...and there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth amongst the minions of the prez of TV fame
Source: axios.com
mudwerks reblogged
Howard Clifford running off the Tacoma Narrows Bridge during its collapse.
Tacoma, Washington, November 7, 1940
[From the UW Digital Collection]
The hacking of the websites of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection on February 17 was the second attack on the agency's web presence in less than a month. Both of the attacked servers were set up for the FTC by the public relations firm Fleishman-Hilliard under the same contract, and ran on servers the firm provisioned from web hosting and cloud services provider Media Temple. But even after the server for the FTC's OnGuardOnline.gov site (ironically, a site intended to share tips from the government on computer security and privacy for consumers) was hacked on January 24 using an exploit of security weaknesses in the applications running on it, Fleishman declined to update the software running its other sites, an executive of Media Temple told Ars.
Media Temple chief marketing officer Kim Brubeck told Ars, "we have actually asked Fleishman-Hilliard to remove any [remaining] .gov sites" from Media Temple's servers. In an email to Fleishman-Hilliard on February 18, Brubeck requested that the company complete the transfer of its remaining government websites to other hosting providers within 48 hours.
Referring to the government's security regulations, Brubeck explained,"We aren't a FISMA-certified hosting service," and added that Media Temple was unaware that Fleishman-Hilliard had intended to use the servers for government accounts. Under the terms of the provisioning service that the servers were provided under, Fleishman-Hilliard was responsible for the administration and security of the servers, including operating system updates, software installations and backups, and had set up the servers—but "had chosen not to update their applications," Brubeck said.
Fleishman-Hilliard has still not responded to requests from Ars for comment.
[lovely...]
The Phobos-Grunt is breaking up and falling to Earth.
MOSCOW — A Russian scientific spacecraft whizzing out of control around the Earth, and expected to re-enter the atmosphere on Saturday, may have failed because it was struck by some type of antisatellite weapon, the director of Russia’s space agency said in an interview published Tuesday.
He did not say who would want to interfere with the spacecraft, which was intended to explore a moon ofMars.
The Russian craft, named Phobos-Grunt for the moon and the Russian word for ground, ran into trouble soon after it was launched in November, when its rockets failed to lift it out of low Earth orbit. What was to have been a two-and-a-half-year interplanetary journey to retrieve a soil sample from Phobos will instead end over the weekend, according to Russian engineers.
When the 13-ton Phobos-Grunt breaks up in the atmosphere, debris could potentially fall anywhere along a vast stretch of the Earth’s surface that includes the cities of New York, London and Tokyo. Though the odds are heavily against the debris causing any harm, the spectacle of people around the world anticipating the crash is another embarrassment for Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, which has presided over a series of rocket and satellite failures this year...
[I just love the name - Phobos-Grunt FTW!...]
Source: The New York Times
The TouchPad tablet from Hewlett-Packard was one of the most closely watched new gadgets of 2011 — and quickly turned out to be the year’s biggest flop. The TouchPad, which was supposed to be a rival to Apple’s iPad, lasted just seven weeks on the market before H.P. killed it, citing weak sales.
Analysts point to a long list of factors behind the tablet’s quick demise. But some of the people involved in creating the tablet’s core software now say the product barely had a fighting chance.
That software is called WebOS, an operating system built on the same technology used by many Web browsers. It promised to be more flexible and open than Apple’s tightly controlled iOS software, and more beautiful than Google’s sometimes wonky Android system. H.P. acquired Palm, the maker of WebOS, for $1.2 billion in 2010 so it could use the software in products like the TouchPad.
WebOS turned out to be something of a toxic asset. Several former Palm and H.P. employees involved in WebOS say that there was little hope for the software from the beginning, because the way it was built was so deeply flawed.
“Palm was ahead of its time in trying to build a phone software platform using Web technology, and we just weren’t able to execute such an ambitious and breakthrough design,” said Paul Mercer, former senior director of software at Palm, who oversaw the interface design of WebOS and recruited crucial members of the team. “Perhaps it never could have been executed because the technology wasn’t there yet...”
Source: The New York Times