sky, Author at Sky's Blog

We await a galaxy-rise – a morning filled with 400 billion suns

17 October, 2009 by sky

During my lifetime I have gone from viewing stars thorough binoculars, and once through a 40-inch refracting telescope (Yerkes Observatory was just miles from my home – I viewed once as a child) to the amazing deep-space digital views provided by the orbiting Hubble Telescope. I watched Halley’s comet in 1986 from the deck of my home in San Francisco, through 10x binoculars. During my lifetime, scientists dealing with cosmology have advanced our thinking about how the universe (and possible 10^10^10^7 parallel universes — oh, sorry, must not forget I am actually a mathematician and the correct notation is 10¹⁰¹⁰⁷) may have gotten to its current state and where it might be going. {the photo is Phil Plaitt, the “Bad Astronomer” — thanks, Phil, for pointing me to the video which you can play below}

This music video is a trippy artistic rephrasing of how two thinkers talked about the meaning and inspiration of all of this.

[youtube zSgiXGELjbc]

Please also continue reading for footnotes and a second video where Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan discuss the universe…

[Read more…]

Security in the Cloud – Matey, there be challenges ahead

14 October, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Being a user of and a promoter of cloud computing, I am also aware of challenges to the security of cloud computing environments. Cloud computing suppliers come in several flavors. I’ll address two of them here: 1) those who provide virtual hosts; and 2) those who provide automatically-scalable hosting solutions without distinguishable hosts.

A virtual host looks like an actual server. You (or your programmer/sysadmin) can use it as if it were your own dedicated server. In fact, however, it is only a portion of a much larger server. Rackspace/Mosso, and Slicehost are two I’ve discussed and actually use. The focus is on the virtual server.

An automatically-scalable hosting solution is a service or set of services which are hosted on one or more computers, and you can’t actually tell how big the server is or for that matter, whether it’s a whole array of servers. The focus is on the virtual service (not the server itself).

What’s good: Virtual servers are a more secure environment than shared servers because you are only dependent on your own security efforts. (On a shared server, if another user picks a poor password, or doesn’t upgrade their PHP software when security upgrades are released, you can be hacked if their account is compromised.) Automatically-scalable hosts may also be secure in this same way if accounts are adequately protected from each other.

What’s bad: A root compromise of a virtual server may be possible. In fact, it’s probably inevitable that such things will happen. And if you don’t update your underlying software (like WordPress, for instance), they you’re likely to be in trouble anyway. So ultimately any server can be compromised.

“Cloud-clobbering” (talk – is cheap)— cloud servers may become a target for hackers.at the 7th Hack in The Box Security Conference in Kuala Lumpur.

I’ve written about “economic denial-of-sustainability” attacks, in which an attacker causes a cloud user to so scale up their server usage that it becomes economically impossible for the defender to survive. These wouldn’t be possible if there were no cloud computing.

Is the Sidekick failure a cloud failure?

12 October, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

When all data for Sidekicks got lost recently [read this article in the Wall Street Journal] was it a cloud failure or was it a single system failure?^[1] [also New York Times article]

In the sense that data was being stored somewhere and the customer didn’t know where it was, then yes it was a cloud failure. But I contend that it was also a failure caused by the existence of a single-point-of-failure. (As system developers, this is our constant nightmare.) The product/service was set up to use a single data service with (apparently) inadequate backup. That created the possibility of this single-point-of-failure. The real failure was that T-Mobile didn’t provide the option to back up your data in a location under your control, so that you could later on restore it if the central service went down. [Read more…]

On the road(s) in northern India

7 October, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

You can learn a lot about a place if you sit for a while and observe the types of vehicles passing by on the road. During one of my trips to India I sat at lunch and watched the traffic on the busy highway. Upon finishing, I stepped outside and snapped photos of some of the traffic on a busy highway over the course of about five minutes. You can look at my photos and read my observations below the fold…

The snapshot to the left is of the rear of a (big) truck. Big TATA and Mahindra trucks do the heavy lifting in India, carrying huge cargoes everywhere. They are brightly painted—each one different from all the others—and on the back of every one is the legend “Blow Horn — Use Dipper at Night.”^[1] When passing one of these behemoths, every driver honks, and sometimes the honking continues the entire time you’re passing. The honk is both a request to pass and a warning that I’m passing. Unlike the US, the honk is a courtesy, not an annoyance (in California it is illegal to honk except to warn other drivers in case of danger).

Lest you think otherwise, the photos I’m showing you express my admiration for a country where everything is used that possibly can be, and is re-used when it breaks. Very few things go to waste here.

And here are my photos: [Read more…]

Defending yourself against patents – Patent busting at EFF

5 October, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

The Electronic Frontier Foundation [EFF.ORG] has a “patent busting” activity that watches for patents that “should never have been granted” (my language) and works to invalidate them, or at least invalidate as many of their claims as possible.^[1] You’d be amazed at the kinds of things that have been patented that were just plain obvious, or had clearly been invented years before by someone else. I’m particularly sensitive to this because of my long history in computer-based learning and education. As an example, EFF is focusing on busting a patent on online test-taking. This one hinges on a method for charging for the tests and splitting the revenue, but nevertheless it seems absurd that someone could obtain a patent on splitting revenues from test-taking, doesn’t it?

[1] A patent hinges on any number of “claims” which are generally separate and somewhat independent of each other, and these are usually structured in such a way that they’re like ”gotchas” — if the patent owner can’t get you on one of them he may get you on another of them. There is a tension between how much is claimed by the inventor and what claims the patent office allows — and this back-and-forth starts at the time a patent application is filed, continuing until the patent is either issued, claims are removed, or the application is denied. On a granted patent, its strength is generally related to how many claims there are and how broadly they can be applied to a competing invention. Attacking a patent involves showing that individual claims should be invalidated, until you have either stricken the entire patent or reduced it to a few claims that are so weak it can no longer be effectively used.