Μαθη(τής/τρια) Λυκείου:

Πάει φροντιστήριο για να περάσει στο Πανεπιστήμιο. Αντε και βγαίνει, φτιάχνει φροντιστήριο για να διδάξει μαθητές να μπούνε στο Πανεπιστήμιο, να βγούνε να φτιάξουν φροντιστήριο κλπ. κλπ. κλπ.  Ενας αέναος κύκλος αντιπαραγωγικότητας που απο εντροπία και μόνο θα καταρρεύσει απο μόνος του, καταρρέει ήδη.

Μαθη(τής/τρια) Λυκείου παραλλαγή β’:

Πάει φροντιστήριο για να περάσει στο Πανεπιστήμιο. Αντε και βγαίνει, μπαίνει σε δημόσιο οργανισμό, στρογγυλοκάθεται 8 στις 10 φορές  και στέλνει τα παιδιά του σε φροντιστήριο για να μπούν στο Πανεπιστήμιο να βολευτούν σαν κι’ αυτόν.  Ενας αέναος κύκλος αντιπαραγωγικότητας που απο εντροπία και μόνο θα καταρρεύσει απο μόνος του, καταρρέει ήδη.

Κανένας δεν τους δίδαξε στο φύσικό το πραγματικό νόημα της εντροπίας; Καθόλου ντροπή οι δάσκαλοι!

Άσκηση για τους ενδιαφερόμενους: Αλλάξτε τους όρους Μαθη(τής/τρια), Φροντιστήριο,Πανεπιστήμιο,Δημόσιο Οργανισμό και δώστε τη δικιά σας παραλλαγή. Ρίξτε και κάνα δύο συνδικαλιστές και lifestyle αριστεριστές στο μίγμα σας ως entropy agents, και στείλτε το μου.

Well he is right up to a point. There is very little value created in IT departments where zombie Middle Management MandarInS run the Information Systems, albeit they produce a sleuth or reports and KPIs.  It seems that most modern technology consuming companies are victims to the zombiefication by degree process.

When I mention the term “degree”  I mean that miscegenated  offspring of an excel spreadsheet and a marketing manual, the MIS degree. The true decline of IT’s true value to any corporation started with the advent of the MIS degree.  I consider it the number one retardant  in the flexibility required by modern environments to adapt quickly and effectively to change.   Quite frankly it still beffudles me  how someone can manage computer teams without basic coding skills.  It is akin to  a shop manager not knowing how to change spark plugs or oil.

Oddly enough, and in par with the ironic nature of the universe, the self same mandarins who choke the life out of any attempt to accelerate or adopt innovation in their IT departments, are the most fervent adopters of novel personal technology.  I have often witnessed  zombie mandarins They would be the first ones to buy an xPhone and demand of their staff to bypass all regulations so they can get their e-mail on it,  yet they would consider an FLOSS solution to the corporate e-mail as a too dodgy solution…

We will probably need a lot of flowers to combat these zombie MIS mandarins from the office space.

Humans tend to have a sense of security albeit false, when they inhabit/work in confined and/or tightly controlled spaces. That means that engineers working in data centers tend to have a severely enlarged false sense of security when they are in contact with the servers inside a data center. In the cloud paradigm, since the servers are not physically present or even completely virtual, this sense of security is quite possibly completely quenched.

So engineers are subconsciously insecure when working with virtual assets, at least me and my teams are.  It is now up to a decent security manager/practitioner to guide this insecurity into creating productive and pro-active security mechanisms and methods. The trick is to kindle  this insecurity every so often so people do not take as  de facto security the use of  proper tools like firewalls and such.

Tools are necessary to enforce security but not enough. Security is a continuous process and a big topic to be covered in a single blog post…

With the advent of iOS,Android,ChromeOS,iPad,ChromeBook etc, we are entering the Padlet Bubble region of space. It has come to pass that computing devices have become ubiquitous, yet unlike whatever I imagined. I thought they would be like a classic computer with a keyboard and mouse and not the mutation of an old beast: a strokable intelligent screen.

So I will now recast my predictions, deep breath, crystal ball focus: The advent of free computing is upon us already, not much of a prediction there. Computing hand held devices will be the mainstream computing means of the new era. As the laptop has taken a bite out of desktop sales , so will tablets steal market share from laptops and desktops alike. We already have multicore pads, all they have to do is grow up a little and become more computer than phone. Give them an HDMI interface and a decent USB port and there you have it, who needs a laptop any more ? We will even see the almost extinct internet shop rise up again and offer docking and/or storage services to tablet owners looking for a faster/cheaper connection instead of their telco connection, or a large screen for an online game.

Now for a slightly more extreme prediction: E-paper will become cheaper and less power hungry. Padlets with rollable / extendable e-paper displays will become extremely sought after. Just think unfolding a large screen from the side of your pad and watch full size …tube videos, or play online games on decent sized display.

Crystal ball is out, don’t get me started on security of those devices.

Padlets = Pads/Tablets

Copyright extension will eventually stagnate the one and only differentiating factor of Europeans in the world at large, and that is culture. The inheritors of such copyright royalties will start litigating against any and all forms or art and/or creativity that even mildly resembles their claim. This is more or less what is already happening in the US with profound effects in the quality of the artistic creation stream.

Claudit

A proposal for the creation of a cloud transparency and auditing service!

