January 2012 will mark 30 years since the Commodore 64 (C64) was launched. I couldn’t wait to celebrate so here’s a video to put things in perspective

And of course here’s a C64 demo to get the party started

A hospital in Geogia blamed a computer virus for system interruptions and outages over three days last week:

Gwinnett Medical Center on Friday confirmed it has instructed ambulances to take patients to other area hospitals when possible after discovering a system-wide computer virus that slowed patient registration and other operations at its campuses in Lawrenceville and Duluth. Staff members discovered the virus Wednesday afternoon and have been working since then with outside I.T. experts to fix the problem, spokeswoman Beth Okun said. In the meantime, the health system has been forced to switch back to paperwork.

Emergency and trauma patients had to be diverted away from Wednesday until Friday afternoon.

I like the name given by one of the commenter’s on blog.scottlowe.org; it describes the traffic route in the following VXLAN example diagram

Note that even though the Windows-based workload inside the VXLAN segment now resides on a completely separate VTEP (ESXi 2, in this case), the traffic from the Linux-based workload outside the VXLAN segment continues to move through VSE 1. That’s because VSE 1 is still the Layer 3 default gateway for the IP subnet inside the VXLAN segment. Therefore—and this is where I was wrong earlier—Layer 3 connectivity is not broken, but it does have to “horseshoe” across to the other data center and then back again, as illustrated above. This is the classic traffic pattern that we see with other overlay technologies, like OTV.

From Bruce Schneier’s blog an unverified story about breaking into banks and then asking them to pay for consulting. Warning, this is generally considered illegal (due to lack of formal pre-authorization) and could easily lead to arrest.

Spoiler alert: Women are characterized as emotional, unstable and irrational. Men are characterized as cool under pressure and smooth. So the story is clearly embellished from a particular bias.

Also strange is how the story starts out bold on technology attacks, to a point of being unsatisfactorily vague and boastful (I expected him next to say he also was in the special forces and has traveled to Mars), but then shifts into a physical assessment description that is laden with pre-authorization, deniability and constant worry to prove their innocence.