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Reach for your Wallet!

  What about Ransomware? Incidents of computer system hacking and ransomware attacks are chronicled almost eery day.  From the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center last yea, the Erie County Medical Center and many others have been victimized by ransomware attacks.  Our own Fairview Hospital was recently targeted by hackers who managed, at the very least, to scramble some of the information stored in their system.  All Berkshire Health Systems ' computers may have been targeted but I cannot find any mention of  the incident in The Berkshire Eagle or other news sources.  More on that as I learn more. In the Hollywood Medical Center incident, The criminals encrypted the hospital's complete file system informing the hospital that they would "sell" the decryption keys to the hospital for a fee.  The Medical Center eventually paid $17 million dollars in Bitcoin for the keys.  Presumably they got access to their patient data. What is Ransomware?  The Hollyw

Hoppin' John

A bowl of dried black-eyed peas artfully arranged for photographic effect My Great Barrington neighborhood, "The Hill", (we live on a hill)  is one of the best aspects of life in the Berkshires.  Although it has been my home for almost 50 years, my roots trace to the deep south.  My 98 yr old Aunt Mil still lives in the Burgaw North Carolina house where I originated and remember from my early school days.  My father was born and reared on a farm at the edge of Georgia's  Okefenokee Swamp .  Generations of my direct forbears share North Carolina, Georgia Texas and Tennessee as places of birth, life and death.  A direct Grandfather who was at Valley Forge, his wife and many descendants are buried in the Ebenezer Baptist cemetery in Hendersonville NC.  I migrated to the Berkshires from Eastern New Mexico, my mother's birthplace, just a spit from the Texas Panhandle, where I had lived since my 10th year. Mrs Cowboy got started in Puerto Rico, (which is way, way so

The Thing About Cornbread. Or is it Corn Bread?

A Blogger's Burden Fresh from my oven: Southern cornbread in cast iron skillet The major burden of having a blog is that the blogger actually needs to blog something from time to time.   Good intentions don't cut it.  Postings have to be posted. Today I  realized that my one, and only, post on Berkshire Pundit was more than three months ago.  Learning to do this correctly means learning to look everywhere for inspiration, then actually doing it. What does that have to do with cornbread?