If Zuckerberg's laptop is pawned (despite access to the colossal might of Facebook's security dept) can we safely assume that Facebook itself is fully pawned?
Does anyone know where the download is for Denyhosts v2.7? This is listed in the changelog for Deny Hosts, but SourceForge only has v2.6 available for download, which I believe still has a minor log injection DoS exploit.
True, but theft of a desktop from a physical location is still a distinct possibility. I have worked in offices where thefts of desktops have occured.
For me, given that a laptop can be stolen when powered up or down, encryption gives the added security that whenever I leave my (screen-locked) laptop unattended I know that the data is still totally inaccessible.
1. data in the data centre should not be encrypted (assuming your data centres are physically secure)
2. everything outside the data centre should be encrypted
An exception to this might be where a 3rd party is managing your data centre (e.g. traditional outsouring or the cloud)
As you say, products like VMware ACE and Sun Ray help to keep sensitive business data unencrypted in the data centre where it is physically secure, or encrypted when it is 'out and about'.
I understand your sentiment but at least with JungleDisk the data is encrypted by the client on *your* machine so Amazon don't have access to any of your data. True, they can still lose it for you, but it really does take the effort/pain out of off-siting. I guess I'm just worried about losing 10+ years (and 400GB+) of music and photos when my house is burgled/flooded/raised to the ground.
Have you considered the JungleDisk client that works with the Amazon S3 storage cloud? This has backup clients for Windows, Linux, and Mac and with suitable configuration of 'buckets' would allow you to do most of what you are trying to achieve. Okay so it's a pay-for service (albeit cheap) but it does provide the all important off-siting, strong security/encryption and unlimited capacity.
It's difficult aside from a few public whitepaper produced by each of the appropriate vendors. However these whitepapers are often no more than bragging rights to boast about 'how scalable our solution is' rather than providing any real information.
This assumes that the new switches are of the same manufacturer and generation. Many SAN 'upgrades' involve changing from one manufacturer to the latest flavour the day (probably as a result of some deal made on the golf course); in this instance you would have to ensure that the SAN is running in 'interoperability' mode which is not generally recommended and can result in reduced SAN functionality - not the sort of state you want your mission critical business to be in.
Also fabric merge and other configuration commands can be momentarily disruptive to a fabric. You would be suprised by the number of organisations that still run single-connect hosts. Obviously here the correct solution is to fix this, but with the best will in the world this often doesn't happen.
As for the copies of data - again vast majority of FTSE 100 companies do not have fully redundant sites. Even a single redundant site is too expensive for most companies - it is cheaper to take the hit on shareholder value (although often the risk that organisations take on a daily basis is not exposed to shareholders) rather than invest in full site redundancy.
Don't get me wrong: most companies have multiple datacentres (e.g. UK1, UK2, etc) that would appear on the surface to provide redundancy, but the quantity of redundant infrastructure in these confusingly titled datacentres is usually vanishingly small. (the banks might be excepted here...)
These are all logical methods of isolation and do not enable you to escape the the impact of physical infrastructure changes. Suppose you need to replace your SAN infrastructure to upgrade - do you really want your entire infrastructure to be dependent on a single fabric while you are carrying out your changes?
Likewise I would never want to be dependent on only two copies of your data. If you are working on one copy do you really only want to be protected by a single remaining copy.
I wouldn't necessarily advocate a SAN system that uses more than 2 fabrics but when your entire organisation sits on a single SAN surely this poses a significant physical risk.
From my experience most FTSE 100 companies in the UK have multi-petabytes of storage so I'm assuming that the article is referring to a single consolidated SAN and not disparate SAN islands. Although it is interesting to examine the limits of scalability for such an environment on theorectical grounds, a more interesting question would be to understand the reasons why organisations would want to consolidate such vast quantities of data within a single SAN system.
Surely there are other important considerations such as security, resilience (yes most SANs are dual fabric - but do you not need more if you are putting an entire organisational egg in one basket?) and risk which must be balanced againsts the need to have consolidated access to the entire organisation's storage through a single interconnected SAN?
