patchmanagement

This just came into my Snarfer!

How can I not love the fact that hacking the CPU - the hardware - is the next big threat? I mean, how do you patch a CPU?

---

IT-manager: "Oh, its patch day. Let me just shut down the boxes."
(Shuts down most boxes in the server room)
IT-slave: "Oh, so silent it suddenly became. It's almost as when I was a kid, and only had my Nintendo DS to play with!"
IT-manager: "Yea, well, lettus gedon widdit."
(They open each box, snap out the CPU, add a transistor or two to the CPU, stick it back in there, and put the lid back on. )
IT-manager: "Cross the fingers, and hit the POWER button."
IT-slave: "Please, please, pretty please, let the main server start again."
(The server spins up, lamps blinking red, green and blue. An ambient light comes out of the cup-holder and after a few seconds, the screen flickers blue, then black, and finally back to blue. A Log-On screen appears on the screen).
IT-manager: "Ah, it worked again. God, I miss the days with automatic updates from Microsoft."
IT-slave: "Yea, when do you think Intel will start with automatic updates?"

---Technorati Tags: kai roer, blog, hacking, cpu, it-manager, roer.com

I have been using a very nifty little RSS reader the past 6 months. It is called Snarfer. It is free, and did not fill my view with ads, nor does it map all my behaviors - or at least so it seems.

As it is a software product, it is regularly updated. It is also a fairly new tool as I understand, and are still working on the main functionalities. Some nice features I loved was (yes, past tense) keyword searching, blog searching and Internet searching. It gave me one place to monitor the world!

And I just loved it!

So when the tool told me it was due for an update, I went ahead. Downloaded version 0.9.x, and ran the updater.

And on my screen flashed a series of error messages.

Something went wrong. No matter what I did, I could no longer use my favorite reader. And I am now out of control. I can no longer monitor my fellow bloggers. I am no longer able to constantly be alerted of topics of my interest.

I AM BLIND!

I will consider downgrading - if it is possible.

This is only a simple example of what can happen when you are patching and updating your systems. Yes, I use Snarfer a lot, but imagine if this had been your CRM tool. Or your billing system. What if your production facility no longer can use the CRC software?

Just try it for yourself. Try to calculate the costs of your main production tool is down one day. What will be the results? What are the costs - direct and indirect? What are you willing to do in order to avoid such an outage?

No wonder why patch management becomes critical.

Ps - please post your tips on a killer RSS-reader! But - no online tools, please, I need to bring my stuff with me when traveling!

----- UPDATE

Thanks to Snarfer for great support - my favorite RSS reader - including my web-searches and search agents are back up and working! Not bad for a free software, if you ask me!

And thank you my readers for helping me considering other options. Stefan, using Firefox just rocks!