powdermonkey

Make Love not CyberWar

Been thinking allot about cyberwar and the orgy of funds raining down upon the tribes of defense contractors and I got to wondering, why fight a war you can't win.

Now try to follow me: the US made it a central part of our national strategy to own the skies, I think the last soldier to die from an air to ground strike was in the Korean conflict. So we spent the funds, developed the tech, trained the pilots and can now pretty much own the sky above any country we want to. We decided that we didn't want any competition in the air and wanted to take away that option from any military.

So cyberwar: we are going to attempt to do the same things, spend the funds, develop the tech, do the training, etc. and we'll own the net. BUT of course the net is this large amorphous blob of foreign governments, public and private entities that don't like to take direction from a central source. In effect we can never own the sky. In this case the lessons learned of 'rule the skys' doesn't work and never will because you can never bound the problem of cyberwar. So what to do?

Don't fight a cyberwar by making sure no one else can either.

Most cyberwar exploits weaknesses in existing technologies (servers not protected, patches not installed, bad security, bad archtecture (internet issues), etc.), so turn that technology that deters cyberwar into a commidity for all to use, make it better and move on.

It's a bit counterintuitive but if you can't bound the problem then you will be constantly in the mode of 'wack a mole' hiting this and that group of nitwits or worse state sponsored folks looking to disrupt things. Or the ole Pearl Harbour attack, etc. This would entail pushing open source software, making it better and publishing it for all (yes including the baddies) to use.

So don't fight this war you can't win or at least make it really hard to see any results fast. Over time the systems should get better so that you can trace back a cyber attack and then drop a bomb on them since we own the sky.

where is Technology Transparency (t2)?

There has been allot of talk about government transparency, which is good, more data to citizens is better than less, etc.

What about technology transparency?

As a taxpayer I would like to be able to use some of the code my government pays for the creation of (unless classified). As a contractor to the military I would like to be able to examine source code for the multiple technologies that are being integrated together to provide the best capability possible for soldiers, sailors, marines and airman in the field and ensure it works, especially if that source code was paid for with taxpayer funding.

The DC CTO and the Sunlight Foundation have recently held contests about creating mashup applications for various data sets, the thing has has made these contests possible is that existing source code was available to change, modify and add to. Otherwise everyone would be creating applications from scratch greatly slowing the speed of innovation. Another great example is Mashable, which has snippets of source code available for use and reuse.

Technology transparency also enables individuals and organizations to learn how the source code functions and maybe ensure that nothing nefarious is going on behind the scenes.

So I hope in the whole transparency discussion going on Transparency of Technology is included in the discussion is included. 

Diplomats take a shine to Wikipedia-like app

I met the guy at the State Dept., who put this together, great guy and great that he was able to  push it through! And saved  money too!

Diplomats take a shine to Wikipedia-like app

State Department employees are using Diplopedia, a new collaborative internal Web site, more often to share their expertise and experience with colleagues worldwide.

Diplopedia is similar in design and uses the same software as Wikipedia, which allows users to edit, update and contribute entries. State’s Office of eDiplomacy launched the wiki last September and there are now more than 1,400 active articles and 255 agency employees registered as editors, according to the program’s organizers. The site is housed on State’s sensitive but unclassified intranet and is accessible by all department employees.

Forrester: Open source is everywhere, and increasingly used for mission-critical applications

via Matt Asay, Open Sources Blog:

Forrester just issued an insightful report on the increasing adoption of open source in the enterprise. The verdict? Open source is everywhere, and taking an ever-increasing piece of the enterprise pie:

    Forrester has observed a pattern: Once companies start using open source software, usage expands from simple applications (e.g., file and print serving and email) to mission-critical application areas including customer-facing applications. Data from the survey on which this report is based indicates that a large majority of companies that considered open source ended up adopting it, and more than half have adopted it for mission-critical applications. Each industry has its own definition of mission-critical, of course, but the key point is that enterprises feel confident enough in the quality and security of the technology to use open source in areas that affect revenue and customers.

