Author: admini

Mickos makes a great point that cloud is very similar to something that IT shops are currently doing and proving the return on investment of. “There’s a very strong ROI story inherently inside cloud which mimics the one of virtualization.”

He’s of course talking about the notion of taking physical machines that are mostly idle and consolidating them into virtual machines that share the same resources, which always leads to lesser investment of physical resources. He’s also seeing that current cloud customers are mostly in test and piloting mode.

Even if the reality of a specific implementation fails, the model itself — that of elasticity, commodity hardware stitched together by clustering software, economies of scale, shared resources — is compelling enough that it will be successful despite individual implementation failures or successes.

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2010/05/cloud_does_roi.html

Google announced that despite earlier assurances to the contrary, Street View had been collecting payloads from open Wi-Fi networks as its cars drove across the globe snapping digital photos. Previously, the company had said it was collecting only SSIDs that identified networks and MAC addresses that identified network hardware, but after German data protection authorities requested an audit of the program, Google says it discovered this was not the case.

In the blog post, Google called the payload data collection “a mistake,” and the company said it would ask a third party to review its data collection software and to confirm that it deleted the data appropriately. “Given that there is some uncertainty about deletion generally, for example one DPA [data protection authority] changed its instruction from delete to retain in the last 24 hours, we think it makes sense to keep the remaining country data while we work through these issues,” the statement reads. But the company was also under pressure from Privacy International and Brussels to halt deletion, and German authorities have already launched a preliminary criminal investigation into the data collection, as other countries consider such investigations, according to The FT.

This past Monday, Google updated its original blog post on the matter to say that it had already deleted data at the request of Ireland. “Before my arrival, Google staff had consolidated the Wi-Fi packet captures onto four hard drives,” read the letter, signed by iSec partner Alex Stamos.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/21/google_halts_wifi_payload_data_deletion/

ICS Cyber Security Solutions — A Complex Mix
There are significant factors that make ICS cyber security difficult for suppliers as well as end users. An ICS cyber security solution is not a single product; instead it is a combination of architecture, practices, behavior, security components — both hardware and software — and 3rd party services.

http://www.automation.com/content/arc-advisory-ics-cyber-security-market-driven-by-risk?x=1&pagePath=00000000,00000307,00002525

“One of every four American homes (24.5 percent) had only wireless telephones (also known as cellular telephones, cellphones, or mobile phones) during the last half of 2009 — an increase of 1.8 percentage points since the first half of 2009,” the National Center for Health Statistics wrote in a report (available here in PDF format).

The wireless carriers love this, because the money is in data plans, not voice plans, noted Avi Greengart, research director for mobile products at Current Analysis. And while the numbers are surprising, there’s more to it, he added. “I think some of these trends are a little overblown. Rise in text and dip in voice is due to the competitive factors that have forced voice package prices down and forced carriers to offer unlimited packages,” he told InternetNews.com.

He noted that U.S. minutes of voice usage are still higher than anywhere else in the world. “We’ve gone from an era where the only way to get in touch with someone was by phone. Then came e-mail, then text and now social network messages and instant messenger.”

http://www.cioupdate.com/features/article.php/3882366/Bye-Bye-Landlines-Voice-Communication.htm