There are a few differences though, the primary one being that money, unlike data, is fungible. If a bank goes out of business you just care that you get an equal amount of your money back. Doesn't have to be the exact same currency.
If your SaaS provider goes out of business it's not really a good substitute for them to say "Here's 213MB of data. It's not the same data you gave us, but it's the same amount so that's good enough, yes?"
Along the same lines, if your bank has a security screw-up and reveals your bank balance to the world that's awkward and embarrassing but probably won't cause you much actual loss. If your SaaS provider reveals confidential company information to your competitors...that could be quite serious.
Problem is, with outsourcing, you don't know who the "insiders" are anymore. Right now I know everybody who has physical access to my servers. How do I know? I handed each one of them their key to the server room, personally. I can shake their hands, I can meet their family at the company picnic, I know who they are and where they live.
If we outsource our data storage into the cloud then I probably don't even know where that data is, much less who can put their hands on those servers. Can I trust anonymous folk somewhere out in the world with my confidential and/or mission-critical data?
Correct. And because of multi-tenant arrangements it's possible that your data could be included, accidentally or otherwise, if the provider is complying with a discovery request for another tenant.
Or worse, an overly broad discovery request could sweep your data up in it.
Imagine if the cops came to serve a search warrant on your neighbor but, perhaps because they didn't understand the underlying infrastructure, they just decided to search the whole block.
Can't happen? Unlawful search and seizure? What if the block, and the cops, are in Singapore?
Or you just keep a closer hold on your data and don't give it to companies that are going to, for the purposes of cutting their own operational costs so they can make a bigger profit, send your data to far-flung (and possibly hostile) nations to be stored.
Part of the problem is that with Cloud Computing you have a much broader set of "enemies" to secure your data from. It's naturally in the interests of cloud/SaaS providers, who are selling an increasingly commodity product, to look for ways to cut their costs. They have price pressure from consumers and competitors so like any business you can bet they're looking for the cheapest providers they can for the services they require. Unfortunately that cost-cutting and corner-cutting will lead to new and different security challenges.
For example: all but the largest will be outsourcing their data centers. And when they outsource that storage will they find the same sort of pricing structures, perhaps on a different scale, that everybody else does - it is attractive, from a price perspective, to off-shore that data to places where it's just cheaper to run. One of the strengths of the Internet is how it shrinks the planet in that regard. But there has recently been a big debate about whether or not the 4th Amendment in the U.S. protects hosted e-mail from search and seizure by the U.S. government. What does the 4th Amendment in Malaysia protect against?
What if your biggest competitor in your particular industry is a Chinese company and your Cloud provider decides to store your data on a server located in China. Do you suppose the Chinese gov't might be able to access (or monitor) your data and provide any of it to their company?
Even if your data stays on a domestic server and your business is entirely legitimate - most Cloud providers are multi-tenant (that's the economy of scale that helps them keep prices down). What if one of the other tenants on that server is doing something naughty and the government decides to seize the server to go after them. Will your data be safe and protected? They're the government, right? OF COURSE your data will be handled properly.:-) Uh huh.
Another big topic is document retention. You want to keep documents as long as you need to and then expire those documents. Will your SaaS/Cloud provider respect your document retention policies? Or are you going to discover, hopefully not after being served with a discovery request, that they actually have copies of your expired documents in cache or on backups somewhere that they never destroyed?
There are a LOT of new security issues that come up when you essentially put your data at arm's length with no real idea of where it's physically stored or who has access to those servers. I'll close with a quote:
"If (CIO) Randy Mott told me 'Put the general ledger up in the Cloud' I'd say 'Go back to work, we're not doing that."
-Mark Hurd, CEO of Hewlett Packard-
I see, and we're supposed to just surmise which laws you consider unjust? You apparently consider national borders to be unjust. Do you feel the same about personal property rights? Or is it o.k. for a person to draw a line in the sand around their house and decide who does and does not get to come in?
