Learn Something New Every Day

Fascinating. Many more interesting facts turned out in visual form.

Spelling Bee

Writing in his WaltSense blog, Walt weighs in on the National Spelling Bee, which he watched on the TV box last Friday night because he's recovering from face surgery and taking in super-intelligent children performing feats of genius seemed like the right thing to do.

Aside from stale references to foreign names having way too many vowels in them (yes, we get it...the names are very long), Walt humorously commends the Bee participants for their intellectual prowess while opining that he doubts his own spawn could compete at the same level.

I tell you what? If one of my kids begins the path down this spelling bee road, I would ask for a paternity test. There is no way one of my kids would be into this.

I don’t mind if they are smart. I wasn’t stupid, I was just lazy. I can see my kids being intelligent. But being aggressive towards academics would SHOCK me.

Tough day to be one of Walt's kids, I guess.

The National Spelling Bee , via WaltSense

The Cyber Security Sky is Falling!

It's hard to not don a Chicken Little outfit and run around the city warning people of the computer apocalypse developing right before their eyes. Geez, don't you people read the news for free on the Internets?

Some sort of "mystery virus" has infected the computers at the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service. Did anyone swab their USB ports and test for swine flu?

Neither agency was willing to reveal much detail about the event, but based on recent vulnerability management performance reporting on federal agencies, both law enforcement groups may have contracted the Melissa virus from 1999. I'm kidding, but they should really stop clicking on those little blue linky things that keep coming to them in emails while they're surfing for porn.

Also in the news is a distributed denial of service attack against DNS in China that left millions of Chinese users unable to resolve domain names to IP addresses, rendering them unable to evade the Great Firewall of China to watch You Tube videos and rue over how inadequate they are compared to glorious American male adult film stars.

Is their DNS held together with twine and broken twigs, tied seven layers high on the back of a bicycle? How can a DDOS knock the country out if the attack is at only one location?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Lost USB Drive Bad for Spies

Think you'll get in trouble where you work if you lose a USB stick containing sensitive data? At least you're not MI6.

Wired has the story of major multi-million dollar undercover drug operation that needed to be scrapped after an agent left a USB memory stick filled with secret mission data behind on a train.

Things were so bad that undercover operatives had to be relocated due to the life-threatening implications of the lost information.

There's something about British government agencies and their inability to keep their secrets...well, secret.

Perhaps it's something regarding their diet.

MI6 Nixed Major Undercover Operation After Memory Stick Lost