Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #3.
Tech
Backdoor account discovered in more than 100,000 Zyxel firewalls, VPN gateways
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username: zyfwp
password: PrOw!aN_fXp
FFS…
The Great Suspender: “New maintainer is probably malicious”
To summarize, the maintainer recently updated their chrome store package. The update raised red flags for some users, because the changelog was not modified and there was no tag created in GitHub. On investigation, it appeared that the extension was now connecting to various third-party servers, and executing code from them.
The Great Suspender is a once-highly-recommended plugin that I’m not currently using, and ho boy am I glad I’m not after reading this. Woof…
Writing Runbook Documentation When You’re An SRE
A lot of great advice on writing runbooks right here. My one thing though, is that I’d point out that runbooks are the definition of toil: if a task is definable in terms of a re-usable runbook, then you can also automate it. So, if you have to write a runbook, you should have an urgent plan for getting rid of that runbook.
Ticketmaster Fined $10m for Breaking into Rival’s Systems
“Ticketmaster employees repeatedly – and illegally – accessed a competitor’s computers without authorization using stolen passwords to unlawfully collect business intelligence,” Acting U.S. Attorney DuCharme said in a press release.
Even by Ticketmaster’s standards, this is pretty egregious.
Browse 800+ Game Performance Reports for Apple Silicon Macs
If you don’t know a little about how AC adapters work, it might seem crazy that the difference between an 18W charger and 20W charger could be significant. If you think it’s all about wattage, they sound so similar — how could 2 watts make a difference?
Home Alone: a Post-Incident Review
This time around I noticed all the little checks that were in place but nevertheless failed. It turns out the movie is surprisingly detailed on all these things and made a lot more attempts than I initially thought to make it almost inevitable that Kevin would be stuck home alone.
I forget which movie I was watching recently, but I had a similar notion about writing a post-incident review for it too. I wonder if there’s some fun to be had in watching some movies and building a library of incidents like this…
Grab Bag
Y2K was 21 years ago. Looking back, I think the only thing we learned is that if a bunch people work really hard to stop a problem from happening, lots of other people will assume it was never really a problem.
Every civilized weekday (i.e. Mon-Thu), Today in Tabs contained a lot of internet, compressed as tightly as I could get it.
Tabs was one of the inspirations I drew upon to start this, so I’m a little chagrined to see it return right as I’m getting started.
What Happened When I Attempted a Cornyn’d Beef Brisket
If the smell of the brisket in the oven was the $2,000 stimulus check you were hoping for, the flavor of the finished product was the $600 you’re really getting.
He also called it a “cross between a meat loaf and a McRib without the bun.”
The Full(est Possible) Story of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping Press Conference
Siravo wouldn’t say who had called, or if he knew how Donald Trump’s campaign had even heard of the small landscaping business, or anything else, really, that might tell how this stretch of asphalt became the official site of the end of the presidency and the beginning of the ass-backward pseudo-legal effort to reverse the results of the election.
The Four Seasons Total Landscaping fiasco is my #1 favorite story of the entire election, and this is probably going to the most definitive telling we will ever get. And it’s a doozy.