Just like the iPod transformed music on the move this nifty box of tricks has transformed music in the living room. There are several killer features which persuaded me to post my £1,500 Primare CD player on eBay, and invest in a couple of these puppies:
- completely silent and wireless - sits amicably next to the hi-fi
- native flac support and digital outputs for unsurpassed audiophile sound with an outboard dac (less than 50 pico seconds jitter apparently)
- AlienBBC plugin allows browsing of BBC programmes on demand via the remote control - believe me this is the way forward. just look at what the tv operators are pushing at the moment (ntl, sky)
- beautiful vacuum plasma display that is visible from anywhere in the room displaying track listings, rss news feeds, weather reports, etc. you can even set monster sized text.
- open source extensibility - I'm usually a bit of a passive activist when it comes to OSS - but the simplicity of creating perl plugins for this thing encouraged me develop my own curious 'enhancements'
- perfect use-case for wireless technology - stick a couple of these things around the house and without nasty trailing cables you have awesome synchronised multi-room sound
My 300 strong CD collection just got relegated to the attic!
I depend on the rather useful ufraw plugin that manipulates images in 16 bit prior to importing in to GIMP. As most of the serious tonal stretching (for me) is done at this stage I don't see any significant limitations with doing the rest of the manipulation in 8-bit.
surely you've just described the Squeezebox2 from SlimDevices. This solves the multiroom audio just nicely, is easy to set up, leverages your existing hifi investment, and will appeal to audiophiles with its flac support and digital outputs.
Currently the only way you can legally obtain files over the internet for playback on an iPod is by purchasing songs from iTunes. The downside for the consumer is where record labels start becoming 'aligned' with channels such as iTunes and start offering exclusives - or worse still, contracts are signed such that all of a particular artist or label's output is locked to a particular technology platform. This works both ways and will ultimately lead to reduced choice for consumers.
The only solution is for this 'closed' DRM to be broken or for the industry to adopt 'open' DRM shared by all channels (with configurable restrictions to meet different contractual arrangements). I for one will continue to buy/rip CDs until this is fixed.
I whole heartedly agree. What we're seeing here is the commoditisation of the operating system. Now, if you were to compare this with commoditisation in manufacturing (i.e. you are not developing your product and prices are purely determined by market forces) there are still significant costs that justify charging for a product and your profit margin (e.g. raw materials, assembly, packaging, distribution, etc)
What we are seeing in the new world of software is that it is possible to make all of these costs (and your margin) evaporate, or at least tend to zero, when a product becomes commoditised. The killer being distribution, as people are able to buy more software distribution bandwidth for less cost directly from their ISP.
The fundamental paradigm shift (and what Microsoft should be afraid of) is that there will be no business case in distributing commodity software. They should now look to other channels (actual product innovation, education, services, hardware (!??!), etc.) as I believe that this issue will bite them in the butt slowly one-by-one for each of the products in their portfolio that begin to stagnate...anyone care to suggest other examples???
I doubt it. At first glance it doesn't look like the core of the iPod has been altered - a few buttons wired up differently, a new battery, and a slimmer case.
I heard that the limitation of gapless playback was because the decoding was done in hw and as a result gapless playback would require upgraded chips.
Anyway, the feature's not being preached from the Apple website so I presume not.
Yes but surely there is then the threat of OSS catching up with the commercial database market in much the same way that you are proposing for the OS market.
If an OSS database were to sideline commercial databases then business application software makers would cheer 'yay, only one database/OS combo to code our application for' and Oracle et al. would go poof....
Slashdot Mirror
If Zuckerberg's laptop is pawned (despite access to the colossal might of Facebook's security dept) can we safely assume that Facebook itself is fully pawned?
Does anyone know where the download is for Denyhosts v2.7? This is listed in the changelog for Deny Hosts, but SourceForge only has v2.6 available for download, which I believe still has a minor log injection DoS exploit.
...and for what it's worth I believe he works for Reuters.
