Author: Robert Coontz (Administrator)

Lizzie Wade Sighting!

Lizzie Wade and Robert

Robert writes:

Last week, my co-worker (and successor as Muse‘s Q&A columnist) Lizzie Wade came to Science headquarters in Washington, D.C., for a big staff meeting. Lizzie is our Latin America correspondent, based in Mexico City, and doesn’t visit us nearly enough. Here we are in the hall outside a conference room. Yes, she really is as much fun as she looks.

Happy 450th Birthday, William Shakespeare!

Don Pedro. Your silence most offends me, and to be merry best becomes you, for out o’ question you were born in a merry hour.

Beatrice. No, sure, my lord, my mother cried, but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born. — Cousins, God give you joy!

—Much Ado About Nothing

Also (and actually) born today: Optimatum and Rós þyrnir. Joy to all!

MuseBlog and the HeartBleed Bug

Our Web provider, Dreamhost, says we’re okay:

As soon as we learned of the “Heartbleed” OpenSSL vulnerability, we began to patch any and all systems that it may have affected. Fortunately this was a very small subset of our systems and was mostly isolated to a small group of mail machines. As of early yesterday, all of our systems are patched. As a preventative measure, we are also re-keying the certificates on any systems with that bug. We have no reason to believe that any of those machines have been compromised, but in the interest of proactive security, we feel that changing SSL certificates is the best option.

DreamHost.com was not vulnerable, but the machines that redirected traffic to our actual site were. This was corrected quickly and those machines will also have their certificates re-keyed.

We can confidently say that our shared servers, VPS guests, and dedicated machines are NOT vulnerable to this issue because they run Debian “Lenny” and/or “Squeeze”. The most common version of OpenSSL on our network is 0.9.8o-4squeeze14, and the “HeartBleed” vulnerability in OpenSSL’s heartbeat module exists in versions 1.0.1 and 1.0.2-beta.

Attention, Everybuggy!

Not quite Muse news, but close:

Cricket magazine is having a sort of homecoming for grownup readers. Here are the details, snatched from an email announcement from the publisher:

Remember when you got your first Cricket? Or maybe you rushed to the mailbox for your issues of Ladybug or Spider.

Whichever magazine you loved, we want to hear from you! Tweet: My favorite @CricketMag memory is…#celebratecricket or post it on our facebook page and you may receive a copy of Cricket’s 30th anniversary commemorative book. This delightful treasury of exceptional stories and poems, great art, and reminiscences is illustrated throughout in black and white and contains 20 pages of color reproductions of Cricket cover art.

Pollyhymnia Sighting!

Robert writes:

Polly Shulman came down from New York yesterday for the retirement party of our friend and frequent editee, the renowned geoscience writer Richard Kerr. Here’s a picture of Polly, Dick, and me in Dick’s strangely bare and reverberant office.

Polly, Dick, and Robert

Polly was her usual ebullient self. Her latest book in the Grimm Legacy series has just gone off to her editor, and she’s pondering new projects — maybe something a little different. More news as it becomes available…