Randy Cohen, who writes the Ethicist column in The New York Times Magazine, answered a question today from an “Internet technician” who discovered pornography belonging to his company’s president while “installing software on [the] company’s computer network”. Some of the images seemed to depict underage teenagers. He asked whether he should call the police, mentioning that he feared for his job.
This week, Apple released a rather large security update to Mac OS X. Predictably, that’s been followed by a flurry of articles in the press speculating as to what this means about OS X’s security relative to other OS’s. I’m not interested in discussing the security of OS X. (Today, anyway.) What bugs me is a lot of the press coverage. The release of a security patch, whether by Apple, Microsoft, or an open-source team, should not be used as a vehicle for speculation that the patched software is insecure. Continue reading
Today, 14Nov2006, LOPSA is having its one year anniversary! Congrats to LOPSA for all of its accomplishments in just one year. Thanks to all the volunteers ( and let’s not forget that the LOPSA board members are also all vounteers ) who’ve worked so hard to make LOPSA a success! Thanks also to the sponsors…
Well, I was going to wait for us to put up an announcement on the front page of “LOPSA”:http://lopsa.org/, but since “Tom Limoncelli”:http://www.everythingsysadmin.com/archives/000164.html just pointed to his blog posting, I guess it is OK to go ahead.
Happy Birthday, LOPSA! It has been a long and sometimes tough journey to reach our one year milestone. We suffered through some early setbacks and had to launch prematurely. But we launched successfully, and we’ve continued to grow, succeed, and provide service throughout the year:
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Operations groups I suspect are going to have real problems soon, and not from the usual causes of automation. It is very common for operations groups to not only monitor the servers, but take on trivial tasks that need to be done out of hours, sometimes even during the business day in an effort to…
Monday morning, November 7th, 2006, George Toft (CISSP) presented on the subject of Compliance For System Administrators at the Phoenix SysAdmins Days event. George’s presentation expressed the need for sysadmins to have an understanding of the requirements, areas of influence, and jurisdiction that make up various regulations and standards in place today to protect company…
A few weeks ago, in the ComputerWorld article “_Look who has access to your email_”:http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9004274, Bruce Hoard wrote about the dangers of system administrators having access to email and other files of high level executives. The article mostly focuses on technical issues such as encryption and access control software. It spends a little time on…
Or how I conquered out-of-band management with a box of serial and a power button. In the beginning When dinosaurs ruled the earth and small, mammalian critters scurried through the data center, the classic method of doing out-of-band management was via a crash cart and the laying of holy hands upon the ailing system. You’d…
This is the fourth and final installment in a four-part series covering my experiences at SA Days Phoenix; you can also read parts one, two, and three. Sorry this last installment is so late; Tuesday was a late night, and yesterday was a long flight. Anywho. Tuesday afternoon was a class on writing IT policies,…
This is the third part of a four-part series; the first two parts are here and here. This morning, I took a “broad-spectrum analysis” of communication for IT with Jesse Trucks, who deserves major kudos since he’s quite literally 25% of the instructors here. It was certainly broad-spectrum, but, luckily, Jesse guzzles coffee and talks…