Cyber Squirrels Attack the US Power Grid!

Cyber Squirrels attach power grid

While surfing today, I came across this article about showing a world map and the various successful confirmed attacks against the USA power grid. The media might have you believing that cyber terrorism is an important threat vector. Maybe in the future it will be, but according to this data, looks like squirrel attacks are […]

The Next Hacking Target = Your Car

auto hack car exploit

We all know that our computers and our phones can be vulnerable to attacks and exploits. Every once in a while, we get a virus or get our Internet accounts hacked, and that reminds us to “be careful”. And, if it not us who gets this reminder, it is a family member or a close […]

Belkin Routers DOS Themselves

Belkin router DOS

Yesterday, one of my small business customers called and left a frantic, cryptic message. That was unusual for several reasons. First, the customer normally emails me. Second, the person who contacted me was someone I had never spoken to before. So, what was so urgent? Their email was down. No, wait, their entire Internet service […]

Cell Phones and Throwing Out Big Telecom

cell phones

Yesterday, someone at work laughed at my cell phone — “It’s so tiny!” And, that reminded me that the accompanying bill was equally tiny. What’s my cell phone secret? Basically, because I wanted an unlocked dual-SIM phone so that I could use European SIM cards, I thought I was stuck with AT&T domestic service. But, […]

Logging Out and Restarting in Cisco, Redhat, and Windows

I bounce between different operating systems and different network appliances all the time. As it happens, I sometimes type a Windows command into linux, or a redhat command into Cisco IOS, or even a Cisco command into Microsoft Windows (note: those are bad days). So, I created a little quick reference for the two things […]

ATM Scams are Getting Very Scary

ATM Skimmer

We all know that our credit cards and ATM cards have magnetic swipes on them. And, we should all be familiar with the scam in which a bartender or waitress swipes our cards twice: once for the actual transaction and a second time to retain the data for themselves. Since I am not willing to […]

How Google Search Generates Revenue

google advertising

I listened to a marketing lecture today which (among other things) described how Google generates revenue from its default search engine website. This is the traditional search page where you enter your search term(s) and click the search button. The result set includes: (a) Paid Placements — the advertisements that appear on your right. (b) […]

Ironic iPod Packaging Designed by Microsoft

I came across this video last week. It was produced by the Microsoft Marketing department to highlight an issue with the existing Microsoft approach to packaging products — that the packaging contains so much information that its hard to tell what’s actually being sold. Anyway, if you are familiar with both Apple product and Microsoft […]