Re-blogging headlines – March/April

It felt like a whole day was lost due to April 1st, the day many Internetizens feel they will be unique in their effort to fabricate ruse to demonstrate their cleverness. The Internet already has a low signal-to-noise ratio; on April 1st, the few valuable sites that exist seem to actively collude to drive the ratio even lower. One has to wonder how many man-hours were spent on CADIE the panda-loving artificial life form and facial gestures for web browsers. At least Mr. Astley continued to receive further free marketing through many gimmicks.

Anyways, it seems the world survived the Conficker worm. Many media outlets poised April 1st as nothing less than the end of the online world. Perhaps it was the biggest April Fool's joke of all time, getting so many agencies to report with veracity on something that didn't happen. And while it sounds like the making of another April 1st prank, the "Conficker eye chart" is actually a real tool. Apparently Conficker blocks access to certain security vendor sites, and the eye chart will make that readily apparent when your browser tries to fetch graphics from said sites. Quite clever.

There have been a lot of cloud-centric headlines recently. The Cloud Security Alliance was launched, of which Zscaler is an active participant. There is a LinkedIn group available for general discussion, but it seems things will really start moving around the time of RSA Conference. The Open Cloud Manifesto group (with a LinkedIn group as well) also launched recently. They are trying to promote open standards for cloud vendors. On the one hand, this is a great plan as most cloud technology is home-grown; current implementations are often proprietary systems and thus have very minimal opportunity of interoperability with other clouds. On the other hand, the pioneering cloud vendors are currently deriving large amounts of market advantage simply from the fact that they have tackled the architecture and implementation hurdles others need to surmount to compete. So I don't predict a lot of vendors willingly jumping onto the openness bandwagon until cloud platforms become ubiquitous and commonly obtainable...meaning the market advantage of merely possessing the technology is minimized or removed entirely and commoditization sets in. And despite all this recent excitement over clouds, I feel I need to provide honorary mention of Craig Balding over at www.cloudsecurity.org, who has been talking about cloud security for quite a while now. It's nice of us to finally start catching up with him.

I've blogged relatively recently about Google, Gmail, beta status, and their cloud technology (in my posts "Changing a tire while going 60mph" and "Big, white, puffy clouds can still evaporate"). There were some recent articles which address some of the points I raised. First was the Ars Technica interview of Gmail product manager Todd Jackson, who addressed the whole Gmail 'beta' moniker despite Gmail celebrating its fifth anniversary. And then Google unveiled some details relating to their hardware designs, which include using localized batteries in the server chassis instead of external UPS battery backups. Apparently internal batteries can achieve better efficiency than a UPS can offer; also interesting was their 12-volt only power supply. But there were two much broader takeaways from that story that appealed to me. First was the notion that Google's investments into platform innovations, even if producing only a minute improvement, can still realize a quick return due to the sheer mass of Google's infrastructure. That's a very unique position to be in, because Google can derive advantage from micro improvements that other corporations just simply do not have the economy of scale to realize a return. Second is the statement that Google is currently obtaining efficiency levels that the EPA hopes will be commonly possible in 2011, after additional "advanced technology" is made available to help realize that goal. That is a pretty big tip of the hat to Google and their level of innovation; apparently they are at least two years ahead of where everyone hopes to wind up down the road. Maybe we should ask them what their lottery number choices are...

Until next time,
- Jeff