What I am reading 7/22/2014 - It's not Manic Monday, It's not a Hazy Shade of Winter, It's Black Friday (dunh, dunh, dun duh)

Sploid - How the United States can collapse and fall on a Black Friday -

Our complex society is so fragile that a virus—spreading through cash and products sold during Black Friday—would bring it to its knees in a couple of days.

And since I mentioned them in the title of this post:




Ars Technica - Senate committee report excoriates Air Force for IT incompetence -

“The Air Force failed in its procurement of [ECSS]… because it lacked a clear objective and the organizational will to implement changes to its internal business processes vital to integrating ECSS into the organization,” the Senate investigators wrote in the report. “In doing so, the Air Force violated many crucial guidelines and best practices for information technology acquisition.”

...

The Air Force also failed to properly plan for the purchase of the system in advance. The program leaders only knew that they wanted to replace a collection of older systems with a new one; they had no real understanding of the functionality required to do that. In the original contract solicitation, the Air Force said that it wanted a system that was “truly ‘off-the-shelf’: unmodified and available to anyone.” But it also wanted a fully integrated system out of the box. What it got instead was three separate software products from Oracle and a collection of tools that a system integrator (Computer Sciences Corporation) could use to put them all together in the fashion the Air Force wanted.

Why did I know that Oracle's name would appear somewhere in conjunction with incompetence and failed Government IT projects?  Just Sayin'.

The Register - Manic malware Mayhem spreads through Linux, FreeBSD web servers -

Malware dubbed Mayhem is spreading through Linux and FreeBSD web servers, researchers say. The software nasty uses a grab bag of plugins to cause mischief, and infects systems that are not up to date with security patches.

What can you really say?  Nothing is safe.

Pando Daily - Homophobia, racism and the Kochs: San Francisco’s tech-libertarian “Reboot” conference is a cesspool -

I think you kind of get the gist of the article from the title.  I am going to go out on a limb here and say that Mark Ames and company don't like Libertarians or conservatives.  I am also going to suggest that he probably doesn't know any real libertarians or conservatives, and that he just operates of the self-reinforcing caricature that he and his buddies at Valleywag and Boing Boing spew out every chance they get.