Sometimes the cure can be more painful than the disease. Case in point: the federal government tried to help a California county website recover from a hacker's attack yesterday and wound up knocking every California state website offline for 7 hours.
Here are the details. A hacker had diverted traffic from the Marin County website so that visitors found themselves looking at porn. That's bad. But when the feds tried to lend a helping hand, the accidentally "deleted the ca.gov domain."
While that did prevent users from finding naughty pictures when searching for Marin County services, it also meant Californians couldn't get information about vehicle or voter registration or find contact information for Arnold Schwarzenegger's office. Oh yeah, and California state employees couldn't reliably send or receive e-mail.
By last night everything was restored to normal. but it just goes to show, it's hard to find good help these days.
It's been a year since the folks at Google successfully knocked off WiFi in Mountain View California. Transmitting all those great 802.11 b/g signals to the grateful residents, businesses and visitors at absolutely no charge at all. They are still trucking along on the San Francisco wireless deal with EarthLink and the city to give all residents free connections to the internet, but who knows when that will all be resolved.
Nevertheless, Google is on a mission to provide top notch WiFi networks, but what exactly does it take? Well, in Mountain View there are over 400 mesh routers that cover 12 square miles and 25,000 homes, with 15,000 unique users per month. Traffic over this free network has risen 10% every month and handles 300 gigabytes of data each day and 95% of the routers are being used every single day.
Here's to hoping that Google someday manages to blanket San Francisco, and a few other cities with WiFi.
Crime is an ugly thing, but the folks over at Stamen Design have turned the tables and made something beautiful to track it in the Oakland California area.
Microsoft Virtual Earth was the tool of choice when it came to skillfully building out this Oakland Crimespotting mapping creation. The interactive map tracks crimes that users can subscribe and receive updates about them via RSS and email, from aggravated assault, murder, robbery, arson, burglary, and disturbing the peace. The map pinpoints and highlights the area in which the crime occurred, time, date, and stamps it with an official crime case number. All data is pulled from the Oakland CrimeView Community map.
Stamen hopes that this tool with encourage local governments to use this visual data model and release more information to the public about tree planting, new schools, and other information that matters most to community members.
Did Google buy SpaceshipOne? Michael Arrington has a scoop that Google has acquired the ship and is planning on storing it in building 43 at the Googleplex. The Ship is rumored to be still in the Smithsonian museum, since it won the $10 million X prize in 2004, but could be on the way to Mountain View California. We all know that Google can afford it with their sizable bank account, especially after the recent third quarter earnings released on Thursday. Larry Page is on the board of trustees of the X Prize foundation, so he does have some insides there if indeed it came onto the market. If you have a picture of SpaceShipOne taken on October 21st, Arrington wants it, and he's willing to give an iPod shuffle to the first person with evidence. This would be a great investment for Google, and then they could get back on track with their interplanetary operations. Stay tuned for further developments.
UPDATE: It looks like Google bought a full scale replica of SpaceShipOne. If you feel the desire, you too can get one from here.
It's been a long time coming, but Google has finally handed over Orkut data to Brazilian authorities. Google is complying by surrendering data on users with the requests that were requested by Brazilian courts.
Brazilian prosecutors are investing illegal activity that might be going on inside of Orkut, Google's social network, and sued Google for the requested information. Google has been fighting the requests because Brazilian prosecutors had requested information from Google's Brazilian subsidiary, but Google US owns and runs Orkut from the US. Thus extending the process because all requests had to be sent to the California offices.
California is on the road to new legislation that could require manufacturers to protect consumers against WiFi invaders that prowl the streets looking for open connections. Gov. Schwarzenegger is considering the bill due to the fact that that many consumers do not implement security settings on their wireless routers when configuring them. If the bill passes, manufacturers would have to choose between four ways of protecting consumers:
A warning sticker
Warning during configuration
Action taken by consumers indicating they know security measures have not been met
Manufacturer default setting that enables security
Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New Orleans are some of the cities that will be enjoying a boost in their citywide WiFi networks care of their provider.
WiFi equipment provider, Tropos Networks, a major municipal WiFi supplier based in Sunnyvale, California, announced that they will be providing a 50% boost in capacity. This means that many service providers will be able to increase bandwidth drastically for users, which is much needed these days to the ever expanding world of video and multimedia content online.
The specific equipment needed for the boost will be out in October, and there will be a test phase rolled out to unspecified customers.
Katie Fehrenbacher was lucky enough to get invited to test out Google's free wi-fi service around the Mountain View California area. She was testing it out, and says that there is ample signal strength. She is set to drive around a bit and try out the different locations that are marked on Google's Mountain View wifi coverage map.
In order to download the the Google Secure Access, and start using Google's wi-fi, you must log on to https://wifi.google.com/download.html at a Google wi-fi network point and download the Google Secure Access VPN client.
The main purpose of Google's wi-fi project is the outdoor use; however, there are supposedly instructions in Katie's invitation that speak about pulling in signals for indoor coverage using a high power wifi modem. Stay tuned for Katie's Google testing tour around Mountain View.
Sometimes the cure can be more painful than the disease. Case in point: the federal government tried to help a California county website recover from a hacker's attack yesterday and wound up knocking every California state website offline for 7 hours.
Katie Fehrenbacher
