Unix admin tried to axe power grid
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A California man pleaded guilty Friday to charges that he shut down the datacenter responsible for managing the state&#39;s electrical supply.Lonnie Denison, 33, is now facing as much as five years in prison and a $250,000 fine after admitting to breaking a glass cover and hitting the emergency &quot;off&quot; switch at the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) data center in Folsom, California, on April 15. By doing so, he shut off the power in the datacenter. He was formerly a contract Unix system administrator at the center.Cal-ISO is the nonprofit organization that manages California&#39;s power. By knocking these systems offline, Denison effectively cut the state off from the energy market, leaving California vulnerable to blackout conditions. No blackouts occurred, however, because the data center went down at 11:23 p.m. on a Sunday -- a time when electricity demand is typically at a lull. &quot;If this deliberate shut-off had occurred in the morning ... things would have been far more severe,&quot; wrote Matthew Amant, the California Highway Patrol officer assigned to investigate the incident, in an affidavit.It&#39;s not clear why Denison would have wanted to flip the switch on California&#39;s power, but according to U.S. attorneys, he was in a dispute with co-workers and just minutes before the incident had discovered that his computer privileges had been revoked.Prosecutors allege that he followed up the power outage by sending an e-mail bomb threat the next day to an unnamed Cal-ISO employee, saying, &quot;Hey, at one point I respected you ... you have a new kid. So this is only because of him. Get out before the timer expires. Not long now. Take care.&quot;Following this threat, Cal-ISO evacuated about 500 employees from all three of its Folsom campus buildings, transferring control of the grid to a second control center.That same day Denison spoke with a friend, admitting that he had tried to &quot;shut off the power grid,&quot; according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice.The Sunday night incident knocked the data center down for about two hours, but it took 20 computer technicians about seven hours to fully restore the system. The total cost of the outage is estimated at $14,000.Denison, of Sacramento, California, is set to be sentenced on Feb. 29, 2008, in federal court.
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The European Commission has adopted draft legislation that would separate power generation from distribution networks. The aim is to restrict the influence of big utility companies. In part, the initiative is aimed at Russia, which provides around a quarter of Europe's gas, since the proposals would ban foreign firms from owning transmission networks -- unless agreements are reached between the EU and the companies' home countries.
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This user has been known to install software that crashes workstations and delete shared network directories -- and he's been blasted by IT support people. But this pilot fish wants to change that.
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This data center brings down all 11 of its servers in order to install a new generator on the emergency power supply. And when they come back up, they all work fine -- except one.
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A power failure with potentially devastating consequences at a new high-security research center provokes a critic's call for change.
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At least one high-level Sun exec is departing after a shake-up affecting the Sun Grid.
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Some businesses in California will likely be forced to cut electricity use on Thursday because hot weather and high air-conditioning use could prompt the state's power grid manager to call a "Stage 2 power emergency."
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Sir Philip Watts, the former chairman of Shell, yesterday broke his silence with a blistering attack on the City regulator, which he accused of riding roughshod over his rights and writing a &quot;flawed&quot; report.
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The former chairman of Shell, Sir Philip Watts, is to take the main City regulator, the Financial Services Authority, to a public tribunal to try to clear his name over the oil giant&#39;s reserves scandal.
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A computer systems administrator was sentenced to 30 months in prison for trying to sabotage his companyâs servers out of fear he was about to lose his job, prosecutors said.
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IBM is beefing up both its System p and Power-based Unix systems and its i Servers, once dubbed AS/400. Now, Linux-based binaries created for x86-based PC environments will be able to run unmodified on IBM Unix servers.
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By JORDAN ROBERTSON, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS  SAN JOSE, Calif.  A computer technician working for the city of Newark was arrested on charges he defrauded technology giant Cisco Systems Inc.
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When officials in this Minneapolis suburb didn't like the two eye-popping digital billboards that Clear Channel erected along the freeway, they pulled the plug. They had the power company cut off the electricity after just a few days.
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Among the security concerns that have been raised is the possibility of someone being able to cast multiple ballots. Other concerns are about a sudden power outage and whether data would be lost in such a scenario.
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The software giant, which is currently trying to fend off a hostile bid from rival Oracle, sacks chief executive and president Craig Conway.
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Companies are giving up control of their electrical systems, and they are being paid to do it. The goal? To better manage the nationâs burdened power grid.
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Staff at Sanmina in Lisburn, have been told the plant is shutting down and relocating.The US owned company, which makes computer cabinets, wants to move to Hungary in a bid to lower its wage bill.  (c) 2007 Belfast Telegraph. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning.