Modes of Software
The world is changing its dynamics and nowhere is this more apparent than in computer language use and infusion into the fabric of the world. And its about to take another leap.
EarthMine is like GoogleEarth with its phototags - criticised as some kind of invasion of "privacy" - a charge to which Google said that there is no real privacy left to protect when it comes to whats there - but now it goes a level further. The EarthMine is a 3D map of every coordinate in a city. (Of course it is not being updated live, maps tend not to be).
Being able to realistically model and make changes to a city's infrastructure by 3D mapping every building, street and eventually things like cabling would make city management vastly more sophisticated.
Such new objects require a different approach to programming. We already have "object orientated" languages that allow the complex interrelationship of "models" of things like business relationships and even friendship. Web 2.0 is really a bunch of programmers seeing that another layer of logic is required for us to have a "smoother" web experience.
Web 2.0 is not a technology. It is a range of technologies that together allow a "smooth interaction" - some of these are in fact just animations to lull our senses but users respond well to that, so it is factually a part of communication. Modern javascript libraries like jQuery are a treat for programmers as they package into an integratable form things like slow fades and movement decay (so the programmer can just worry about what they want to achieve). Compartmentalisation allows relationships to be discrete. It is essential that interactions between elements are understood and controlled.
Now we have new "environments" for friendship, first "ecommerce" and then "social networking" evolved new software techniques and spawned new languages. Learning new languages is not difficult but sometimes the differences are subtle.
Labels: 3D mapping, Google Earth, Second Life
The Good Old Hacker Community
Security researchers are criticizing hacker Dan Kaminsky for keeping quiet about technical details of a critical DNS flaw.
If he did publish the way that the hacker community traditionally do, and if many of the world's D.N.S. software manufacturers were unable to compete with the simplicity of the hack - they would not work out what was wrong before the infrastructure caching invasion set for possibly days or longer sites for the highest bidder (i.e. gambling, pornography, virus launching, dangerous, harmful, spam sites) but hidden in DNS subnets. If you consider how the DNS works, it would mean damages in the trillions of dollars.
Therefore, some toleration of the occasional fraud of publicity seeking sensationalists is a small price to pay when faced with the potential loss of value from web facing business, in fact - instant brand degradation and cut off from the rest of the world, making business takes a pragmatic stance on computer viruses. Treat any old story as important.
Is this one important? Well if it is, then the only harm will come from DNS software that is not fixed, and may still exist in between routes. Of all the doors to leave unlocked, DNS? It is like a mutual blind spot. It is only the one that could really cripple things.
When you think of the freely available 2048-bit encryption software that is readily available and used for host control technical access to the internet for good reason.
That DNS keys are cheaply calculated 16 bit values is enough to make me fret with fear. If Dan Kaminsky has fixed that in much of the DNS software world-wide, well he had done humanity a massive favour.
In my view an "exploit method" is subject to the author's copyright and just because the "hacker community" have an open source exposure requiring proof of concept, creating a sort of hacker no-go territory (no hacker worth his salt would use a published exploit!), is not necessarily protecting the rest of us who are subject to the upgrade whims of mega-corporations, and changing terms and conditions littered with retroactive legal agreements and mostly unread clauses.
The Hacker Community correctly sees itself as a modern form of Robin Hood, but the use of a secure and safe internet is far better for humanity than a broken one.
The hacker community may amuse themselves in their wisdom but underestimate their value to the real world because of their magic code. Publication of all exploits. Then at least it would be lame, if for example some terrorist used one that was "in the open" to compromise the security of a satellite system that used hardware that could not easily be upgraded, and launched a military attack in the area the hacker lived in, that would genuinely suck.
Anarchy has its rewards, and of course, it's risks.
Labels: hacker community
Hosting outage
CNN coveragesfsw.net went off line for some hours yesterday - due to a huge storm in Atlanta
We are now switching to backup services but while we do, here is our man on the ground with his expanation.
Things will be back to normal shortly. Our more crucial client sites will be switched to backup servers first, then our other sites if the main site does not return.
Severe storm cells came through North Georgia Region this evening. AtlantaNAP experienced an over current fault outage on one of our 2 main feeds. The feed is the original feed that has the most load currently connected to it. The amount of systems connected to the load is the amount of lightning and over current that will try to be passed to the system – i.e. if you don’t have very much load on it - like our new feed is currently only at 1/6th load - then current does not try to flow to it very much. Our first system is currently at 65% load so it tried to absorb much more of the lightning strike than the other one and hence the main breaker going into over current fault.
I have spoken with all of our key electrical engineers associated with the building at this point. According to Georgia power / our PSSI and Cummins engineers – we likely took a lightning strike to the utility very near the facility which caused an over current fault on our main incoming breaker on our first set of switchgear. The breaker is designed to trip in the event of this kind of fault to protect the gear (your computers) inside the building from being burned up by the lightning strike.
When this type of fault happens - the computer that is the brains of the swithgear will not start the generators until an engineer verifies where the fault is. This is because a fault inside the wiring plant could also cause this kind of over current in the event of a main short if a feeder wire of main current in the building were to become damaged.
In that case it would be very dangerous to turn the power back on manually or to force a manual start of the gen sets and push current to the system with a fault remaining. Lives and machinery could be lost.
We dispatched several of our staff visually to inspect for faults – (we did not want to turn something on and have it fry everyone’s gear) and found none and verified it was likely a lightning strike and manually started the generators to restore power. Unfortunately the ups system is only designed to carry that load for 10 minutes which was not enough time for us to safely verify and do a manual start.
