gci1334133,00.html

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/routers/ps274/products_configuration_example09186a00801d8113.shtml

False. One pass is enough. Massive linkdump:

http://www.anti-forensics.com/disk-wiping-one-pass-is-enough-part-2-this-time-with-screenshots
http://sansforensics.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/overwriting-hard-drive-data/
http://blog.epcusa.com/2009/03/data-destruction-is-one-pass-overwriting-enough/
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/security-corner/the-great-drive-wiping-controversy-settled-at-last/

This article seems to list everything a corporation should consider:

Price of power
Networking infrastructure
Accessibility
Talent pool
Local incentives

The 'C' in NIC stands for 'Controller', not 'Card'.

some people, including 3Com and Cisco, disagree with you.

That's normally between 24 hours and 7 days

Just because something is customary doesn't mean it's mandatory. RFC1035 explicitly states TTL should be set to 0 (zero) if the "[Resource Record] can only be used for the transaction in progress, and should not be cached" or "for extremely volatile data."

The article you mention (which btw. seems to be a wikipedia invention)

Damn those Wikipedians! They've poisoned SecurityFocus, Whatis.com, The EU SPAM Trackers group, and even Google!

would be done with custom DNS anyway, otherwise it's easily blocked by the ISP setting its cache to ignore a TTL less than a couple of hours (as most do.. hell, my even my home DNS does that).

It would be done by setting your DNS record (yes, a DNS RR you are responsible for) to have a short TTL. Not a custom DNS server, just administrative rights to the DNS record associated with one or more resources. And if, by setting the TTL to a low value, I tell you that my DNS record is going to be quite volatile, you can disagree with me all you want (by "ignor[ing] a TTL less than a couple of hours"), but don't be surprised when your cache goes stale.

Gosh, I wish I could live in the world you live in, with deathless and ultrastable interfaces and static network architectures. You could probably get by with just a really big "hosts" file. But out in the real world, sometimes you need short DNS TTLs for stuff like warm-failover high-availability architectures.

according to some website the LOC holds aprox. 10 terabytes worth of information.

which means that 102.4 LOC's would equal 1 petabyte.

10,886,216.9 * 102.4 = 1,114,748,610 kg

or aprox 2,457,600,000 lbs.

IBM put it to the test once, consolidated 3900 Unix/Intel servers down to 30...According to this article. If I'm not mistaken though the actual number ended up being 12 and a little over 4000 servers.

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid80_gci1266438,00.html

Informative? WHAT THE FUCK.
You're 100% WRONG, dipshit.
Spanning IS JBOD! JBOD IS spanning!

http://www.yourdictionary.com/telecom/jbod

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci343350,00.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#Concatenation_.28SPAN.29

No, I didn't make it up:

http://searchwindevelopment.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid8_gci1019210,00.html

I think it fits Microsoft's position and strategy perfectly. Of course they want to wait until it's the perfect time to act.

You know, don't knife the baby until the opportune moment.

That funny E sign means 'element of a set' and the set is defined by that funny P sign, which means all primes. This means that Wolfram is saying that 2^42643792 -1 is a member of the set of prime numbers. See also how they know it is a prime.

Oh, of course established companies never release flawed software, right? Their ActiveX control does not have to be malicious in itself, it is sufficient if it tears holes into your defense for others to abuse. ActiveX needs to die a very quick death already. And can we please club that idea that a browser, JavaScript and a bit of fairy-dust can fully replace any local application regardless of specific implications out of people's heads?

I would hazard the vast majority of us have first hand knowledge of an SAP based enterprise system project gone amok (as I have). Some interesting ideas here http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/sap-watch/what%E2%80%99s-the-real-trend-in-failed-sap-projects/. I wouldn't necessarily blame the users all the time; in our case, it seems a combination of ill defined requirements, crazily feature rich software and consultants not unhappy when things drag out.

Rackable is a small server vendor with revenues in the hundreds of millions while they big boys in that space (HP, IBM, Dell, Sun) are in the billions.

They build x86 based rack servers. They're focus seems to have been in high density rack systems. I think one of their first/biggest innovation was creating a half depth chassis so you could put two servers back to back in a 1u space leaving a hot air plenum in the middle to keep things from getting overheated. They also have 12V Motherboards like Google uses on their systems.

The goal of Rackable isn't to sell you one x86 server, it's to give you a solution including a rack full of their servers. That seems to have also been the focus of SGI lately. They went from big single systems to clustered super computers. So the deal appears to make sense. I'm sure there's a lot of good talent and patents that Rackable could use to help it become a bigger player.

In 2007 Rackable's 4 biggest clients were Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and Facebook.

The name change might be good because SGI is a more recognizable name in the industry. I think some people see Rackable as an x86 server vendor but they're really a server farm vendor.

The past couple of years haven't been great for Rackable with some pretty big losses in proportion to their revenue so they need to make some bigger moves and this might do the trick.

The summary and TFA are rather light on the details I wanted. Here's what you need to know about Zeus:

It's a Trojan that takes over Windows computers. It is being spread through phishing tricks. It is designed to be easy to use, so script kiddies can just pay US$700 to get the Zeus kit and start building botnets to steal data such as credit card numbers.

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid14_gci1310679,00.html

One feature of Zeus is the "kos" command, for "kill operating system". This wipes out the Windows Registry and the OS files. Usually, black hat hackers don't want to kill systems they 0wn, but recently Roman Hüssy saw a whole botnet get the kos command. TFA listed three possible reasons for this: 0) rival black hat hackers might have gained enough control of a botnet to issue the kos command, to deny the botnet to its 0wners; 1) the hackers might have issued the kos command by mistake or due to incompetence; or 2) the hackers issued the kos to cover their tracks, and give them more time to use stolen data.

That last theory makes some sense to me. If the system is still intact, the owner of the system may figure out that his system was 0wned. The kos will wipe out the evidence of Zeus as well as the OS, so all the owner really knows is that Windows really crashed hard this time.

steveha

Actually its easier to protect against outbound traffic using the windows firewall,

XP's firewall doesn't monitor outbound traffic at all Vista's firewall only does so with difficulty.