True, but theft of a desktop from a physical location is still a distinct possibility. I have worked in offices where thefts of desktops have occured.
For me, given that a laptop can be stolen when powered up or down, encryption gives the added security that whenever I leave my (screen-locked) laptop unattended I know that the data is still totally inaccessible.
I agree - it seems to me like:
1. data in the data centre should not be encrypted (assuming your data centres are physically secure)
2. everything outside the data centre should be encrypted
An exception to this might be where a 3rd party is managing your data centre (e.g. traditional outsouring or the cloud)
As you say, products like VMware ACE and Sun Ray help to keep sensitive business data unencrypted in the data centre where it is physically secure, or encrypted when it is 'out and about'.
Whole disk encryption will only protect you against someone with physical access to the machine turned off.
Surely encryption can also protect you on a running machine with the screen locked and autorun disabled (so long as your password is good enough).
His lab works with a protozoa, and has massive computational requirements. There will never be any patient data near his lab...
Crikey Alaederach! Get that encryption software installed pronto. Your personal details are already being leaked on to the web!
I understand your sentiment but at least with JungleDisk the data is encrypted by the client on *your* machine so Amazon don't have access to any of your data. True, they can still lose it for you, but it really does take the effort/pain out of off-siting. I guess I'm just worried about losing 10+ years (and 400GB+) of music and photos when my house is burgled/flooded/raised to the ground.
Have you considered the JungleDisk client that works with the Amazon S3 storage cloud? This has backup clients for Windows, Linux, and Mac and with suitable configuration of 'buckets' would allow you to do most of what you are trying to achieve. Okay so it's a pay-for service (albeit cheap) but it does provide the all important off-siting, strong security/encryption and unlimited capacity.
It's difficult aside from a few public whitepaper produced by each of the appropriate vendors. However these whitepapers are often no more than bragging rights to boast about 'how scalable our solution is' rather than providing any real information.
This assumes that the new switches are of the same manufacturer and generation. Many SAN 'upgrades' involve changing from one manufacturer to the latest flavour the day (probably as a result of some deal made on the golf course); in this instance you would have to ensure that the SAN is running in 'interoperability' mode which is not generally recommended and can result in reduced SAN functionality - not the sort of state you want your mission critical business to be in.
Also fabric merge and other configuration commands can be momentarily disruptive to a fabric. You would be suprised by the number of organisations that still run single-connect hosts. Obviously here the correct solution is to fix this, but with the best will in the world this often doesn't happen.
As for the copies of data - again vast majority of FTSE 100 companies do not have fully redundant sites. Even a single redundant site is too expensive for most companies - it is cheaper to take the hit on shareholder value (although often the risk that organisations take on a daily basis is not exposed to shareholders) rather than invest in full site redundancy.
Don't get me wrong: most companies have multiple datacentres (e.g. UK1, UK2, etc) that would appear on the surface to provide redundancy, but the quantity of redundant infrastructure in these confusingly titled datacentres is usually vanishingly small. (the banks might be excepted here...)
These are all logical methods of isolation and do not enable you to escape the the impact of physical infrastructure changes. Suppose you need to replace your SAN infrastructure to upgrade - do you really want your entire infrastructure to be dependent on a single fabric while you are carrying out your changes? Likewise I would never want to be dependent on only two copies of your data. If you are working on one copy do you really only want to be protected by a single remaining copy. I wouldn't necessarily advocate a SAN system that uses more than 2 fabrics but when your entire organisation sits on a single SAN surely this poses a significant physical risk.
From my experience most FTSE 100 companies in the UK have multi-petabytes of storage so I'm assuming that the article is referring to a single consolidated SAN and not disparate SAN islands. Although it is interesting to examine the limits of scalability for such an environment on theorectical grounds, a more interesting question would be to understand the reasons why organisations would want to consolidate such vast quantities of data within a single SAN system.
Surely there are other important considerations such as security, resilience (yes most SANs are dual fabric - but do you not need more if you are putting an entire organisational egg in one basket?) and risk which must be balanced againsts the need to have consolidated access to the entire organisation's storage through a single interconnected SAN?
surely you told him 'not to hold his breath'. otherwise you are evil!
don't you mean 'asynchronously' as in fire and forget?