Scalability: Set Amazon's Servers on Fire, Not Yours

Scalability: Set Amazon's Servers on Fire, Not Yours
Don MacAskill, CEO & Chief Geek, SmugMug
his blog: http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb

slides posted there, download them

--> great presenation with hard numbers about how to outsource you data storage, processing and hosting <--

SmugMug
192 terrabytes data stored
140 million pictures
 doubling every year
$.15 per GB w/ replicas
Why use amazon: not a lot of web-scale expertise on Planet Earth
helps focus on the app, not the muck
Guess: ~ would saved $500k per year
actual
- 64 m to 140 mil photos
- disks $40k to 100k per month
- $922k would have been spent
- $230k spent instead
- $629 in cold, hard savings!
nasty taxes: $295k 'saved' in cash flow! bonus!
- and can resell hard disks, recouping sunk costs
labor mot included, because they had to move 100 TB of data onto
S3 sweet spots
- perfect for startups and small companies
- deal for 'store lots, serve little' business of all sizes
- not so great (yet?) for serving lots if you're a medium or large business. Transfer costs high if you can buy bandwidth
Like SmugFS (file storage) previous:
- everyone building same
-pain to screw in servers
Lessons:
- hot and cold model just right, SmugMug hosts 'hot' data roughly 10% stored locally, s3 holds all of it
- 95% reduction in number of disks bought, no local backup and then only 10% stored local
outages:
3 outages, 15-30 mins, 2 core failures
 and one DNS prob. Amazon.com affected
- 2 performance degradations, one our customer noticed, the 2nd they didn't.
 - not a big deal, everything fails, expect it.
SLA, Service and Support
Amazon a little weak with customer support
launching ec2 implementation soon
- image processing
- 500k - 1 mil images a day
- 2 terapixles of processing
- ridiculously parallel

University dumps Cisco VoIP for open-source Asterisk

as software technology becomes more of a commodity:

University dumps Cisco VoIP for open-source Asterisk

Some organizations consider taking the plunge off of big iron PBX
platforms into IP telephony as being pretty daring, but that's nothing
compared to what Sam Houston State University (SHSU) is doing. The
south Texas school is boldly moving thousands of users off a Cisco VoIP
platform to an open-source VoIP network based on Asterisk.

Write as We Fight

Write as We Fight

If the boots-on-the-ground community is urged to “train as you fight,” the technology community that supports warfighters must similarly be urged to code as we fight—not as a set of scattered assembly lines, but as a robust, responsive network.

During a combat operation, a new coalition sensor becomes available that could help exploit an enemy’s vulnerability if it can be quickly integrated into the common operating environment. Within hours, engineers access the source code, coordinating with a community of programmers who review and bug-test modifications.

Days later, the command interface has been modified to import data from the new sensor. Missions are more successful, and there is unprecedented coordination with coalition forces, because the commander can implement the same software, minus a few classified modules, on the coalition network.

An open technology acquisitions strategy, including accessible source code, makes this scenario possible. Unfortunately, this kind of technological responsiveness and agility is all but impossible today, because much of the Department of Defense’s software, which is central to its operations, is bound up in proprietary systems. These “black boxes” cannot be accessed or modified by anyone but the original vendor, even though DoD nominally has rights to millions of lines of code that have cost billions of dollars to develop.

FAA open-source system saves $15 million

please send me more stories like this (jms3rd AT gmail DOT com):

FAA open-source system saves $15 million

Today, the Federal Aviation Administration announced it has saved $15 million by migrating to an open-source platform for traffic flow management (TFM). The upgrade is part of a broader service-oriented architecture that will exchange TFM's old proprietary systems with Java, Web service, open source and Oracle applications.

The FAA switched from Unix to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, an open-source operating system that consolidated hardware and software installed in 1999.

Real Estate Look-up Mash-up: Zillow

very cool new web 2.0 start-up, mashes together GoogleMaps and real estate listings. A little slow from overuse, but give it a spin: Zillow

Open Source in 2005

I guess when Business Week notices a field the fun's over: A Watershed for Open Source

Open-source software isn't a new phenomenon. It has been winding its way through the tech world for decades, starting with Richard Stallman's Free Software movement in 1980s. But only in recent years have businesses warmed to the promise of low-cost, openly available software. In fact, open-source programs have become so popular, they now pose a legitimate threat to the established software giants.