JDPFu.com 2025

Below are a few incidents that I’m personally aware of which impacted a few different projects. Some are from my personal desktop to production dispatching systems with 20K+ users to some that impacted a space shuttle launch data.

People like Top 10 Lists, but I could think of only 9 near disasters. Perhaps something interesting will happen this week? ;)

Ooops – beep, beep, beep ….

I came across a short article on the Free Software Foundation building a federated social network solution and figured a few of my readers would be interested.

How do you deal with abusive web aggregators?

You know, those automatic programs that search out and grab web content so that others can see it? Usually, this is a good thing for a web site, since it makes your content visible to others that wouldn’t normally see it. That is, until it becomes abusive.

2014 Update:
Adobe is at it again. This time violating paid customer privacy.
Adobe spies on readers: EVERY page you turn, EVERY book you own leaked back to base

Time to start blocking adobe domains, if you don’t already.
adelogs.adobe.com is one.

Adobe has been plagued with security issues in their most popular tool, like Acrobat and Reader. These issues seem to be on all platforms, but are mostly targeted by hackers on MS-Windows. For years, we’ve known that Acrobat allowed PDF documents more access than most people need by default – JavaScript and the ability to start other programs running on the system. 99% of Acrobat Reader users do not need or want either of those features, yet, they are enabled by default.

Adobe has been slow to correct issues and claimed to be on a quarterly patch cycle. This is for Flash, Shockwave, Reader and all products including PhotoShop. For almost all of these tools, there are alternatives that are not the main targets of hackers.

So, I gotta ask …

Why are you still using Adobe Tools?

How to ask for help for Linux issues.

All of us need a little help now and again. Linux users aren’t any different than MS-Windows or Mac users in that regard. The difference is that to get help for Linux, you need to do a little more research first.

We’ll assume you don’t have a nearby Linux knowledgeable friend that knows everything. You’ll need to ask people you do not know for help. Or, perhaps you are the Linux guru in your circle of friends and your questions are more complex than most.

Below, I’ll suggest a few methods to use to get help and outline the data you should include in your requests to optimize the ability of others to actually be helpful to you.

Sometimes a home or small business would like to extend a network without running any ethernet cables or using expensive power line methods. Many homes have an old WiFi router that is still working, but the new router still doesn’t get signal to all parts of the home or some devices do not support WiFi networking, only 100base-tx wired. By using the new WiFi router with the older WiFi router, it is possible to extend a network over WiFi and locate wired connections on the far side of the home using just the two wifi routers in bridge mode.

In the last few days, a permanent article here about a WiFi Router Security Checklist has gotten a very large number of hits, over 100x the normal page views. It contains 15 or so suggestions that every home or small business wifi router user should do from a security point of view.

We all know to keep our systems patched, but that isn’t always easy. Mozilla has come up with an easy way for everyone to check their browser for out of date plugins. This applies to Firefox browsers, but it also works for EI, Safari, Opera and perhaps other browsers.
So, open a new browser tab and go check your plugins http://www.mozilla.com/plugincheck/ now.

What’s that saying? Some days you eat the bear and other days the bear eats you.
Or perhaps Stupid is as stupid does fits.

Ooops is something you never want to hear your system/network admin say. I’ve heard it said elsewhere and then watched as 200+ NASA servers all started rebooting. No time to save your work. No time to do anything before the screen flickers and a bios screen is displayed.

Today, I said, “ooops.”

I do system patching on servers every Saturday morning during a maintenance period. Almost always, nothing goes wrong. I’ve seen some really big patch sets for huge, complex systems go in cleanly … then there’s Java. Every Java update causes some kind of problem for Adito.

Here’s the fix to the latest and most future Java update issues with Adito … I hope.