Question: If our borders were "thoroughly opened" do you think there would be anybody living south of Texas anymore? A few in Brazil, perhaps?
Funny how people cavalierly dismiss what the law says...until they need it to protect them. The cops are all pigs and tyrants...until it's your home being broken into, your family under attack, you who needs protection under those same laws from those same "tyrants."
In the absence of law you would see a whole other kind of tyrant. It would be the tyranny of the strong and cruel where the bullies would rise up and take what they wanted without consequences. For evidence of that just look to some of the parts of the world where there is no working system of law. If that's the way you want to live I'm sure you could find a nice place in Somalia, for example.
At least the way it is now we get to choose who has that power and it's those laws you speak of so derisively that keep them at least somewhat in check.
Is our system perfect? No, it's the worst system there is...except for all of the other ones.
Wow, you Linux FanBoys really have no sense of humor, do ya? =)
Hey, Linux is pretty cool stuff, I'll grant you that. But other than for very specialized applications I just don't have much use for it. If you ask 6 Linux guys what distro you should run you'll get 7 different answers. That should tell you what you need to know about that.
And, I've used quite a few of them. From CentOS to Ubuntu and a couple of flavors of Red Hat and...Knoppix and I forget what else. Roughly half the time it didn't work "out of the box" and I had to break out the Google-Fu (on a Windows or Mac box of course) to figure out why. Almost always a case of needing to find and download new drivers for something, then figure out how to get them installed. Even on plain 'ole Dell or HP desktops.
I was amused recently when a professional Linux guy and I were on a job site and had to change a couple of static IP address - he on a server running CentOS and I on a workstation running...XP Pro, I think. Took me about 20 seconds. Took him about 4 minutes. I'm not sure how many conf files he had to locate and edit.
My grandfather was able to do basic stuff (check e-mail, a little web surfing, manage his checkbook in Quicken) with a Windows XP PC with virtually no experience or training. He wouldn't have grepped the first thing about a Linux box - even with one of the GUI front-ends.
Yes, Linux *IS* getting better in that regard. But it still has quite a ways to go before it's really going to challenge the two mainstream OS's (Windows and OSX) on the desktop. It's just not that easy or intuitive for people who aren't computer pros/hobbyists with the time and interest to figure it out.
Well, there are plenty of distros to choose from. Heck, another 3 hours on the forums and he might have it narrowed down to half a dozen or so. Then if he can just figure out what RAR is and which distro works with his processor and his NIC he'll be in business!;-)
There's already a moat of sorts - the Rio Grande river. I think that only stops illegals who can't swim and have no access to a raft or other boat.
I think we have bigger problems than illegal immigration and trying to patrol the border, which is an arguably worthwhile endeavor, is really not the most effective technique at our disposal. It would help, for starters, if the country they were fleeing wasn't such a cesspool of corruption, crime and poverty. Notice that we don't have nearly as much trouble with Canadians fleeing their country. I can hardly blame those Mexican immigrants for wanting to get the heck out of there.
Second it would probably be more effective if we made it easier for them to come here LEGALLY. Then they could work and live here, with less fear of deportation, and contributing more openly to the society they want so badly to join.
It's a complicated problem, which is why nobody has really managed to solve it. Just ask a Cherokee. If you can find one.
It's just that he spent a hour recompiling his video drivers, another 3 searching the forums to figure out which build he was supposed to have for the core he was running, had to redownload a bunch of files because he found out he's running an Athlon processor instead of an Intel, then couldn't remember which.conf files to VI and finally just gave up on the whole deal because he needed to get some deliverin' done.
He'll find some 14-year-old Elf with lots of time on his tiny hands to help him figure it out later.;-)
TheBrain is a really interesting UI also. Cool idea, great for mind mapping and seeing connection. You can spend a LOT of time putting information into it and maintaining it though. I suppose that's true of any project software but TheBrain is an app you could easily lose a day playing with without even realizing it.
I agree - our firm uses OneNote extensively for project and research tracking. OneNote 2010 even has a view that will dock to the side of the screen - very handy for leaving your notes convenient while working on other things.
