I was a guest this week on the ComputerAmerica nationally syndicated radio show, where I spoke for an hour about Windows 7 Migration options. There are six products that I have spent some time with for a series of reviews on ITExpertVoice.com.
With the announcement earlier this month that Facebook topped Google as the most-viewed site on the Internet, it is no wonder that social networking-like features such as discussion forums, chat, file sharing and status updates are seeping into more enterprise applications. Whether it is a fad, a trend, or a time-sucking annoyance isn’t really important: these features are here to stay.
Last week we witnessed the first Cyber War, but it didn’t go down quite as many of us expected. Instead of a group of anonymous hackers trying to take over thousands of infected PCs or trying to cut off access to critical infrastructure, we saw Google declare the first salvo in its war against Chinese censorship by moving its servers to Hong Kong.
The more I thought about this, the more I realized that this was war, declared by a private company on a nation state. Just because Google doesn’t have its own army (yet), or that no actual physical weapons were fired doesn’t make it any less of a battle. And it is only going to get worse for all of us as other private firms realize that they need to take control over their servers and intellectual property. What is curious is how few companies signed up for the cyber equivalent of the coalition of the willing – GoDaddy was one of the few. Not Microsoft. Not Intel. No PC manufacturer of any shape or size.
Let’s face it. No one wants to declare war on China, whatever form that will take. Most of our PC hardware components are made there. More people are using the Internet in China than the US total population, and it is growing quickly, too. And while the breaches on several Google accounts had Chinese origins, getting accountability isn’t easy.
Coincidentally, while all this was going down I was reading a preview copy of Richard Clarke’s new book called Cyber War. I highly recommend pre-ordering a copy. Clarke was a national security advisor to several presidents and teaches now at the Kennedy School at Harvard.
The book is chilling account of exactly what is wrong with our government and how unprepared we are for Cyber World War I. How so? Think of a Cyber War in terms of nuclear proliferation and the Cold War preparation. But unlike what we did in the 1960s to defend ourselves against possible nuclear annihilation, we are doing everything wrong for a cyber defense. Instead, we have made America more of a target, because so much of our infrastructure, our weapons, our culture, and our PCs are out in the open, ripe for the picking. Look at how easy it is to hijack the drone video feed as a starting point (although the control systems are secured, for the moment.) Clarke talks about various war game scenarios and at one he mentions:
“If you have a mental image of every interesting lab, company, and research facility in the US being systematically vacuum cleaned by some foreign entity, you’ve got it right. That is what has been going on. Much of our intellectual property as a nation has been copied and sent overseas. Our best hope is that whoever is doing this does not have enough analysts to go through it all and find the gems, but that is a faint hope, particularly if the country has, behind the filtration, say, a billion people in it.”
He mentions how there were times when computer professionals working for the Hopkins Applied Physics Lab back in 2009 discovered a data breach. The only way they could solve it was to disconnect their entire organization from the Internet and clean each PC, one by one. “If you are connected to the Internet in any way, it seems, your data is already gone [overseas].”
The problem is that the best defense in a Cyber War isn’t the best offense. Nope: it is hardening your connections. Look at what China has done with its “Great Firewall.” Most of us think this is to keep the porn and liberal thinking out of China. And yes, it does do that. But what is really going on is that in the event of a Cyber War, China can quickly pull the plug and disconnect from the world, to defend itself. Trying asking AT&T or Level 3 to do that here. Ain’t gonna happen.
Another part of the problem is that there is no one actually “tasked,” as they say in DoD-speak, with defending our power grid control systems, transportation networks, and so forth. Where are the cyber equivalents of nuclear strike forces in case someone hits one of these targets? Nowhere. DoD has its own ships, planes, and troops to worry about. Homeland Security is trying to keep shoe bombers and the like out of our skies. What is left is up for grabs. Call it the cyber gap. “Can a nation shut off its cyber connectivity to the rest of the world, or spot cyber attacks coming from inside its geographical boundaries and stop them?” China probably can. We can’t. In an odd twist of irony, the less developed a nation is, say Afghanistan or North Korea, the better defended it can be, because so little of that country’s resources are hackable. How many power grid control rooms have VOIP phones, bringing the Internet literally to the right desktop?
In the past, spies had a harder time of it. They had to physically copy plans, or data, or compromise an actual human being. Now, they can sit in their jammies and download entire manuals without anyone noticing.
When Obama was elected in the fall of 2008, Clarke was an advisor to the transition team. He asked everyone on the team to stop working on their home PCs and even provided brand new Apple MacBooks that were locked down so they couldn’t connect to the public Internet. When the users complained about this when they tried to access public Wifi networks, he “tried to quietly point out that if you are a senior member of the informal national security transition team, you probably should not be planning the takeover of the White House from a Starbucks.” Gulp.
That is the problem. We are too used to our connectivity, and have gotten too complacent with our computers. A lot remains to be done. You have been warned.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony has the wonderful potential for cutting communications costs and delivering additional features. But making the switch isn’t a slam-dunk, and you could have potential problems that could end up costing you more money and time in the short-term as you try to adapt your infrastructure technology to handle voice traffic over what is essentially a data network.
Here are five questions that you should answer in an article I wrote for CIOUpdate before deciding on the appropriate system for your enterprise.
Looking to get control over your virtual infrastructure? Then consider the Hytrust Appliance, which allows you to set up policies, access rules, and other security measures to segregate your virtual infrastructure from your users. It comes with integration with Microsoft’s Active Directory users and groups, and a newly designed user interface with the ability to handle extremely large virtual installations.