Just like the iPod transformed music on the move this nifty box of tricks has transformed music in the living room. There are several killer features which persuaded me to post my £1,500 Primare CD player on eBay, and invest in a couple of these puppies:
- completely silent and wireless - sits amicably next to the hi-fi
- native flac support and digital outputs for unsurpassed audiophile sound with an outboard dac (less than 50 pico seconds jitter apparently)
- AlienBBC plugin allows browsing of BBC programmes on demand via the remote control - believe me this is the way forward. just look at what the tv operators are pushing at the moment (ntl, sky)
- beautiful vacuum plasma display that is visible from anywhere in the room displaying track listings, rss news feeds, weather reports, etc. you can even set monster sized text.
- open source extensibility - I'm usually a bit of a passive activist when it comes to OSS - but the simplicity of creating perl plugins for this thing encouraged me develop my own curious 'enhancements'
- perfect use-case for wireless technology - stick a couple of these things around the house and without nasty trailing cables you have awesome synchronised multi-room sound
My 300 strong CD collection just got relegated to the attic!
how did I hear about this review? my squeezebox delivered slashdot rss headlines to my living room!
I depend on the rather useful ufraw plugin that manipulates images in 16 bit prior to importing in to GIMP. As most of the serious tonal stretching (for me) is done at this stage I don't see any significant limitations with doing the rest of the manipulation in 8-bit.
totally agree! if a neighbour's fruit tree overhangs your garden, you're hardly going to be be arrested for sampling the fruit on your own side!
surely you've just described the Squeezebox2 from SlimDevices. This solves the multiroom audio just nicely, is easy to set up, leverages your existing hifi investment, and will appeal to audiophiles with its flac support and digital outputs.
Currently the only way you can legally obtain files over the internet for playback on an iPod is by purchasing songs from iTunes. The downside for the consumer is where record labels start becoming 'aligned' with channels such as iTunes and start offering exclusives - or worse still, contracts are signed such that all of a particular artist or label's output is locked to a particular technology platform. This works both ways and will ultimately lead to reduced choice for consumers.
The only solution is for this 'closed' DRM to be broken or for the industry to adopt 'open' DRM shared by all channels (with configurable restrictions to meet different contractual arrangements). I for one will continue to buy/rip CDs until this is fixed.
I whole heartedly agree. What we're seeing here is the commoditisation of the operating system. Now, if you were to compare this with commoditisation in manufacturing (i.e. you are not developing your product and prices are purely determined by market forces) there are still significant costs that justify charging for a product and your profit margin (e.g. raw materials, assembly, packaging, distribution, etc)
...anyone care to suggest other examples???
What we are seeing in the new world of software is that it is possible to make all of these costs (and your margin) evaporate, or at least tend to zero, when a product becomes commoditised. The killer being distribution, as people are able to buy more software distribution bandwidth for less cost directly from their ISP.
The fundamental paradigm shift (and what Microsoft should be afraid of) is that there will be no business case in distributing commodity software. They should now look to other channels (actual product innovation, education, services, hardware (!??!), etc.) as I believe that this issue will bite them in the butt slowly one-by-one for each of the products in their portfolio that begin to stagnate
And what happened to the 60gb version? I thought Apple had signed a deal with hitachi/toshiba (or whoever it was)!
I doubt it. At first glance it doesn't look like the core of the iPod has been altered - a few buttons wired up differently, a new battery, and a slimmer case.
I heard that the limitation of gapless playback was because the decoding was done in hw and as a result gapless playback would require upgraded chips.
Anyway, the feature's not being preached from the Apple website so I presume not.
Yes but surely there is then the threat of OSS catching up with the commercial database market in much the same way that you are proposing for the OS market.
If an OSS database were to sideline commercial databases then business application software makers would cheer 'yay, only one database/OS combo to code our application for' and Oracle et al. would go poof....