Summary: Hosted by Eric McClintock, Mark Stewart, and Mark Avey. Listen Here: Subscribe to automatically get the latest podcast: iTunes, Zune, RSS XML, E-Mail, All Other. Avsim.com Hacked Avsim was hacked on May 12th 2009 in such a way that it would seem unlikely that it will return. Tom Allensworth made this announcement: "We regret to inform the flight simulation community that on Tuesday, May 12, AVSIM was hacked and effectively destroyed. The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible, to recover from. Both servers, that is the library / email and web site / forum servers were attacked. AVSIM is totally offline at this time and we expect to be so for some time to come. We are not able to predict when we will be back online, if we can come back at all. We will post more news as we are able to in the coming days and weeks...". "I want to provide everyone with a non-technical view of what took place yesterday and last night so that some of the rumors that are already starting to spread are corrected. During the early evening yesterday, we noticed that some alarming things were starting to happen on our servers. The first sign of an issue was that some functionality disappeared on our web server. That progressed to not being able to access the web server via FTP or SSH. Finally, the web/forum server tripped offline. Next the library/email server started to exhibit issues. We went in to reboot it, and that is when it failed entirely. The partitions on both of the servers had been removed. We shut down both servers until we can get a technical member up to our Network Operations Center (NOC), and do a comprehensive inspection of the damage. I have seen some rumors and speculation already on the various forums in the community, and I would like to make sure that everyone knows the facts. Here are some: Early in the evening, I sent out a bulk email to all forum members letting them know that we anticipate shutting down the Web/Forum server for a period of time. About a third of the way through the process of sending that email to all 60,000 forum members, the hacker succeeded in bringing the server down. The email was did not get sent to everyone. The reason I sent the email, based on what we knew at that time, was because that a minimum, we would need to shut the web/forum server down to inspect the unit and do repairs. At the time the email was sent, we were unaware that a hack was in progress and that our system would be taken offline entirely. There were no hoaxes involved, as some have asserted." When asked about the subject of Backups... Some have asked whether or not we had back ups. Yes, we dutifully backed up our servers every day. Unfortunately, we backed up the servers BETWEEN servers. That is, GREEN, our library server, would be backed up to PURPLE, our WEB/Forum server. That way, if one or the other failed, we would have a back up on the remaining active server. The hacker took out both servers, destroying our ability to use one or the other back up to remedy the situation. As of current, Avsim has set up temporary forums here: http://linux.myalbemarle.org/forums Via various sources... [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link]. Carenado C172N Skyhawk II Float for FSX Carenado have released one of the most versatile aircraft for bush flying and surveillance tasks - the C172N Skyhawk II with Floats for FSX. This aircraft is a standalone package (It isnrsquo;t an extension pack for our previously released C172N). [Much like the C172 Ski Edition last week] This product was developed only for FSX taking advantages of all the FSX and DX10 features like cast shadows on VC, external dynamic cast shadows, normal mapping, specular mapping and bloom lights, resulting in a high quality aircraft. Price: $12.95 [Buy Here, Via FlightSimX.co.uk] Screenshots: [nggallery id=33] Free X-Plane Trainer for iPhone/iPod Touch X-Plane Trainer is a free applica...
