At a meeting on a completely different subject, I was interviewed
about
SpamRankings.net.
Here's
the audio,
and here's the blurb they supplied:
John S. Quarterman, long time Internet denizen, wrote one of the
seminal books about networking prior to the commercialization of the
Internet. He co-founded the first Internet consulting firm in Texas
(TIC) in 1986, and co-founded one of the first ISPs in Austin
(Zilker Internet Park, since sold to Jump Point). He was a founder
of TISPA, the Texas ISP Association.
Quarterman was born and raised
in Lowndes County, where he married his wife Gretchen. They live on
the same land where he grew up, and
participate in local community
and government.
WWALS is an advocacy organization working for watershed conservation
of the Willacoochee, Withlacoochee, Alapaha, and Little River
Systems watershed in south Georgia and north Florida through
awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen advocacy.
Paul Graham points out that big company checks on purchasing
usually have costs, such as purchasing checks increase the costs of
purchased items because the vendors have to factor in their costs
of passing the checks.
Such things happen constantly to the biggest organizations of all,
governments. But checks instituted by governments can cause much worse
problems than merely overpaying. Checks instituted by governments can
cripple a country's whole economy. Up till about 1400, China was richer
and more technologically advanced than Europe. One reason Europe pulled
ahead was that the Chinese government restricted long trading voyages. So
it was left to the Europeans to explore and eventually to dominate the
rest of the world, including China.
I would say western governments (especially the U.S.) subsidizing
petroleum production and not renewable energy is one of the biggest
source of current world economic, political, and military problems.
Of course, lack of checks can also have adverse effects as we've
just seen with the fancy derivatives the shadow banking system
sold in a pyramid scheme throughout the world.
It's like there should be a balance on checks.
Which I suppose is Graham's point: without taking into account
the costs of checks (and I would argue also the risks of not
having checks), how can you strike such a balance?
He doesn't neglect to apply his hypothesis to SOX:
Adam quotes a 30 year old book about computer security and
notes that the IRS then and now doesn't adequately protect taxpayers'
information and promises to do better.
His quote that I like best, though is:
Top management people in large corporations fear that publicity about internal fraud could well affect their companies' trading positions on the stock market, hold the corporation up to public ridicule, and cause all sorts of turmoil... (Computer Capers, page 72)
Each thing we are trying to push for in secure coding these days
requires mastery, Cardspace, static analysis, threat modeling, web
service security, and friends are very deep individual domains, and when
applied to an enterprise they get wide as well. Let me underline that -
to deploy any of the current cutting edge stuff in software security at
scale, requires technical depth and deployment width. This automatically
limits your resource pool of who can deliver this stuff.
So what I have seen work well is using a decentralized, specialist team
approach with a very specific agenda and goals. Note the team can be
very small, 2 or 3 people even if they are empowered.
Since its debut more than 20 years ago, IOS has largely been a closed,
proprietary, tightly guarded jewel in Cisco's lockbox. But the company's
ambitions to make the network the platform for all IT operations and
become a software force are in turn forcing Cisco to give up a little in
return – like making IOS more than just a platform for Cisco-developed
services.
"It's a significant step forward for us," said Don Proctor, senior vice
president of Cisco's newly formed Software Group, at last week's C-Scape
2007 analyst conference. "Software turns out to be a key way that we can
do what [we've] been talking about for some time, which is link business
architecture to technology architecture in a meaningful way."
—
Cisco opening up IOS,
Looks to make software third-party friendly,
Network World, 12/12/07
Wow, who could have imagined that technology architecture could be
related to business architecture?
Suing your customers could be a risk of getting your stock delisted:
The SCO Group, Inc. ("SCO") (Nasdaq: SCOX - News), a leading provider
of UNIX® software technology and mobile services, today announced that
it received a Nasdaq Staff Determination letter on December 21, 2007
indicating that as a result of having filed for protection under Chapter
11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, the Nasdaq Listing Qualifications Panel
has determined to delist the company's securities from the Nasdaq Stock
Market and will suspend trading of the securities effective at the open
of business on Thursday, December 27, 2007.