We tested the appliance on a network of eight VM ESXi and ESX hosts during March 2010.
Pricing: Download for free, limited to managing three hosts
Standard edition $1000 per typical host
Enterprise: $1500 per typical host including federation across multiple appliances
Hytrust.com
It is wall-to-wall conferences for the next couple of weeks here in St. Louis. There are various events that you might want to attend, some free, some with small fees. A few I am actually speaking at too!
I will also be moderator of this ITexpertVoice.com Webinar on Windows 7 Migration Options and Tools on April 13th, if you are interested, please sign up and join us.
If you have to jointly author a spreadsheet with a colleague, what is the first thing that you do? Email it back and forth. This can be painful, particularly as you try to keep track of your partner’s changes and hope the emails transit back and forth across the Internet. Add a third or fourth person, and things get worse. Luckily, there is a better way, and a number of providers have stepped up with tools to make spreadsheet sharing a lot easier than sending attachments.
I take a look at several of these services for an article published in ITworld here.
My college experience was perhaps a bit different from many of you. I was very lucky to be able to design my own curriculum around what turned out to be an entire year’s worth of independent study classes. Perhaps that set the tone for my working life, where much of my day is spent doing research and writing articles and designing my presentations.
I thought about this during the past week when I read in the NY Times about the digital archives of novelist Salman Rushdie that is being curated at Emory University in Atlanta. Rushdie was fanatical about keeping digital copies of all of his work product and donated his older Macs to the university several years ago. Since then, a team of computer programmers has been working on ways to make it more accessible to researchers.
What does this have to do with my own education? One of my independent classes was to research and create a series of photographs that mimicked well-known photographers of the past. One of them was Lewis Hine, who created a series of images of underage factory and mill workers around 1910 before there were any child labor laws. Some of his work is kept at the Library of Congress. As part of my independent study, I went to DC and got to see his pictures firsthand.
It was fascinating to be able to walk into the archives and within a few minutes have these old photos in front of me. And what was even better was that for a small fee, I could have the government make contemporary prints from some of the original negatives. I thought, how cool can this be? It was then that I got interested in what archivists do. And even cooler, I can link to it on the Web now.
Fast forward to today. Now we have to deal with what archivists call born digital works. This means that instead of paper copies, we have to deal with preserving computer files that were never or infrequently printed out. My Hine negatives and prints aren’t an issue – other than their deteriorating condition, you can still take a 4×5 negative and print it out on modern enlargers and so forth.
But there is a problem if we are trying to view the records of someone who creates digital content so that later historians and even the general public can go back and examine them. This is where it gets tricky, and we run into issues.
As an IT person, you initially might say: this is simple, just make bulk copies or image the hard drives and you are done. But wait. Some of the programs are no longer available. Newer versions don’t necessarily read very old file formats. As an example, try buying a version of a 1990s era software program today. And even if you can find it on eBay or in your attic, it might be difficult to run it on modern hardware.
That is the situation that the Emory archivists found themselves in when they got Rushdie’s old Macs. But through some hard work, they have been able to reconstruct things and allow us to become immersed in the complete environment that Rushdie was working in at the time he was writing his books. You can view the same files, work through the revisions and edits that he made, and be completely brought back to the past, care of some very clever programming tricks.
You can read more about what the team of programmers and archivists have done to set up this exhibit and what they are doing with all the materials that Rushdie donated to the library here.
What struck me was that I doubt many of us could even attempt to recreate the computing environments that we have had over our careers, let alone last year. Granted, it isn’t like some university is knocking on my door wanting my Model 200 Radio Shack, not that I have kept it or many of the other computers that I have used over the past 30 years. Nor would I want to turn over my old PCs and Macs, even if I had them, to the world to see what is all on them. But still. I do have copies of many of my previous’ years work on my hard drive. Sometimes I actually do search for something that I wrote and even find it, but most of the time these files remain untouched. I took a quick look at what I have been carting around with me digitally speaking and it is a real mess. I have presentations in software that is no longer in my possession, documents in Xywrite (which for the most part are text files that I can still open and read), and older versions of accounting software (DOS QuickBooks, anyone). Speaking of DOS, trying to decode an eight letter file name into a meaningful article is an exercise in frustration. I can’t imagine what an archivist would have to deal with if I am having problems.
I will have more to say about this for an article I am writing for Baseline magazine. In the meantime, I am enjoying looking at Hine’s photos again, you can find many of them easily online. And I don’t have to leave my office either. This Web thing is pretty cool.
While 2009 was a year of economic downturn for most legitimate businesses, fraudsters worked overtime to trap unwary Internet victims. In this edition of the Brandjacking Index, we look at the overall trends for 2009. We found that con artists are exploiting the economy and sharpening their targets at well-known brands for their own profit. Cybersquatting continues as the tool of choice and there was a big increase in phishing attacks last year, particularly targeted at financial services businesses.
SmartDeploy is a software tool that converts virtual machine disk files into Windows Image files that can be used to deploy new OSs, including Windows 7, across an enterprise. This screencast demonstrates its features. SmartDeploy is easier to use than Microsoft’s WAIK, and Kbox, both of which we reviewed earlier on ITexpertVoice.com.
You can watch the video here:
http://itexpertvoice.com/home/prowess-smartdeploy-eases-windows-7-migration/#more-1781
