Recently I’ve read a lot of things about the attacks against Sony. I’ve read that they’re nothing more than extortion attempts by hackers that probably live in their parents basements (based on the fact that the initial demands didn’t mention North Korea at all). I’ve read they were orchestrated by China by people who felt North Korea was being picked on and couldn’t stand up for themselves. I’ve read highly unconvincing reports from the FBI that they were orchestrated by North Korea. No one really knows. I can send traffic to servers from anywhere in the world. Anyone can anonymize their web traffic as easily as using a ToR plug-in…
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Minnebar Presentations Available On YouTube
I was supposed to give a presentation at MinneBar a few weeks ago, but I ended up having to be out of town. I was pretty bummed as I really wanted to see a few of the presentations. But, lucky me, MinneBar has actually started posting presentations to YouTube. Woohoo, they’re available at http://www.youtube.com/user/MinneStarMedia. The one I think I was most interested in seeing is available right here, and I can embed it into my own site and watch it from here. I will try and make the next one to do the presentation I’d planned on giving. This is a community I am very supportive of and love contributing…
- Articles and Books, Business, cloud, iPhone, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mac Security, Mass Deployment
Apple's Customer Facing SystemStatus
Apple now has a new system status page for their services, available at http://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus. This site goes through many of Apple’s services and shows an indicator light for when they are up. Additionally, you can scroll down to the detailed timeline and see a historical account of what services are online. This is yet another step in Apple’s continued progress at providing more and more information to the community on, well, everything. This includes seeing Apple popping up at conferences here and there, most notably at Black Hat this year, publishing more kbase articles that detail problems and allowing more community involvement from some employees. A more open Apple is a…
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The Return of Dallas: 25 Business Tips Learned From The Ewings
JR Ewing (aka Larry Hagman) passed away this week. He was one of the stars of Dallas and the famed character from the “who shot JR” line. He also had a ton of great quotes over the years, such as “Say, why don’t you have that junior plastic surgeon you married design you a new face: one without a mouth!” and “”Revenge is the single most satisfying feeling in the world!” He also busted out with “A conscience is like a boat or a car. If you feel you need one, rent it.” and one that every NFL running back seems to bust out with in the last year of their contract “Contracts…
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Amazon Now Has Book Trade Ins
When I was in college, at the end of each semester we’d go to the book store (you know, that place that fleeced us with $100 used books) and we’d sell back those books for about one tenth to one quarter what we bought them from. We’d then use that money to help fund one of our books for the next semester (or beer). Well, Amazon is doing something similar now. Although it has to do more with when new editions of the book are released. Each edition of a book allows you to trade the book in for new editions. Take Practical C++ Programming, from O’Reilly. Apparently I bought…
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My New Book on Time Machine Now Available
I have published a new book on Time Machine (Time Capsule, deployment/Managed Prefs and Time Machine Server as well). I wrote it months and months ago and it finally ended up getting posted (publishing is a weird world like that sometimes). It is available for Kindle (Amazon) for now and should be up on the iBooks store as soon as the good people from iTunes Connect get back from their holiday break. To quote the Amazon excerpt: Time Machine is Apple’s built-in backup solution that comes bundled with Mac OS X. In this book, we will explore Time Machine, looking at how to enable Time Machine, configure what to back…
- Articles and Books, Business, certifications, Consulting, iPhone, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mac Security, Mass Deployment
MacTech Bootcamps Coming To A City Near You!
I’ve been watching the MacTech Conference and then Boot Camps for some time. After hearing of the resounding success of the Conference last summer I was then stoked to hear that the January Boot Camp went extremely well. A MacTech Boot Camp is a regional, single-track seminar designed specifically for consultants and techs. MacTech Conference is a multi-day conference for IT professionals with a focus on enterprise and development whereas the Boot Camps are for consultants and techs focused on home users and small to medium sized businesses. Both are going really well. https://krypted.com/ is now a media sponsor of MacTech Boot Camps! This means I get discounts to offer my…
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iPhone, NFC & A Few Hundred Billion Dollars
Many of us now use our phone to check our email more often than we use our computer. Our phones go everywhere with us (although please hang up when you’re in the can as few things are more disgusting than listening to someone talk to their mom when they’re droppin’ the kids off at the pool in the stall next to you or hearing someone you’re talking to dropping’ a deuce in the pooper on the other end of the line). Many no longer have land lines and some have even dumped desktop and laptop computers in favor of smart-phone or tablet based digital lives. Few skipped the computer altogether…
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Active Announcement in the Morning!
For those who haven’t yet seen it, or who almost forgot due to crossing too many time zones, Active Storage, the makers of the Active RAID will be announcing their new product tomorrow morning. From what you see on the web site it looks to be some sort of rack mount device. Given their fantastic development work in the past, it’s sure to be a good addition to the bat-belts of the MacIT crowd. 9am Eastern, see ya’ there! http://www.activestorage.com
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EMC + Isilon = ?
EMC is buying Isilon for $2.25 billion. They want the video market, which seems to just be growing and growing. EMC stock dipped a little on the news, which is not surprising because Isilon isn’t worth what EMC is paying for it. What does this mean for the video market? More uncertainty. EMC has been an acquisition marathon runner since 2002, buying up Avamar, Documentum, Epoch, McData, Iomega, Archer, Greenplum, Bus-Tech, Kashya, Dantz, Mozy, Data Domain and even VMware (not to mention a bunch of other companies). So what does this mean for Isilon’s product line moving forward. If you look at how the acquisition of Dantz and Iomega sparked…