Microsoft does provide a 60-day free trial - fully functional.
You probably won't have to install A/V software for their iPhones unless they jailbreak them. One of Apple's weaknesses (heavy-handed control over their hardware and their App store) is also a strength when it comes to security.
What happens when parts of your open source mesh network is off that day because the people with the nearest access point unplugged it to plug in the vacuum cleaner?
One of the big advantages to the big carriers is that, for the most part, their signal is relatively reliable in urban areas. Yes, there are places were you can't get signal, but those areas are fairly well-known and don't tend to change that often. I know when I'm in my fave Chinese restaurant that my Verizon Droid gets 4 bars of signal. It's not a vague "Gosh, I hope somebody has an access point around here" situation.
The other question I'd have with a Mesh network is security. If I'm connecting to some random mesh access point how do I know who owns that and what they might be sniffing (traffic wise)? At least with Verizon I know, unless I'm roaming, whose tower I'm connecting to.
Maybe they should focus on fixing the devices they already have on the market rather than bringing out whole new things?
The Android is an interesting device but Exchange-Calendar sync is broken (even my iPod Touch does it better), the camera is mediocre and a lot of features just feel like they're.9 level rather than ready for prime time.
Whereas before they were probably GAINING a pound or three a month, now they're losing as much as 7 pounds over this period. It's not a great mystery, burn more calories than you consume. Exercise is only one piece of the puzzle.
If you adjust your diet to reduce your caloric intake to a reasonable level (1800-2000 calories a day is reasonable for most people), and increase exercise to increase lean muscle mass (which increases your resting metabolism) as well as burn more calories during the day then you're going to lose weight.
What did they expect? They were going to drop 10 pounds a week like on "Biggest Loser" just by modest exercise alone?
I suspect that the biggest advantage of a hybrid over a conventionally powered engine is that at stops the hybrid shuts off while the conventional engine sits there and burns fuel at zero mph. Further when you accelerate the initial movement of the vehicle, which is the most energy demanding bit, is powered by the electric motor and the gas motor only kicks in when you've already got a certain amount of momentum.
Actually it's probably good that the kids learn English and it's a fair bet that a number of them speak at least a little English already.
Americans are perhaps the most mono-lingual nation in the world. Whenever I travel abroad I'm taken aback at how easily folks in other parts of the world speak multiple languages.
In fact there are more English-speakers in China than there are in the U.S. and Canada combined. Why? Because their kids study Chinese AND English - many of them take extra classes after regular school. How many of our kids are learning to speak Chinese?
Remember that 10 years from now when Chinese is the dominant language of the Internet and the U.S. is struggling to retain our role as the dominant economic and sociopolitical power on the planet.
Well, she's obviously not the brightest bulb on the tree. I would say that yes, it is possible to block all of the zip/executables that a user like that would get. It's not like he changed the extension to.PDF but included instructions that she was to rename it to.EXE after saving it to her drive, right?
There are ways for geeks to get executables past web security. I suspect he just sent her a.EXE or a.COM or something like that and she opened it.
And what kind of web security do they have that allows Yahoo mail anyhow?
Most elegant system I've seen simply uses incremented numbers. They started at 1....currently they're into the several hundreds I guess. They maintain a separate database that indicates what Machine #23 is, who uses it, where it's physically located, what OS/major software revs are on it and ties any service calls to it as well so they can see that users of Machine #23 frequently complain of trouble printing to the network printers, for instance.
Clean, easy, elegant, when the machine moves to a different desk (as they sometimes do) or gets upgraded or gets a new user or a new purpose they don't have to do anything to the machine name. They just update the database and go on about their day.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's a good point. But is "Better than nothing" really what we're aspiring to?
Wouldn't it be better to find ways to increase the security of the average folks WITHOUT introducing all of the other risks?
There are a few differences though, the primary one being that money, unlike data, is fungible. If a bank goes out of business you just care that you get an equal amount of your money back. Doesn't have to be the exact same currency.
