“Data centre operators in the North Island of New Zealand have weathered an extensive power outage that saw electricity supply interrupted to a large swathe of the upper North Island in New Zealand on Monday… Power was restored to the region around 8.30pm after police escorted Transpower staff to the farm on which the fire took place, after the owner of the property refused entry to for repair workers. Over 800MW of power was lost from Auckland during the outage, according to Transpower.”
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Roundup: CloudKick, Tieto, IBM, Juniper:
“Cloud management start-up Cloudkick launches. San Francisco start-up Cloudkick announced its cloud server management and monitoring services coming out of beta… Tieto builds new data centre in Finland. Helsinki based IT services company Tieto announced they are building a new, energy efficient data centre in Espoo, Finland… IBM Upgrades Tennis Australia. Australian IT news site reports on an IT infrastructure upgrade for the Australian Open, led by IBM… Juniper and Polycom Partner. Juniper Networks and Polycom announced an alliance focused on improving the reliability, cost-effectiveness and quality of the customer experience for telepresence and video conferencing services.”
“Most U.S. federal agencies — including the Department of Homeland Security — have failed to comply with a Dec. 31, 2009, deadline to deploy new authentication mechanisms on their Web sites that would prevent hackers from hijacking Web traffic and redirecting it to bogus sites… Many other countries — including Sweden, Puerto Rico, Bulgaria and Brazil — have already deployed DNSSEC on their country code domains.”
“We are urging U.S. media companies to take a proactive role in challenging foreign governments’ demands for censorship and surveillance. The private sector has a shared responsibility to help safeguard free expression. And when their business dealings threaten to undermine this freedom, they need to consider what’s right, not simply what’s a quick profit,” Clinton said in remarks Thursday at the Newseum, before an audience including members of Congress, representatives from nonprofit groups, and perhaps more than one Internet company executive forced to ponder the meaning of that paragraph.”
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Router glitch cripples California DMV network:
“The network was down for about two hours and was restored at about 1:40 p.m. PST, according to Maile. There are 168 DMV offices throughout the state, said Jan Mendoza, spokeswoman for the DMV. “We didn’t close offices,” she said. “When people came in we handled customers manually. We did it the old-fashioned way–with pen and paper.”
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Adobe fixes critical Shockwave bugs with Neanderthal patch:
“Adobe is strongly urging users to upgrade, but the pill they are recommending isn’t the easiest to swallow. Unlike the vast majority of today’s patches, the Shockwave fix requires users manually uninstall the out-of-date version, reboot their systems, and then install the latest version. For an application with more than 450 million installations, that’s downright primitive. More importantly, making it inconvenient for users to upgrade is a guarantee that a sizable portion of them will remain vulnerable.”
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Windows plagued by 17-year-old privilege escalation bug, All 32-bit versions vulnerable:
“The vulnerability exists in all 32-bit versions of Microsoft OSs released since 1993, and proof-of-concept code works on the XP, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008, and 7 versions of Windows, Ormandy reported.”
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Google postpones Android launch in China:
“Google has postponed the launch of two mobile phones in China which use its Android platform, in the first sign its business in the country is starting to be affected by a dispute over hacking and censorship.”
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NetApp Seen in Deal With Cisco, VMware:
“NetApp has begun sending invites for an event on Jan. 26 “to learn what we’re introducing to help you imagine and achieve virtually anything with one elegant solution.” Speakers will include Tony Bates, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco‘s Service Provider Group, NetApp CEO Tom Georgens, VMware CEO Paul Maritz, and “a special guest.”
Update: Cisco, NetApp, VMware team up on virtualization security
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Network flaw causes web error, session hijack courtesy of AT&T:
“A Georgia mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from mobile phones last weekend and wound up in a startling place: strangers’ accounts with full access to troves of private information. The glitch — the result of a routing problem at the family’s wireless carrier, AT&T — revealed a little known security flaw with far reaching implications for everyone on the Internet, not just Facebook users.”
Read more of the ESG IT Team’s blog entries at IT Artillery.
