Bill Melendez Passes on at age 91
Bill Melendez: Who was he? If you grew up in the USA chances are you watched many of his creations. I did say many, and that is probably an understatement.Bill was an incredible animator. He worked for Disney and for Warner Brothers, but his most notable work came from an association with Charles Schulz, the creator of Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang. He died eight years after Mr. Schulz, who left this Earth on February 13th of the year 2000. What a team they were indeed! They were pure genius!
Looking back: In 1916 Mr. Melendez was born in Mexico. He became associated with Charles Schulz and began work on Peanuts in 1960. From that point on no one except Bill would ever work on Peanuts! No one!
In 1965 the famous "A Charlie Brown Christmas" was aired on television, ushering in a series of about 70 Peanuts shows so incredible that no one would or will ever forget the magic! Not even Disney!
He was great! Perhaps the greatest!
A fond farewell: On Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 Mr. Melendez passed on at St Johns Health Center in Santa Monica California. He was 91 years old.
It seems many of the greats are dying at 91. Is it a coincidence? We will never know, but one thing is for sure... We will always remember what this man has given to us all. Good Grief! 91 years old! Can you believe it Charlie Brown! Can you!
Thanks for all the good times Bill! You will be missed..
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George, We'll Miss You!
In memory of the Greats..Comedian George Carlin Passes on:
Comedian George Carlin has left the stage officially. On Monday, June 23, 2008 it was reported that Mr. Carlin had heart failure shortly after checking into the hospital complaining of chest pain. There was nothing that could be done to save him.
Remembering George:
Perhaps one of the most outstanding comedians of all time, George Carlin appeared on The Tonight Show over 150 times, wrote 2 books, and located the boundaries of comedy only to cross them blazingly. I had the pleasure of seeing him live in Atlantic City. The only comedian I could ever compare him to, George Burns, has already joined his wife Gracie passing on several years ago at the age of 91. The stage is now empty.
George's most famous skit was "The Seven Words You Can't Say on TV". It actually made the FCC stand up and take notice. What an inspiration he was!
We will miss you George! Keep them laughing up there!
George Carlin - Died Monday, June 23, 2008- Age:71 (1937-2008).
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National GrrrrID
Power outages on Long Island are becoming a common thing ever since National Grid has taken over LIPA. Every other day the power goes out it seems. We are talking Nassau County now, which until recently could almost say they never had major outages. Now they can say they always have major outages. What do you think the state should do to fix this? Take over again, have someone else buy out National Grid? Who knows... but if you remember the big blackouts in the Northeast a few years back, they were in part due to incompetancy of National Grid! I think they have had enough fun with my power! Replace them! What's your take? Contact US Senator Charles Schumer to let him know you are tired of the constant power problems of National Grid, and he may step in to help. He's a good person. The more people that contact him the better! This is a link to his website and feedback form. He reads this personally. http://schumer.senate.gov/SchumerWebsite/contact/webform.cfm1 Comment - Edit - Delete
SANS YELLOW ALERT!
A yellow alert has not been issued by SANS.org since the SQL Slammer Worm surfaced at 05:30 UTC on January 25, 2003. It spread rapidly, infecting most of its 75,000 victims within ten minutes. This is a big one! Pay attention Debian-Linux SSH and SSL key users! This means U!Direct from www.sans.org
INFOCon yellow: update your Debian generated keys/certs ASAP
Published: 2008-05-15,
Last Updated: 2008-05-15 15:30:39 UTC
by Bojan Zdrnja (Version: 2)
As you can see, we raised the INFOCon level to yellow. The main idea behind INFOCon is to protect the Internet infrastructure at large, and the development on automated scripts exploiting key based SSH authentication looks like a real threat to SSH servers around the world (any SSH server using public keys that were generated on a vulnerable Debian machine – meaning – the keys had to be generated on a Debian machine between September 2006 and 13th of May 2008).
Note: 'Debian' in the above paragraph refers to any Debian-based Linux distribution including Ubuntu.
Scripts that allow brute forcing of vulnerable keys (see this as rainbow tables for SSH keys) are in the wild so we would like to remind all of you to regenerate SSH keys ASAP.
Please keep in mind that SSL certificates should be regenerated as well. This can be even more problematic if you had your certificates signed since you'll have to go through this process again (and possibly pay money again).
More information is available in our previous diaries:
http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=4420
http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=4414
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Bojan
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Trojan Strikes Windows File Sharers Hard!
Hundreds of thousands of links containing a new Trojan in a media file have flooded onto P2P networks.Since May second more than half a million instances of the Trojan have been detected on consumer PCs, according to McAfee.
The spread of the Downloader-UA.h Trojan is the most significant malware outbreak in the last three years.
The Trojan pops up ads onto contaminated PCs basically turning them all into an advertising medium for Spammers.
McAfee says malware authors loaded hundreds of modified MP3s and MPEGs onto Limewire, eDonkey and other file sharing networks. The files are all named differently, are in many languages, have different file sizes in order to make them appear like legitimate music or video files.
If one of these files is played it will trigger the download of an application named "PLAY_MP3.exe" that blasts tons of ads onto the now-infected Windows PCs.
McAfee ratings: "medium" risk.
No other malware has been rated this high since some time back in 2005!
Watch your backs! This one will no doubt get worse before it gets better!
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