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<title>Haaze.com / stpetroski / Published News</title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com</link>
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<pubDate>Wed, 22 Jun 2011 07:11:37 +0000</pubDate>
<language>en</language>
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<title><![CDATA[Disgruntled IT guy slips porn into CEO's PowerPoint]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=disgruntled-it-guy-slips-porn-into-ceos-powerpoint</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=disgruntled-it-guy-slips-porn-into-ceos-powerpoint</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 22 Jun 2011 07:11:37 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>stpetroski</dc:creator>
<category>Marketing and advertising</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=disgruntled-it-guy-slips-porn-into-ceos-powerpoint</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Sometimes, revenge is bitter.The reason for this is that sometimes you get your revenge and then you get, well, caught.Please consider the feelings of Walter Powell, a 52-year-old IT manager at Baltimore Substance Abuse Systems. Actually, he became a former IT manager there. Which, perhaps stimulated a desire for a little revenge.I am grateful to The Baltimore Sun for offering this story which begins with revenge, has porn in the middle, and whose denouement is played out in court.Powell, you see, was reportedly fired in 2009. He wasn't very happy about this, so began to use his significant expertise to tap into his former employer's computer systems, according to the story. It seems he may have had a piece de resistance in mind. I cannot be sure that this particular piece actually involved any sort of resistance, or even bondage. However, Powell managed to remotely control his former CEO's presentation to the board of directors of this nonprofit organization, which distributes public funds to substance abuse programs.At the point at which the CEO was to unveil a particular PowerPoint slide and give forth, Powell remotely shut down the system. When it rebooted, there, alas, was porn.(Credit:CC Cogdogblog/Flickr)Well, to be precise, it was some kind of a picture of a naked woman on the rather sizable 64-inch screen.I know that there will be those will admire his ingenuity. I know there will be those who can only imagine the smirk that must have come across his face--and perhaps those of one or two Baltimore Substance Abuse Systems board members--when the lady was projected.However, court papers show that Powell admitted his guilt--at least to two counts of &quot;unlawful access to a computer causing it to malfunction&quot; and one of &quot;possessing a pass code without authorization.&quot;He reportedly received two years suspended (all but time served), 100 hours of community service, and three years probation. He was also barred from &quot;possessing software that enables remote access and monitoring of other computers.&quot;How, though, might that last part be enforced He's an IT guy. IT guys know how to do everything surreptitiously. They can get everything from everywhere with every kind of software. They press a couple of keys in Baltimore and traffic lights stop in Mumbai. They slip a little custom software onto their MacBooks and the prime minister of Montenegro is heard to talk like Donald Duck.I know that they occasionally get caught.But you cannot keep a clever IT guy down. What price a porn movie gets projected onto the doors of a courtroom in, say, Baltimore in the very near future<br/><br/>766 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Repairs ground Endeavour at least a week]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=repairs-ground-endeavour-at-least-a-week</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=repairs-ground-endeavour-at-least-a-week</comments>
<pubDate>Sun, 01 May 2011 07:10:16 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>stpetroski</dc:creator>
<category>Social</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=repairs-ground-endeavour-at-least-a-week</guid>
<description><![CDATA[KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--Engineers have traced an electrical problem blamed for grounding the shuttle Endeavour Friday to a power distribution box in the ship's engine compartment, officials said today. Replacing the box will delay launch until at least May 8--Mother's Day--and possibly later.&quot;I'm here to disappoint everybody by saying I'm not going to tell you what the new launch date is because I have no idea,&quot; Mike Moses, chairman of NASA's Mission Management Team, told reporters after engineers decided on a course of action. &quot;We have a lot to evaluate, both the work to do, the R &amp; R (removal and replacement), the retest that has to be done, how we work all that schedule in.A technician works in the shuttle Endeavour&amp;39's cramped engine compartment where a suspect power distribution box is located. Work to replace the box will delay another attempt to launch Endeavour to at least May 8 and possibly longer.