Que es?
The Weblog of Brett Singer. Bringing the world what it needs most - a blog.

Note: Sorry about all of the 'hot deals' entries (someone referred to this blog as CorporateShill.com).
The deals and things are being fed into Multineedia.com. We will soon move the deals category over to Multineedia so you don't have to read it, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Gawker on Radar

Gawker gets an earful (inboxful?) from Radar about their claims of sold-out newsstands across the country. As they say:

We genuinely appreciate Blattman’s lesson on magazine distribution. She makes some very good points. (And we won’t bother pointing out that they’re somewhat irrelevant, as Maer didn’t tell WWD, “We sold out at some newsstands in New York.” He said, “We’re sold out all over the country.” The “we’re” — we are, uncontracted — suggests an ongoing state of affairs, not a question of restocking.)

Not to overstate the importance of all this, but what Gawker is doing (intentionally or not) is not putting up with a media culture that allows people like Maer Roshan to lie freely and without consequences. Maybe it doesn't matter: they have audited circulation, presumably, and if you lie about that, there are (sometimes) consequences. But the thing is, THEY'RE RIGHT, Radar's editor in chief is lying through his teeth. They also point to this stupid blog, which they claim is written by Radar’s PR guy, Drew Kerr. How'd they find out who the blog belonged to? A little site called Register.com, perhaps you've heard of it. So who's doing the real reporting, people? The "snarky" web site (Gawker), or the slick, glossy, heavily funded, overhyped, overstocked magazine (Radar)? Hmpf.

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DNS Servers Vulnerable to Attack

IT News Happening Now
DNS servers--open to attack?
Scan finds that hundreds of thousands of the servers that act as
the white pages of the Net are vulnerable to attack.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought that this happened before and was already known about. Someone said to me recently that if you're not a full-time sysadmin, its pretty damn tough to manage a server that works well and is secure. Tis true. This is why I always liked the concept of server appliances like Cobalt, before Sun bought the company and ruined the product. I think its wishful thinking, though: an unprotected system is open to attack. Even if you're data isn't worth stealing, your machine can be zombified and used for nefarious purposes. Feh. Computers are complicated. Get me an XBox.

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Its Funny Cuz Its True

Well, it COULD be true.

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