A Cyber-Attack on an American City… (by South Africans)

23 04 2009

Bruce Perens writes about a recent cyber attack on an American  city:

“Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed down four manholes serving the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and cut eight fiber cables in what appears to have been an organized attack on the electronic infrastructure of an American city. Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported.”

We have been having problems with criminals stealing the Telkom cables maybe they upped their game and went International with this job.  Did anyone check if the cables was removed instead of just cut ?.

But it is interesting on how a city can be technology disabled by cutting a cable in America, luckily we don’t suffer from the same problem since we can not  rely on fixed lines in the first place.





Long time no post

19 04 2009

I am happy to report that my lack of posting is because of a few nice changes in my life.

I have started a new job as Junior Lecturer at Tswane University of Technology teaching 1st and 3rd years. This doest leave a lot of time for working on projects but I have made some progress on the Mxit perl library.

Since Mxit have released the protocol specification I have moved the project over to their site located here: http://devzone.mxit.com/

The project has its own space located here (Wiki) and here (Blog)

Since the campus were I teach is located in Witbank I have moved back in with my parents in Middelburg about 30 km from the campus. I will probably get my own place before the end of the year.

One cool application I can report on is DropBox . DropBox allows you to sync files over multiple computers and is nicely
integrated with Gnome. The registration process is totally painless and you get 2 GB free when you sign up (250 mb extra for using this https://www.getdropbox.com/link/21.X7hWEhmrJV link)

I have also upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 and will report on the experience at a later time.

Remember keep the source open and have a nice series of long weekends (If you are in S.A)