(Credit:NASA)&quot;But we can tell you pretty much it's not going to be any earlier than the 8th. That doesn't mean we're going to go launch on the 8th, that just means we know right now the 8th is our next available opening,&quot; he said.Launch Director Mike Leinbach said engineers plan to remove the suspect aft load control assembly--ALCA-2--box from Endeavour's cramped engine compartment tomorrow, install a replacement Tuesday and get into a complex re-test procedure Tuesday night or early Wednesday.To make a launch at 12:09:17 p.m. EDT on May 8, NASA would have to start a fresh three-day countdown around 10:30 a.m. Thursday. Whether the team can complete the ALCA-2 swap-out and re-test in time remains to be seen.But if Endeavour does not make May 8, launch likely would move to May 10. A launch on May 9 could result in the shuttle undocking from the International Space Station on May 23, the same day a Russian Soyuz crew ferry craft is scheduled to depart. There are no known conflicts for subsequent launch opportunities.In the meantime, &quot;the team is upbeat,&quot; Leinbach said. &quot;A little disappointed, of course, that we couldn't launch. But responding to problems is one of the things we do best around here and the team always likes a good challenge. I'm sure we're going to be really glad when Endeavour's finally on orbit but right now, the team is upbeat and ready to execute the plan that we've laid out.&quot;The aft load control assembly electrical switching box is located on the right side of the shuttle&amp;39's engine compartment.(Credit:NASA)Endeavour commander Mark Kelly and his crewmates--pilot Gregory H. Johnson, Michael Fincke, Gregory Chamitoff, Andrew Feustel, and European Space Agency astronaut Roberto Vittori--flew back to Houston early Sunday aboard a shuttle training aircraft to participate in additional ascent simulations later this week.&quot;Things happen fast,&quot; Johnson said in a Twitter update. &quot;We are now all aboard an STA for return to Houston. Be back in a few days. More to follow.&quot;Endeavour was grounded Friday during the final hours of the countdown because of telemetry indicating multiple fuel line heaters used by one of the shuttle's three hydraulic power units were not activating normally. The heaters are needed to keep the lines from freezing and possibly rupturing in flight.The shuttle is equipped with three auxiliary power units, providing the hydraulic muscle to move the ship's engine nozzles, wing elevons, rudder, tail fin speed brake, body flap, landing gear brakes and nose wheel steering system. The shuttle can safely fly with a single APU, but flight rules require full redundancy for a countdown to proceed.Likewise, each of the shuttle's three APUs is equipped with redundant heater &quot;strings&quot; and only one channel is required for normal operation. But again, the flight rules require redundancy to protect against a subsequent failure that could knock the system out of action.Early Saturday, engineers ruled out a problem with the fuse panel in the shuttle's cockpit that routes power to the APU circuitry. That left two possible culprits: one or more faulty heater control thermostats or the aft load controller assembly the heater circuitry runs through.To find out if a faulty thermostat was to blame, engineers working in Endeavour's cramped engine compartment Saturday afternoon sprayed compressed air on APU No. 1's B-channel heater thermostats to lower their temperature enough to find out whether they would cycle on or not. They did not, but that could have been the result of a wiring problem or a bad connector. Additional tests were carried out overnight and no such problems were found.Engineers met early Sunday and recommended replacing the ALCA-2 box.&quot;The box will come out tomorrow and we'll send it down to our malfunction lab for a detailed inspection,&quot; Leinbach said. &quot;The new box goes in on Tuesday...And then after that, we get into the re-test Tuesday night, Wednesday, that kind of timeframe. It's going to be a full two days of re-test.&quot;The shuttle's electrical system features three main circuits, or buses, for redundancy. As a result, three aft load control assemblies are present in the engine compartment.Each 50-pound box includes dozens of power switches that route electricity to components in nine major systems, including the auxiliary power units, the environmental control and life support system, solid-fuel booster electronics, the shuttle's main engines, its orbital maneuvering system rockets and flight control systems.The box is located just forward of a right-side engine compartment access door and Leinbach said the replacement operation was not particularly difficult. An ALCA was changed out during a 1995 shuttle launch campaign and engineers will use the same procedures for Endeavour.The issue for NASA is the time needed to complete testing to make sure the myriad subsystems downstream of the box are receiving power as required.