This is not unexpected after SCO's recent layoffs.
The trouble started much farther back, when SCO decided to sue for
intellectual property infringement instead of producing a product
people wanted to buy.
There's another approach, from the wilds of south Georgia:
The statewide papers from Atlanta and Jacksonville have pulled out of
this market back to their own communities leaving a void of state and
national news from a print media. When I was growing up, The Atlanta
Journal “covered Dixie like the dew” and the Atlanta Constitution
covered Atlanta. Today the “dew” stops in Macon and the Journal is now
just the Constitution. The Florida Times-Union several years ago started
the Georgia Times-Union with distribution across the bottom third of
our state. Now, with the pullback coming soon, their distribution will
be limited to Southeast Georgia or east of Waycross.
Beijing has recently added a new weapon to its arsenal of surveillance
technologies, a system it believes to be a modern marvel: the Golden
Shield. It took eight years and $700 million to build, and its mission
is to "purify" the Internet — an apparently urgent task. "Whether we
can cope with the Internet is a matter that affects the development of
socialist culture, the security of information, and the stability of
the state," President Hu Jintao said in January.
The Golden Shield — the latest addition to what is widely referred
to as the Great Firewall of China — was supposed to monitor, filter,
and block sensitive online content. But only a year after completion,
it already looks doomed to fail. True, surveillance remains widespread,
and outspoken dissidents are punished harshly. But my experience as
a correspondent in China for seven years suggests that the country's
stranglehold on the communications of its citizens is slipping: Bloggers
and other Web sources are rapidly supplanting Communist-controlled
news outlets. Cyberprotests have managed to bring about an important
constitutional change. And ordinary Chinese citizens can circumvent
the Great Firewall and evade other forms of police observation with
surprising ease. If they know how.
While Sony BMG's customers first became aware of the dangers posed by
the rootkit through media reports following Russinovich's October 31
announcement, the company was on notice that its product contained a
rootkit, at the very least, four weeks earlier.12 Finnish anti-virus
software developer F-Secure contacted Sony BMG on October 4, 2005,
alerting it to the presence of the rootkit.13 Of course, First4Internet,
as the developer that chose to incorporate the rootkit into its design,
necessarily knew of its presence from the outset.
Yet Sony apparently thought that they could still sneak a rootkit
onto CDs its customers paid for.
The customers knew better, because Amazon reviews told them,
and sales CDs plumetted as soon as rootkit-infested versions were issued.
DARPA is interested in the full spectrum of network range capabilities, from network simulations and virtual test ranges that simulate future range architectures and protocols, to physical implementation of networks. Additionally, DARPA is interested in the full spectrum of testing environments – from individual hosts, to single enclaves and local area networks, to world-wide Wide Area Networks (WAN).
Hey, looks like Randall Munro already proposed the single enclave
part of this in his comic, xkcd.
Somebody's going to make a bundle selling cyber ant farms
and leasing DARPA the rights to shoot cyber bullets at them.
Jared Diamond: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed The author examines societies from the smallest (Tikopia) to the largest (China) and why they have succeeded or failed, where failure has included warfare, poverty, depopulation, and complete extinction. He thought he could do this purely through examining how societies damaged their environments, but discovered he also had to consider climate change, hostile neighbors, trading partners, and reactions of the society to all of those, including re-evaluating how the society's basic suppositions affect survival in changed conditions.
seminal books about networking prior to the commercialization of the Internet. He co-founded the first Internet consulting firm in Texas (TIC) in 1986, and co-founded one of the first ISPs in Austin (Zilker Internet Park, since sold to Jump Point). He was a founder of TISPA, the Texas ISP Association. Quarterman was born and raised in Lowndes County, where he married his wife Gretchen. They live on the same land where he grew up, and participate in local community and government.
Quarterman took some time during Georgia River Network's Weekend for Rivers to speak with the Nonprofit Snapshot about spam-mapping and small town politics.
WWALS is an advocacy organization working for watershed conservation of the Willacoochee, Withlacoochee, Alapaha, and Little River Systems watershed in south Georgia and north Florida through awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen advocacy.
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