Federal investigators are looking into a report that hackers managed to remotely shut down a utility’s water pump in central Illinois last week, in what could be the first known foreign cyber attack on an industrial system on U.S. soil.

I sit here typing while listening to the sounds of chainsaws, wood chippers, and a huge crane of a tree service working in my front yard on Labor day (sorry neighbors). Last Sunday, I was here in this same place as the winds of Irene were roaring and a monsoon of rain was pouring down.

With all the bad news coming out of Japan since the quake, we thought we could point out just a bit of good news, that being the goodwill and support being pledged in the aftermath of the disaster by the high tech community… and perhaps even encourage more.

Recently, Jeff Hine wrote a blog post – “Cloud changes who pays for IT – And that changes EVERYTHING!”.. If you need further proof of this, I came across a recent news article – German hacker uses rented computing to crack hashing algorithm. He used Amazon’s E2C cloud service to supply the computing power needed, which cost a grand total of two dollars.

A review of recent network-based service outages and issues. In this episode: The Planet’s Houston data centers go offline, Google calendar goes down yet again, and Telstra’s Next G mobile network suffers a massive outage to all of Queensland Australia due to an update that apparently went very wrong.

It’s been a busy time in our battalion (more on that soon), so in this edition of Newsreel Roundup, just a quick post of just a few humorous items that caught our attention recently: Steve Jobs accusing Adobe’s Flash of being too proprietary, and the lost iPhone 4G prototype saga through the eyes of Jon Stewart and Scott Adams.

“If you board the wrong train, it’s no use running along the corridor in the other direction,” said famed World War II German resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We in IT boarded the wrong train a long time ago. It’s the “standard model” of information technology organizations — the familiar litany that says CIOs should run IT as a business, meeting the requirements of its internal customers. This refrain has been endorsed by our holy trinity, too: analyst firms, most consultancies, and ITIL.

A review of recent network-based service outages and issues. In this episode: Codero’s Phoenix data center suffers lengthy outage, Wordpress.com goes down affecting millions of sites, Microsoft’s Live ID servers wobble after loss of a brother, Google gives honest assessment of February app outage, and Ubisoft’s new DRM system falls down locking out paying customers.

There is a war going on, but this war is different. It’s a war that’s not fought with ground troops, air power, or artillery, but with ones and zeros. But as far as IT is concerned, it’s still a deadly game.

A review of recent network-based service outages and issues. In this episode: Human error takes down university data center, Mother nature knocks out NaviSite San Jose data center, and Microsoft’s cloud is “hiccuping.”