&quot;Anytime you break connection to a box like this, you essentially invalidate all the testing we did up to that point,&quot; Leinbach said. &quot;You could take the tack of saying all you're doing is replacing the box and everything downstream of that box should be fine. Well, that's true, But our requirements, the way we do business is whenever we break a connection we go back and retest it.&quot;That's just the prudent thing to do and the way our requirements are set. So we have to retest every one of those nine systems. The details within those systems, you could probably write a thesis on how many individual tests there are within those nine systems. And that's why it takes so long.&quot;Assuming NASA sticks with a May 8 launch, Endeavour would dock with the International Space Station around 9 a.m. on May 10 and the mission's primary payload, a $2 billion particle physics detector, would be attached to the lab complex the next day.The mission's four spacewalks would be carried out May 12, 14, 16 and 18, before undocking around 2 a.m. on May 20. If that schedule holds up, landing back at the Kennedy Space Center would be expected around 6:30 a.m. on May 22.But NASA managers plan to extend Endeavour's mission by two days, if possible, to give the shuttle crew time to help their space station counterparts with needed internal maintenance. In that case, undocking would slip to May 22 and landing would be expected before dawn on May 24.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[NRC plans review as focus turns to nuclear fuel storage]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=nrc-plans-review-as-focus-turns-to-nuclear-fuel-storage</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=nrc-plans-review-as-focus-turns-to-nuclear-fuel-storage</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 21 Mar 2011 07:11:07 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>stpetroski</dc:creator>
<category>Eco</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=nrc-plans-review-as-focus-turns-to-nuclear-fuel-storage</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission plans to do a &quot;systematic and methodical&quot; review of U.S. nuclear facilities following the onset of the crisis earlier this month in Japan.The NRC said today that it will study information from the situation in Japan--where a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and ensuing tsunamis provoked a dangerous situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility--and conduct an assessment of nuclear power plants in the U.S. There will be a rapid, 90-day review and a longer review which could include regulatory action, according to reports.&quot;We have a high degree of confidence that at our 104 nuclear reactors there is an adequate basis to ensure adequate protection,&quot; Bill Borchardt, executive director for operations at the NRC, said at a Commission meeting, according to a report at E2 Wire.Dry cask storage entombs spent fuel assemblies in steel and concrete.(Credit:NRC)The review comes at a time of growing concern over nuclear disasters in the U.S. and renewed calls to improve the safety of spent fuel from nuclear facilities. At the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, the spent fuel pools have emerged as one of the gravest dangers because they are not stored in metal and thick concrete structures as the reactors are.In the U.S., there are under 100 tons of spent fuel stored at power plants, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. After they have been used to generate heat in the reactor, fuel is kept in pools of water that contain the radiation. Water is also circulated to remove the residual heat from the assemblies, which hold the nuclear fuel rods, for several years. Because there isn't a central repository in the U.S. for storing spent nuclear fuel, many nuclear plants have a lot of spent nuclear fuel on site. The Seabrook Station nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, for example, had space for 20 years worth of spent fuel storage in pools but then needed to build a dry cask storage facility on site. The nuclear waste is covered in steel and concrete.The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which released a report citing safety lapses at U.S. nuclear plants last week, noted that storing fuel in dry casks, rather than in pools, is safer from errors, natural disasters, and attacks. &quot;UCS has long recommended that spent fuel be transferred from the pool to dry cask storage once the fuel has cooled enough, after about five years. This is a major issue in the U.S. because U.S. pools are becoming increasingly packed with spent fuel,&quot; said Lisbeth Gronlund, the co-director of the global security program, in a blog post yesterday.In particular, plant designs where nuclear fuel is stored above ground have come under fire. Massachusetts state attorney general Martha Coakley yesterday put out a statement pressing the NRC to review the spent fuel at two New England nuclear power plants--Vermont Yankee and Pilgrim. The Seabrook Power Plant was not subject of the complaint because it has below-grade storage.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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