A sacked system administrator has been jailed after hacking the control systems of his ex-employer – and causing over a million dollars in damage. Brian Johnson, 44, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, US, had worked at paper maker Georgia-Pacific for years, but on Valentine’s Day 2014 he was let go. He didn’t take that lying down,…
There has always been a class of worker that is paid for their labor, not for their expertise. There is a reason they were called “laborers”. The IT professional used to be part of the workforce where they were highly skilled and earned a premium for their experience. Now employers, often while employing contract IT…
Cisco has issued a warning that an electronic component used in versions of its routing, optical networking, security and switch products prior to November 16, 2016 is unreliable – and may fail in the next year and a half, rendering affected hardware permanently inoperable. Replacement units will be on their way – just don’t call it…
Regarding recent news of a 14 month long VPN crackdown campaign in China, SSBG would like to clarify the following: This crackdown is targeting 3rd party VPN Proxy Tools (Astril / ExpressVPN / SwitchVPN / etc) used by locals to get around the Great Firewall filtering of Youtube / Facebook / Google / etc. As…
China is cracking down on the hi-tech ways citizens avoid official scrutiny of what they do online. The nation’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has announced plans to “clean up” unauthorised internet connections. The 14-month campaign will target the VPNs and dedicated lines many use to go online. All these types of service must…
Get ready, Office 365 administrators: Microsoft is ending support for the Office 2013 client apps that it previously distributed through its cloud-based productivity service. Instead, administrators and users will be pushed to use Office 2016, the latest version of the productivity suite that includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Starting on Feb. 28, users won’t be…
China is implementing a new cybersecurity law due in mid-2017 and it has different requirements for businesses operating in China: data localization, reporting cyber incidents to the government, the usage and sharing of personal information, and constraints on the publishing of any content online. This means that almost every multinational operating in China will have…
Windows Server 2016 has finally been shoved out the door today, albeit only for evaluation purposes. Which is a very good thing because the software will cost a lot of users more than they paid for Windows Server 2012, especially if they’re slow to talk to Microsoft about their upgrade. Microsoft revealed its Windows Server…
It has not been a good few months for the health and consistency of airline information technology. Two huge outages within a couple of weeks of each other — caused by simple component failures — resulted in massive passenger disruptions and cost two U.S. airlines millions of dollars in lost revenue and customer compensation. See…
Dropbox, Google Drive, and other international cloud storage providers have long been blocked in China – and now a number of domestic storage services are facing a similar fate. Vdisk, KuaiPan, and UC net disk – run by Sina, Xunlei, and Alibaba, respectively – have filled the gap left by the government’s censoring of international…
EN 
CN