If your SaaS provider goes out of business it's not really a good substitute for them to say "Here's 213MB of data. It's not the same data you gave us, but it's the same amount so that's good enough, yes?"
Along the same lines, if your bank has a security screw-up and reveals your bank balance to the world that's awkward and embarrassing but probably won't cause you much actual loss. If your SaaS provider reveals confidential company information to your competitors...that could be quite serious.
Problem is, with outsourcing, you don't know who the "insiders" are anymore. Right now I know everybody who has physical access to my servers. How do I know? I handed each one of them their key to the server room, personally. I can shake their hands, I can meet their family at the company picnic, I know who they are and where they live.
If we outsource our data storage into the cloud then I probably don't even know where that data is, much less who can put their hands on those servers. Can I trust anonymous folk somewhere out in the world with my confidential and/or mission-critical data?
Correct. And because of multi-tenant arrangements it's possible that your data could be included, accidentally or otherwise, if the provider is complying with a discovery request for another tenant.
Or worse, an overly broad discovery request could sweep your data up in it.
Imagine if the cops came to serve a search warrant on your neighbor but, perhaps because they didn't understand the underlying infrastructure, they just decided to search the whole block.
Can't happen? Unlawful search and seizure? What if the block, and the cops, are in Singapore?
Or you just keep a closer hold on your data and don't give it to companies that are going to, for the purposes of cutting their own operational costs so they can make a bigger profit, send your data to far-flung (and possibly hostile) nations to be stored.
Part of the problem is that with Cloud Computing you have a much broader set of "enemies" to secure your data from. It's naturally in the interests of cloud/SaaS providers, who are selling an increasingly commodity product, to look for ways to cut their costs. They have price pressure from consumers and competitors so like any business you can bet they're looking for the cheapest providers they can for the services they require. Unfortunately that cost-cutting and corner-cutting will lead to new and different security challenges.
:-) Uh huh.
For example: all but the largest will be outsourcing their data centers. And when they outsource that storage will they find the same sort of pricing structures, perhaps on a different scale, that everybody else does - it is attractive, from a price perspective, to off-shore that data to places where it's just cheaper to run. One of the strengths of the Internet is how it shrinks the planet in that regard. But there has recently been a big debate about whether or not the 4th Amendment in the U.S. protects hosted e-mail from search and seizure by the U.S. government. What does the 4th Amendment in Malaysia protect against?
What if your biggest competitor in your particular industry is a Chinese company and your Cloud provider decides to store your data on a server located in China. Do you suppose the Chinese gov't might be able to access (or monitor) your data and provide any of it to their company?
Even if your data stays on a domestic server and your business is entirely legitimate - most Cloud providers are multi-tenant (that's the economy of scale that helps them keep prices down). What if one of the other tenants on that server is doing something naughty and the government decides to seize the server to go after them. Will your data be safe and protected? They're the government, right? OF COURSE your data will be handled properly.
Another big topic is document retention. You want to keep documents as long as you need to and then expire those documents. Will your SaaS/Cloud provider respect your document retention policies? Or are you going to discover, hopefully not after being served with a discovery request, that they actually have copies of your expired documents in cache or on backups somewhere that they never destroyed?
There are a LOT of new security issues that come up when you essentially put your data at arm's length with no real idea of where it's physically stored or who has access to those servers. I'll close with a quote:
"If (CIO) Randy Mott told me 'Put the general ledger up in the Cloud' I'd say 'Go back to work, we're not doing that."
-Mark Hurd, CEO of Hewlett Packard-
I see, and we're supposed to just surmise which laws you consider unjust? You apparently consider national borders to be unjust. Do you feel the same about personal property rights? Or is it o.k. for a person to draw a line in the sand around their house and decide who does and does not get to come in?
Question: If our borders were "thoroughly opened" do you think there would be anybody living south of Texas anymore? A few in Brazil, perhaps?
