HBGary CSO Jim Butterworth will moderate a discussion with me on February 16, 2012:
…about whether an organization or corporation has a legal right to initiate and conduct mitigative counterstrike operations against their attackers to protect their systems, and what is the timetable for doing so?
You can register on the HBGary Webex page. Hope you can join.
It’s no secret that Will Cuppy is one of my favorite historians. Along with Ambrose Bierce he has a certain way with words, as found in The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. Here is how he sums up the pyramids:
The fact is that building a pyramid is fairly easy, aside from the lifting. You just pile up stones in receding layers, placing one layer carefully upon another, and pretty soon you have a pyramid. You can’t help it. In other words, it is not in the nature of a pyramid to fall down…
And then there’s the origins of America
Captain Smith reached Virginia on April 26, 1607, with a number of English gentlemen and some people who were willing to work. Then they all held a meeting to discuss ways and means of civilizing everybody. They made a great many speeches and accused each other of various crimes and misdemeanors and arrested some of themselves as an object lesson, and American history was started at last.
Perhaps my favorite quote of all by Cuppy is in regard to the Aztecs.
Montezuma had a weak and vacillating nature. He never knew what to do next.*
(*He had the courage of his convictions, but he had no convictions.)
I was reminded of this style of humor recently when I read the slightly less prosaic but still curmudgeonly lines of thinking in a blog post from James Iry, an abridged history of programming languages:
1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.
1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.
[…]
1972 – Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.
Petros Virellis has spun an update to the famous painting
I did nothing more than to try to visualize the flow and combine it with background responsive music. All the feeling still resides on the original masterpiece. The composed music has a charmolypic mood (a greek word for joy and sorrow as one). The interaction serves only to provide alternative views of the painting. It’s not meant to be used as a “gameâ€.
The programming was made with openframeworks, an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding.
Reminds me of Amiga art with DPaint in 1989
Ah, remember how text alerts would go to our pagers and how cool it was to wake up at all hours of the night and have to sleep-shell into servers for emergency maintenance?
Yeah, blowing up a pager is so 90s.
Now it’s all about sending Tweets with twitter-lite-perl.
Here are the requirements [for software that actively “tweets†the status of the cloud for you and your co-sys.admins to follow]
Have a twitter account opened for this application.
Have a machine, or a virtual machine, running Linux with network capability.
Have the cloud admin’s credentials.
Have a smartphone with Twitter Client App installed.
Easy peasy. Very cool that a group all can see status from anywhere in the world for just the regular cost of a network connection. As long as Twitter itself is available you should be good to go.
An alerting system below “three nines” (99.9) isn’t much help if you are trying to use it to stay above. YouTube appears to be a better candidate; can we get some tube-lite-perl?
Wait, what? Did they say have the admin‘s credentials?
After verifying the test tweet, go to the directory “./pigeons_on_a_euca/credentials†and store your Eucalyptus cloud’s admin credentials
Oooh, must scan for world readable “euca/credentials” directories…
Another interesting detail to consider is the rate of messaging.
Warning: The amount of tweets generated by the application might be overwhelming; at its maximum rate, it will upload 350 tweets per hour.
That is almost as fast as Ashton Kutcher tweets. I mean when Twitter is available.