Today’s post is brought to you by:
Cheapest Unlimited Hosting Plans
————–
Stuxnet may have done us all a favour. Although the computer worm seems to have targeted nothing beyond Iran’s nuclear programme, the obscure breed of industrial control software it so easily attacked runs factories and major utilities worldwide – and its apparent ease of success has prompted security researchers to seek out weaknesses in these critical systems. Now they have revealed dozens of vulnerabilities in the supervisory, control and data acquisition (SCADA) software that much national infrastructure and manufacturing industry depends upon.
Over the past week, computer experts in Italy, Russia and the US have posted details online on a clutch of vulnerabilities they have found in various SCADA packages used to automate installations as diverse as power stations, water purification plants, oil refineries, food factories, breweries and steel plants. None of the weaknesses have yet been exploited by worms, but sample “exploit code” has proved the vulnerabilities are real.
If harnessed by an attacker, the security holes could cause SCADAs to crash or deny operators access to critical data – or allow saboteurs access to the industrial process itself. The vulnerabilities were serious enough to prompt a series of alerts from the US Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), urging the authors of the SCADA software to plug the holes.
###
Rodrigo Rosenberg’s Murder in Guatemala
Rodrigo Rosenberg knew that he was about to die. It wasn’t because he was approaching old age—he was only forty-eight. Nor had he been diagnosed with a fatal illness; an avid bike rider, he was in perfect health. Rather, Rosenberg, a highly respected corporate attorney in Guatemala, was certain that he was going to be assassinated.
Before he began, in the spring of 2009, to prophesy his own murder, there was little to suggest that he might meet a violent end. Rosenberg, who had four children, was an affectionate father. The head of his own flourishing practice, he had a reputation as an indefatigable and charismatic lawyer who had a gift for leading other people where he wanted them to go. He was lithe and handsome, though his shiny black hair had fallen out on top, leaving an immaculate ring on the sides. Words were his way of ordering the jostle of life. He spoke in eloquent bursts, using his voice like an instrument, his hands and eyebrows rising and falling to accentuate each note. (It didn’t matter if he was advocating the virtues of the Guatemalan constitution or of his favorite band, Santana.) Ferociously intelligent, he had earned master’s degrees in law from both Harvard University and Cambridge University.
Read More Here at the New Yorker.
###
Now this hits all us retired people! Yes, I am retired. So this is very important to me and everyone of you who are retired.
Medicare rise could mean no Social Security COLA “Millions of retired and disabled people in the United States had better brace for another year with no increase in Social Security payments. The government is projecting a slight cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security benefits next year, the first increase since 2009. But for most beneficiaries, rising Medicare premiums threaten to wipe out any increase in payments, leaving them without a raise for a third straight year.”
###
The U.S. mean center of population, as of April 1, 2010, is near Plato, Mo., an incorporated village in Texas County. The U.S. Census Bureau calculated this point as the place where an imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly if all 308,745,538 residents counted in the 2010 Census were of identical weight. – Provided by Census Bureau
Bill Reid’s sculpture ‘Raven and The First Men’, showing part of a Haida creation myth.
Here is an interesting site you should visit. Great pictures and good commentary.Go to:
Very interesting history and on this blog the writer will tell you about the above picture and so much more: Old Picture of the Day
###
Everything you wanted – or didn’t want – to know about your mind. From how many friends your brain can cope with, to experts discussing consciousness and mental illness.
###
Welcome to The Atavist. We publish original nonfiction and narrative journalism for digital devices like the iPad, iPhone, Kindle, and Nook. Our stories are longer than typical magazine articles but shorter than books, written by experienced reporters and authors and designed digitally from the start. Each story has extensive free text and audio excerpts here at the site, with links to where you can buy and read them in full:
Apiculture is the practice of beekeeping—the care and manipulation of honeybees to enable them to produce and store more honey than they need so that the excess can be collected. Beekeeping is one of the oldest forms of animal husbandry. Early efforts at collecting honey required destroying the hive. However, modern beekeepers are able to extract the cells of the honeycomb without damaging them. To collect honey, beekeepers need a veiled helmet for protection and a smoker, which does what? More…
Dita von Teese and Scarlett Johansson photographed by James White
Originally posted 2011-03-28 11:42:36. Republished by Blog Post Promoter