Air traffic chaos in Norway

More than 50 flights had to be cancelled all over Norway on Monday, after dozens of cockpit personnel for airline SAS Braathens called in sick.

That was the news story yesterday

Today it all continued with:

Passengers flying with SAS Braathens faced another day of delays and flight cancellations on Tuesday, even if SAS' pilots reported for work. By late morning, 70 flights were cancelled and more were expected, disrupting plans for as many as 10,000 travelers.

Okay, so this isn't a strike. It does however show how easy it is to exploit the norwegian healthcare-system for ones own financial gain. Should fire them all.

Botnets

James Ancheta aka "Resjames" or "Botmaster" pleaded quilty in Los Angeles yesterday for running a botnet and selling bots.

He faces up to six years in prison. He will also have to pay restitution and give back about $60,000 and his BMW, bought with botnet money.

Ancheta was active in 2004. With another bot herder known as "SoBe", they infected more than 400,000 computers.

They were making money by selling bots to spammers, and by signing up as affiliates in adware install programs run by Gammacash and Loudcash (both are owned by 180Solutions nowadays). This way they earned money every time they installed an adware program to an infected machine.

You can read the full story at fsecure.com

Good that they cought up with the spammer, althought this is one of many. The only way to improve the situation is if the user get some responsibility. Please, do your best to read up and learn about securing your own system. Hopefully secure-my-internet.com can guide you on the way.

Sound of a HDD malfunctioning

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has released as of now six sound bits to help you recognize Hard Disk Drive (HDD) failures. Couldn't they have told me about it a bit earlier? Maybe it could have helped to avoid a certain HDD failure I had on my own. Well, the server is located 700km away from me, but I'm sure someone would be able to hear it before it crashed.

You can download the clips yourself at: hitachigst.com