Category Archives: tech

cloud computing, Cyberdefense and Information Assurance

What an Internet “Kill Switch” Would Mean to the Public Cloud

In the wake of the events in Egypt in early February–and the cut-off of Internet access by the Egyptian government in response to protests coordinated partially by social media–the U.S. Senate took up legislation that would give the President the ability to exert emergency powers over Internet traffic in the event of cyber attack or some other sort of nationwide cyber threat.

While senators deny that any legislation will include a “kill switch” measure–allowing the President to shut down the public Internet in case of an emergency–just the discussion of such a capability has sent waves of concern through the Internet community, and it has raised major concerns about what the impact of legislation could be on public cloud providers.

David Linthicum, CTO and founder of Blue Mountain Labs, recently wrote an article about how just the idea of a “kill switch” is already hurting cloud providers. The reason: organizations are reluctant to invest in cloud computing as a solution, because they are concerned about the possibility of their connection to data being “pulled from (them) at any time.”

But it doesn’t take an Internet “kill switch” to make that happen. A denial-of-service attack or other degradation of the network through overt hostile acts, natural disaster, or any of a number of other events that could affect public Internet bandwidth, could disconnect organizations from the public cloud without warning, if there aren’t proper provisions made for alternate connections.

Read the rest of this post at : Virtual Integrated System Blog – Government – What an Internet “Kill Switch” Would Mean to the Public Cloud.

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cloud computing, sticky

McNealy’s Monday Morning Quarterbacking on Solaris and Linux … shows he still doesn’t get it.

Scott “Privacy Is Dead” McNealy told an audience at an event in Silicon Valley that Sun could have won out over Linux if the company had consistently pushed forward Solaris xI86 instead of pussy-footing around.  “Google today would be running on Solaris,” he said.

Um, no.

Solaris was, and is, a great operating system, to be sure. But Linux did not succeed because of Sun’s failure to commit to Intel.  Linux succeeded because of the open-source model, and the ability of IT people all over the world to try it without license restrictions.

If Sun had open-sourced Solaris early, Sun may very well have taken a dent out of Linux’s success. But that’s a big if.  And considering how much internal wrangling, legal finagling and patent-exchanging had to be done to get Solaris open-sourced in the timeframe that it did, even with the somewhat restrictive terms of Sun’s custom-rolled open-source license even though it was a license that split Solaris off to some degree from other open-source communities , it’s doubtful that McNealy would have pulled it off. It wasn’t until 2005 that Sun cleared the legal hurdles to open-source Solaris.

There are so many other “woulda, shoulda, coulda” moments in Sun’s history. McNealy should be acknowledged for his early recognition of the coming of cloud computing — “application dial-tone”, he referred to it as.  But  Sun had multiple opportunities to redefine the market with open-source early, both with Java and Solaris.   The company’s toe-dips with its investments in OpenOffice (via its acquisition of StarOffice), Gnome, mySQL and other open-source projects came after Linux had already become a major threat. And honestly, Sun did those things to put a thumb in Microsoft’s eye.

So, McNealy can look back and replay the game all he wants. But it won’t change the fact that Sun was caught up in Sparc , and failed to leverage Solaris and Java to transition the company toward being an open-source driven software services company that also sells hardware.  And that’s why Larry Ellison owns Sun now.

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