Fire Services RSS pages

I have been using the following pages to get details from the CFA without loading their server; these pages read the RSS feeds from the CFA.

• CFA 1 – Country Fire Authority – Victoria, Australia – Updates & Advice (5 min refresh)
• CFA 2 – Country Fire Authority – Victoria, Australia – Statewide Current Incident Summary (10 min refresh)

Combined with @cfa_updates, @774melbourne and the 774 Broadcast the latest details can then be tweeted to #fireupdates.

i have been tweeting to #fireupdates along with @geehall1 @wolfcat @strictly @websinthe and others over the last few days.

Some details about the @cfa_update twitter stream which has been so amazing:

cfa_updates
Thankyou for visiting/following the @cfa_updates twitter feed.

Let me start off by saying this feed is NOT run by the Country Fire Authority (CFA). It is maintained by a volunteer “twitter”
…
Technical Info:

The Incident Updates are automatically done with a combination of the CFA updates RSS Feed and Twitterrific twitterfeed, which converts the RSS to “Tweets”.

Twitterrific twitterfeed, while a good solution during quieter periods, can only process 5 items from an RSS feed every 30 minutes. On Saturday 7th Feb, between 1450hrs and 1500hrs there were 31 incidents during that 10 minute period. I lost count how many during that half hour. This reinforced the limitations that Twitterrific has.

Also, Twitterrific twitterfeed can not process the Total Fire Ban or Incident Summary RSS feeds properly, so these are done manually.

If the CFA do set up a twitterfeed or take over this one, they can do away with the need for Twitterrific twitterfeed, and post their RSS directly to Twitter with a little bit of cronjob magic from their server. This would provide updates in realtime with no limitations to provide a more reliable feed with less human interaction.

Many thanks to all the Retweeters and #Hashtaggers of my posts, (You guys know who you are) this has meant even more people have access to the feeds than just those that are subscribed.

On the subject of retweets, those that are retweeting **incident summary** posts during the bushfires, please only RT ones relevant to the current crisis. The **incident summary** autofeed is not filtered and contains any incidents on private property in Victoria, not just the main fires

Patch Tuesday Wednesday (FEB-2009)

This month we have 2xCritical and 2xImportant which are detected via Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MS BSA 2.1). A restart will be required.

Bulletin	KB number	Description	Severity	Impact	Software
MS09-002	961260	Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer	Remote Code Execution	Critical	Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer
MS09-003	959239	Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Could Allow Remote Code Execution	Remote Code Execution	Critical	Microsoft Exchange Server
MS09-004	959420	Vulnerability in Microsoft SQL Server Could Allow Remote Code Execution	Remote Code Execution	Important	Microsoft SQL Server
MS09-005	957634	Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office Visio Could Allow Remote Code Execution	Remote Code Execution	Important	Microsoft Office (Visio)

For this month:

This month’s edition of the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) adds the ability to remove the Win32/Srizbi family of trojans. — MSRC [1]

This month Microsoft released four bulletins which repair a total of eight vulnerabilities. One of these vulnerabilities (MS09-004) has been publicly available since December 2008. … — eEye [5]

PATCH NOW:
NOW!: MS09-004 Exploit code publicly available since December 2008
ASAP: MS09-002, MS09-003, MS09-005 No publicly known exploits

LINKS:
[1.] February 2009 Monthly Bulletin Release (2009-Feb-10) [MS]
[2.] February Black Tuesday Overview (2009-Feb-10) [SANS]
[3.] Microsoft Security Bulletin Summary for February 2009 (2009-Feb-10) [MS]
[4.] Microsoft security updates for February 2009 (2009-Feb-10) [MS]
[5.] Microsoft Patch Disclosure – February 2009 (2009-Feb-10) [eEye]