Golden Guardian 2008 Starting 10:00 AM PST

Today at 10:00 AM PST the largest earthquake drill and exercise in history is taking place.

Golden Guardian 2008, The Great Southern California Shakeout is now taking place. It is based on a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the San Andreas fault.

San Francisco Mayor Newsom Announces Influenza Task Force

Mayor Gavin Newsom along with San Francisco City health officials, have announced the creation of an Influenza Task Force at a press conference. The meeting took place on November 16 2005.

UPDATE: Another photo from the meeting

Google Announces Flu Tracking Capabilities, May Predict Outbreak Before CDC

Google announced yesterday that they are tracking flu trends and hope to be able to alert people to an outbreak before the CDC is even aware an outbreak has occurred.

According to a post on the Google.org Blog "The CDC does a great job of surveying real doctors and patients to accurately track the flu, so why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.

For epidemiologists, this is an exciting development, because early detection of a disease outbreak can reduce the number of people affected. If a new strain of influenza virus emerges under certain conditions, a pandemic could emerge and cause millions of deaths (as happened, for example, in 1918). Our up-to-date influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics and — though we hope never to find out — pandemics.

We shared our preliminary results with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC throughout the 2007-2008 flu season, and together we saw that our search-based flu estimates had a consistently strong correlation with real CDC surveillance data. Our system is still very experimental, so anything is possible, but we're hoping to see similar correlations in the coming year."

Source 1
Source 2 Google Flu Trends

United States Computer Systems Under Attack, IT Security Lacking

White House emails and networks infiltrated, President elect Obama, and Senator McCain's computers attacked and infiltrated during the summer at least once.

The Chinese have been accused and caught spying on the United States since the early Clinton administration, though nothing has really been done about it.

Little action has been taken to secure the systems, guard information from them, and they are still vulnerable.

The scary part, is apparently the ease with which they were allegedly able to penetrate the systems and this should be a warning to any future candidates running for the office of the President of the United States, and any other people in the Government.

It was recently announced that the World Bank was hacked apparently numerous times as well.

Too many Companies, and Government systems holding sensitive data are unnecessarily vulnerable to outside attack. Placing this data on vulnerable and accessible networks is like leaving the door to the candy store wide open.

Recently, Michael Horowitz had a post on his Defensive Computing blog titled "Some Computers Are Too Important To Be Networked". I highly suggest you read it, and apply its lessons to your computer security plans. It is a short post and well worth reading.

An earlier post I had on this can be found here: Obama and McCain Computers Hacked Over The Summer.

Source 1
Source 2
Source 3
Source 4 U.S Treasury Hacked
Source 5 World Bank Hacked
Source 6

Al-Qaeda: New Attack Planned Against US

According to reports, Osama Bin Laden is planning a major attack against the United States. The report goes on to say that the attack will "outdo by far" September 11, an Arab newspaper in London has reported.

Many papers in Italy have also published the report and all point to one source so far as coming from, a former senior Yemeni al-Qaeda operative.

The warning, on the front page of an Arabic newspaper published in London, Al-Quds Al-Arabi - and widely reported in the major Italian papers - quotes a person described as being "very close to al-Qaeda" in Yemen.

According to the report, bin Laden is himself closely following preparations for an attack against the US and aims to "change the face of world politics and economics".

Source 1
Source 2