Funny how people cavalierly dismiss what the law says...until they need it to protect them. The cops are all pigs and tyrants...until it's your home being broken into, your family under attack, you who needs protection under those same laws from those same "tyrants."
In the absence of law you would see a whole other kind of tyrant. It would be the tyranny of the strong and cruel where the bullies would rise up and take what they wanted without consequences. For evidence of that just look to some of the parts of the world where there is no working system of law. If that's the way you want to live I'm sure you could find a nice place in Somalia, for example.
At least the way it is now we get to choose who has that power and it's those laws you speak of so derisively that keep them at least somewhat in check.
Is our system perfect? No, it's the worst system there is...except for all of the other ones.
Wow, you Linux FanBoys really have no sense of humor, do ya? =)
Hey, Linux is pretty cool stuff, I'll grant you that. But other than for very specialized applications I just don't have much use for it. If you ask 6 Linux guys what distro you should run you'll get 7 different answers. That should tell you what you need to know about that.
And, I've used quite a few of them. From CentOS to Ubuntu and a couple of flavors of Red Hat and...Knoppix and I forget what else. Roughly half the time it didn't work "out of the box" and I had to break out the Google-Fu (on a Windows or Mac box of course) to figure out why. Almost always a case of needing to find and download new drivers for something, then figure out how to get them installed. Even on plain 'ole Dell or HP desktops.
I was amused recently when a professional Linux guy and I were on a job site and had to change a couple of static IP address - he on a server running CentOS and I on a workstation running...XP Pro, I think. Took me about 20 seconds. Took him about 4 minutes. I'm not sure how many conf files he had to locate and edit.
My grandfather was able to do basic stuff (check e-mail, a little web surfing, manage his checkbook in Quicken) with a Windows XP PC with virtually no experience or training. He wouldn't have grepped the first thing about a Linux box - even with one of the GUI front-ends.
Yes, Linux *IS* getting better in that regard. But it still has quite a ways to go before it's really going to challenge the two mainstream OS's (Windows and OSX) on the desktop. It's just not that easy or intuitive for people who aren't computer pros/hobbyists with the time and interest to figure it out.
Well, there are plenty of distros to choose from. Heck, another 3 hours on the forums and he might have it narrowed down to half a dozen or so. Then if he can just figure out what RAR is and which distro works with his processor and his NIC he'll be in business! ;-)
There's already a moat of sorts - the Rio Grande river. I think that only stops illegals who can't swim and have no access to a raft or other boat.
I think we have bigger problems than illegal immigration and trying to patrol the border, which is an arguably worthwhile endeavor, is really not the most effective technique at our disposal. It would help, for starters, if the country they were fleeing wasn't such a cesspool of corruption, crime and poverty. Notice that we don't have nearly as much trouble with Canadians fleeing their country. I can hardly blame those Mexican immigrants for wanting to get the heck out of there.
Second it would probably be more effective if we made it easier for them to come here LEGALLY. Then they could work and live here, with less fear of deportation, and contributing more openly to the society they want so badly to join.
It's a complicated problem, which is why nobody has really managed to solve it. Just ask a Cherokee. If you can find one.
It's just that he spent a hour recompiling his video drivers, another 3 searching the forums to figure out which build he was supposed to have for the core he was running, had to redownload a bunch of files because he found out he's running an Athlon processor instead of an Intel, then couldn't remember which .conf files to VI and finally just gave up on the whole deal because he needed to get some deliverin' done.
;-)
He'll find some 14-year-old Elf with lots of time on his tiny hands to help him figure it out later.
TheBrain is a really interesting UI also. Cool idea, great for mind mapping and seeing connection. You can spend a LOT of time putting information into it and maintaining it though. I suppose that's true of any project software but TheBrain is an app you could easily lose a day playing with without even realizing it.
I agree - our firm uses OneNote extensively for project and research tracking. OneNote 2010 even has a view that will dock to the side of the screen - very handy for leaving your notes convenient while working on other things.
Microsoft does provide a 60-day free trial - fully functional.