This is apparently a rare event – to get a direct utility strike like this – that close that does not get dissipated before it hits us. The farther away from your site the strike occurs - the more other load and grounds it has to dissipate before it gets to you.
The good news is we did not burn up any equipment.
Some of you did not lose power because you were connected to the other lightly loaded feed coming in and it was not enough load source to overwhelm the breaker since it is only 18% loaded at this point.
Some of you lost network connectivity because downstream feeder switches that your computers are connected to are only single power supply units.
We are in the process of examining a facility wide network upgrade that will move to a newer chassis based solution throughout the facility - we started looking at this as a way to offer new services capability that many f you have been asking for - it is a costly upgrade and will bring redundancy but also brings some pitfalls as well since you have more connections into a single chassis. We are still looking at this currently and will keep you up to date as to the direction we decide to move.
They have told me that under normal operating conditions there is really nothing we could have done and we should simply be glad we had good equipment installed that kept our computers from being fried.
I am thankful that I am not looking at a lot of damaged equipment that could not simply be turned back on - that would be a disaster I do not want to deal with. At this point it seems like the new switchgear with over current protection was a good investment.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this outage has caused. Unfortunately there's not much you can do to protect yourself from freak events like this!
We are working hard to get the server back online ASAP.
Labels: hosting outage, sfsw.net
SFSW.net - developing a new functionality
Starfish Software was named after an earlier enterprise shared with a genius entertainer who is still marketing wildly and creates better stuff on the internet that I ever will - spending tens of thousands no doubt or more on top of the line designers. That is his thing - that the eye is pleased by what it sees.
Starfish Software has an entirely different agenda. It is the bits of workability that I aim to provide, and inventing new thingees is part of it. Hence, I spent five minutes putting a bunch of googley widgets on the site, only to notice Windows XP, Mac-OS and even browers getting in on the widget act.
It is a nice wee paradigm - the little browser universe run application in its own window but melding into the browser, safely and without doing any harm to your computer as it is "in the browser".
Yeah, right. How is an application delivered over the internet any different to one that lives inside a "browser environment" supposed to protect you? You go out and buy games, these are sometimes entire universes of fictional "reality" where you are expected to go around shooting "people".
There is another appplication that is entirely different, and yet nearly the same as that, Second Life - a virtual world where anything is possible.
Anything? Well anything that is socially accepted by our shared annonymous not so secret work of human expression.
Is it useful? As a paradigm reality that we can engage with people that we would not normally engage with we can risk communication at a whole new level without physical threat.
Developing software for environments like SL is yet another new frontier for software writers to engage with. Is there a demand for it? Not here. One would not want to find SL populated by plenty of programmers offering God like services. But one suspects one will.
The next phase of sfsw.net shall be in providing more than the best international hosting space we can find and the best damn domain support service at a fixed price - but your choice of Content Management branded with your look, and software that suits your requirement from corporate to individual.
All on-line. All easy.
Labels: new services, web functionality
Junk war rages on despite spam act - 01 Oct 2007 - NZ Herald: Technology News from New Zealand and around the WorldA few weeks ago there was a major change in the way NZ business faced emailing potential customers. The new Spam legislation is a double whammy to NZ Business. It elevates Email from a cost free method of contacting customers to a large potential for liability if one is found guilty of emitting spam.
The problem is that most NZ originated spam is worthless. We can legislate using the crimes act for locally sourced spam, but the problem is internationally sourced spam. Email filters are eliminating 95% of all emails to protect us from spam.
And ISPs seem to have no answers. Filtering Email is just not cricket. It is not an email service when as a system it does not work.
How many people look at their inbox without an ounce of fear? How many Emails are being filtered out before you get them? There simply has to be a better way.
Opt-in mailing can be taken a stage further - customer management of email lists. Where should this management occur? At the client end? At the server end?
ISPs taking on this responsibility (in between server and client) are either: filtering out real mail; or, not filtering enough mail. How can they get it exactly right?
new SFSW services
New Zealand
If you have a mailing list that requires new postcodes or reformatting for New Zealand post, get in touch with us for advice that may save you thousands of dollars.
When all else fails, try SOA best practices: "'We have a best practices driven approach that SOA is architecture,' Bloomberg said. 'Architecture consists of best practices for leveraging IT to meet changing business needs. It doesn't start with the technology. It doesn't start with vendors. It starts with asking what do you want to do and what is the best way to do it?'"
In other words, a "services oriented architecture" seems to exist but nobody is about to lay claim to having found the right one yet as it is a burgeoning activity. If software is designed as a set of intricate services that are linked or are not linked; it sounds simple enough. But design is everything. If you do not fit things together properly early on for the activity, then when do we have? Lots of little activities. Each one may have a level of complexity but part of the idea of SOA is to keep services independent of each other. That is avoiding complexity.
The idea being to create parts of a system that can operate independent of each other. They do not contain parts of each other but send "function calls" to each other using WDSL and SOAP protocols. These are just ways to communicate that both end will understand and can verify.
The idea of foreign calls or "SOA viruses" or more accurately interceding services can be prevented by the protocol. It provides glue to link legacy systems to web access, as well as provide for inter-system functionality.
But the quote above implies that the reason for SOA is that IT is too hard to adapt to changing business needs. I would argue that changing business needs are just a factor of instability that arises when uncertainty exists in the business model. That an evolving business tries to adapt software to meet it needs but its own evolution is pegged to its understanding of IT capability.
No, the idea is to allow software to be adapted to suit new business conditions. The days of "the software is like that, so the business must follow" are over.
