It's
not always a hacker attack.A much more interesting aspect of this story would have been a list of companies who were NOT impacted.
Yahoo,
Bing Briefly Knocked Offline Due To Botched Code Update
Poor
Microsoft
- 2015 hasn't been too kind to it so far. We
reported just yesterday that Google
exposed a rather big Windows
bug to the world simply because Microsoft didn't patch it in time,
and now, we learn that a bad code update conducted yesterday
knocked out the company's Bing
search. That in turn took out Yahoo's
search, as it's based on Bing.
Another
service that was temporarily affected by the outage included Apple's
Siri personal assistant.
A
bad code update can result in various levels of problems, but for
Microsoft, the biggest problem was merely rolling the update back.
They
didn't call it “an act of war!” I wonder why not?
Sony
cyber-attack: North Korea calls US sanctions hostile
….
In response, the North's state-run KCNA news agency on Sunday
quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying: "The policy
persistently pursued by the US to stifle the DPRK [North Korea],
groundlessly stirring up bad blood towards it, would only harden its
will and resolution to defend the sovereignty of the country.
"The
persistent and unilateral action taken by the White House to slap
'sanctions' against the DPRK patently proves that it is still not
away from inveterate repugnancy and hostility toward the DPRK."
(Related)
Oh, yeah. That's why.
Why
North Korea Sanctions Are Unlikely to Be Effective
…
There is a long-running scholarly debate about the effectiveness of
international sanctions generally. In North Korea, there are
particularly high hurdles to significant results. In contrast to
Russia, another country that has recently faced U.S. led sanctions,
few
North Korean officials travel widely or have significant assets
in foreign banks. Instead, North Korea earns hard currency through
the
illicit sales of military technology and narcotics. The United
States Treasury Department acknowledged
that sanctioned North Korean organizations are likely to reconstitute
under new names. Said Adam Cathcart, a Tokyo-based expert on the
country, "North Korea will be able to get around the sanctions
pretty easily."
…
Sanctions do, however, serve one function: Issuing them has allowed
President Obama to uphold
his promise for retaliation, tidying up one of the most bizarre
episodes in recent U.S-North Korea history (even as questions over
the origins of the hacks remain).
The
truly sad part is, government in general has gotten much better in
the technology area. (A bit of a fluff piece, but it does reiterate
why the government has so much trouble understanding echnology.
…
Not only does she now carry a BlackBerry, she uses a 2013 Dell
laptop: new by government standards, but clunky enough compared with
the cutting-edge devices of her former life that her
young son asked what it was...
… The problem, technology experts say, is that the mandate of the
chief technology officer has been nebulous since Mr. Obama created
the job five years ago, not least because it
does not come with a substantial funding stream, a crucial
source of power in the government.
And
while Mr. Obama started
the United States Digital Service in August to upgrade the
government’s technology systems and improve its websites after the
healthcare.gov meltdown, that team is housed in the Office of
Management and Budget and overseen by a chief information officer, a
position that does not currently have a permanent occupant.
Perspective.
Russia
plans to launch national digital library in 2015
Calvert
Journal – “Next year we will launch a national electronic
library, set to be the largest collection of online texts, books,
magazines and so on [in Russia],” Minister of Culture Vladimir
Medinsky told regional governors. “We will send you an approved
model of a library, the implementation of which will allow the
libraries to be turned into modern information and cultural centres
at minimum cost. Successful examples of this work can be seen
already in Moscow, Murmansk and Belgorod.”
TeleRead:
“Russia has increasingly raised its profile in the ebook world as
more and more people there get their books digitally. One year ago,
IDC, a consultant group, stated Russia
had the third largest e-book market in the world, only behind the
United States and China.”
Dilbert
illustrates the “boundary” between work and personal life.
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