It's not Motorola's fault that the calendar sync is broken and the camera issues are not hardware but rather software. Motorola makes the hardware... Here ya go: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=What's+the+difference+between+hardware+and+software%3F You're welcome.
You probably won't have to install A/V software for their iPhones unless they jailbreak them. One of Apple's weaknesses (heavy-handed control over their hardware and their App store) is also a strength when it comes to security.
What happens when parts of your open source mesh network is off that day because the people with the nearest access point unplugged it to plug in the vacuum cleaner?
One of the big advantages to the big carriers is that, for the most part, their signal is relatively reliable in urban areas. Yes, there are places were you can't get signal, but those areas are fairly well-known and don't tend to change that often. I know when I'm in my fave Chinese restaurant that my Verizon Droid gets 4 bars of signal. It's not a vague "Gosh, I hope somebody has an access point around here" situation.
The other question I'd have with a Mesh network is security. If I'm connecting to some random mesh access point how do I know who owns that and what they might be sniffing (traffic wise)? At least with Verizon I know, unless I'm roaming, whose tower I'm connecting to.
I don't get why I would use Google's DNS instead of OpenDNS - which is what all of my sites use now.
You would think so but they've made mistakes with security before. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/26/more-security-loopholes-found-in-google-docs/
Maybe they should focus on fixing the devices they already have on the market rather than bringing out whole new things?
.9 level rather than ready for prime time.
The Android is an interesting device but Exchange-Calendar sync is broken (even my iPod Touch does it better), the camera is mediocre and a lot of features just feel like they're
Whereas before they were probably GAINING a pound or three a month, now they're losing as much as 7 pounds over this period. It's not a great mystery, burn more calories than you consume. Exercise is only one piece of the puzzle.
If you adjust your diet to reduce your caloric intake to a reasonable level (1800-2000 calories a day is reasonable for most people), and increase exercise to increase lean muscle mass (which increases your resting metabolism) as well as burn more calories during the day then you're going to lose weight.
What did they expect? They were going to drop 10 pounds a week like on "Biggest Loser" just by modest exercise alone?
I suspect that the biggest advantage of a hybrid over a conventionally powered engine is that at stops the hybrid shuts off while the conventional engine sits there and burns fuel at zero mph. Further when you accelerate the initial movement of the vehicle, which is the most energy demanding bit, is powered by the electric motor and the gas motor only kicks in when you've already got a certain amount of momentum.
Actually it's probably good that the kids learn English and it's a fair bet that a number of them speak at least a little English already.
Americans are perhaps the most mono-lingual nation in the world. Whenever I travel abroad I'm taken aback at how easily folks in other parts of the world speak multiple languages.
In fact there are more English-speakers in China than there are in the U.S. and Canada combined. Why? Because their kids study Chinese AND English - many of them take extra classes after regular school. How many of our kids are learning to speak Chinese?
Remember that 10 years from now when Chinese is the dominant language of the Internet and the U.S. is struggling to retain our role as the dominant economic and sociopolitical power on the planet.
Well, she's obviously not the brightest bulb on the tree. I would say that yes, it is possible to block all of the zip/executables that a user like that would get. It's not like he changed the extension to .PDF but included instructions that she was to rename it to .EXE after saving it to her drive, right?
.EXE or a .COM or something like that and she opened it.
There are ways for geeks to get executables past web security. I suspect he just sent her a
And what kind of web security do they have that allows Yahoo mail anyhow?
Most elegant system I've seen simply uses incremented numbers. They started at 1....currently they're into the several hundreds I guess. They maintain a separate database that indicates what Machine #23 is, who uses it, where it's physically located, what OS/major software revs are on it and ties any service calls to it as well so they can see that users of Machine #23 frequently complain of trouble printing to the network printers, for instance.
Clean, easy, elegant, when the machine moves to a different desk (as they sometimes do) or gets upgraded or gets a new user or a new purpose they don't have to do anything to the machine name. They just update the database and go on about their day.