This has been a busy busy week, what with the National Space Infosec Conference Symposium Workshop, completion of first downselect for ACSAC Site Selection for 2015/2016, and my normal work. Combine this with a relatively light week with of news of interest. This hasn’t allowed much time to find articles for the stew this week. Still, I’ve got a few articles for you:
- Pete Seeger. Pete died a little over a week ago. One of the best obituaries I’ve seen for the man comes from Michael Jonathan, host of the Woodsongs Old Time Radio Hour. Here’s his blog post in memory of Pete.
- Jay Leno. This was the last week of the Jay Leno tonight show. My facebook feeds have been fully of the cynics who think he stole the show back from Conan, and that he’ll do it again with Fallon. I tend to disagree — there are significant differences between the Conan situation (Jay wasn’t ready to go, plus he still had his staff together and his show going on in Burbank) to the Fallon situation (Jay’s staff have gotten their pink slips, his is the last NBC show left in the Burbank complex, and Fallon is in New York with Lorne Michaels at the helm, and Jay doesn’t still have a show). I’ve particularly enjoyed Mark Evanier’s take on the subject, such as this, this, or this.
- Stamp Art. An interesting article on a woman who turns postage stamps into art. I have strong memories of a table we used to have that was made from postage stamps and envelopes. Even though stamp collecting seems to have gone out of vogue, stamps are still wonderful works of art.
- The Target Hack. Brian Krebs has done a remarkable job — especially when you realize he’s doing it solo — on uncovering and investigating the Target hack. Here’s his latest take on it. What’s most interesting about this is that the vulnerability came from a different type of insider attack — maintenance personnel — who (thanks to cyber-physical system interconnects) were able to have greater access than they should have (cough — least privilege — cough). How many other systems are vulnerable to the same attack? Then again, we have to remember that a brute force attack can be equally effective.
P.S.: No, I’m not going to say anything on the Woody Allen situation. I’ve never been a big fan of Allen’s style of humor, although some of his movies have been good. Much of this is “he said/she said” dragged through the mud-flats of the media, and the only people that know the truth are the particulars involved — and after this many years, that truth may well have been colored by how the brain remembers things (on both sides). There is no good answer to this one.