Current Status

In today’s IT horizon, Virtualization and cloud services are prevalent and gathering more momentum as we speak. One major problem of this paradigm is the particular difficulty of managing and furthermore auditing the work performed on cloud based servers with GUIs.

There is no physical device to monitor, neither a corporeal engineer to be managed, so how does one cope with quality control, or compliance or a hundred other issues that have to do with technology  management ? How does a company pass a compliance audit over its outsourced virtualized infrastructure?

Purpose

Enter Rautor ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/rautor/ ). Some time ago I authored an auditing aid application that records the usage of windows based PCs. It dumps screenshots, keyboard logs and application textual data from the machines console be it physical or virtual. Rautor works not only on system consoles with one or more monitors attached but is particularly efficiient in Terminal server setups where there are no physical devices.

The Central Idea behind claudit

The IT or security manager creates a user account on the web site and downloads a free copy of rautor agent ( please somebody come up with a better name). He then proceeds to install rautor and enable it with the same user name and password to as many machined as he sees fit. The agents start their work and upload the data in chunks to the storage server farm. The administrator can then review and replay any  session using the online Multiviewer application.All the sessions will be bundled under the same user credentials so if a company needs logical isolation of more than one class of recordings , all they have to do is purchase more accounts.

For a proof of concept please visit http://www.unix.gr/rautor/rautor_free/full/ so you can replay some sample sessions. The combination of the agent and player is so powerful that administrators can even do searches for textual screen contents when available.

Pricing

Option A (Anything): Charging will be simple per Mb/month much like loggly does. This is quite easy to digest by the customers  and since rautor is configurable for the size and bit level of the images it creates , the customer’s administrators can easily adjust it to their needs.  They can go for high quality , or large screen size, full color or gray scale etc. This option would have no backup of the user data.

Option B:  (Backup) would include whatever option A has , plus copies of the data to redundant storage servers. Obviously it will cost at least twice as much as option A.

Option C: (Compliance ) This would provide  Compliance Ready storage that could potentially be used by local authorities to audit and cross check computer usage records. Obviously that option that would be much more expensive since it requires better ,more redundant storage that is carefully backed up.

Strengths and weaknesses

Strong points:I can design and implement most of the backend stuff and PC software and their interactions. I can do most tech.

Weak points:I cannot do web design , that will have to be handled by an outside agency under my supervision. I cannot for the life of me wrap my head around sales, or crm applications to be used by sales people. That will need doing.

Competition

The current competition is  focused on providing campus based auditing services and not distributed cloud based ones. There is observeit-sys.com and www.tsfactory.com which are both good companies, yet focused on the local data center . I strongly believe that I can carve a pretty nice chunk of the global market for a number of reasons.

a) All the monitoring and replay functions are web based, which means that a security administrat0r can do his auditing work from even a smart phone
b) They have no live over the web monitoring option, which I do. This is project coliau as mentioned below.
c) we can support unix like OSes too. A preliminary  linux port is available.
d) I am open source friendly, that is there will be stripped down versions available for free as a guerilla marketing tactic.
e) I can twist this into a PCI compliance aid.

Future directions:

Rautor can be sold either retail over the cloud or as a device for the campus. As a device it can be bundled with http://coliau.codeplex.com to enable security admins to monitor live what the users are doing.

An Apple port would be relatively easy given the similarity to the linux port.  No changes are necessary on the web platform.

I can also work in saving on the cloud SSH session recordings like this patch provides. This will help organizations both ensure security and integrity of operations at the same time.

I know I am right:

I build popssl in 1998. At the time people thought: “feh: who needs email encryption” , nowadays it is a mainstay of sane business practices. I know that a few years from now, all IT managers will require a claudit like service to prove operational transparency on their IT assets.

Irony is pandimensional, unrestricted by our current understanding of physical laws and all permeating.  Irony is probably the glue force or elemental particle or ultradimensional string or what have you that researchers should consider in their grand unifying theory of everything.  At least everything that revolves around the human condition and causes bitter laughter.

Examples of universal Irony:

By the time you understand how this world works you are too old to enjoy it, isn’t that ironic?

If you marry the girl that you are infatuated with, you lose that infatuation, isn’t that ironic ?

Good employees are the ones that get all the shitty work because the boss knows they will perform. Slackers get less work because they are slackers and are slack with their duties, isn’t that ironic?

Bad debtors get more cash to help them repay old debts, those who pay regularly cannot even request  an application to fill in for another loan. Isn’t this ironic ? Probably, but not funny these days, especially after the fiscal crisis.

You spent 40 years in school only to graduate with already dated knowledge, isn’t that ironic ?

I am spending time to right clever ditties down only no one will read them. Isn’t that ironic?

The west is democratic but it fosters autocratic rulers elsewhere, that would be ironic if it wasn’t so inhuman.

The hungrier the children in Afrikia the reacher the charities that claim to help them, isn’t that ironic?

The more secure you think you are  the easier the next hax0r kid will  crack your systems, isn’t that ironic?.

The Japanese made Sci-Fi horror flicks of a Gozzira afflicted by radiation, now they have to live through the reality or disaster in their nuclear plants, not to mention that they are now moving their families to Hiroshima and Nagasaki prefectures. This would be ironic if the disaster was not so massive.

..

go ahead sent me your irony

Here is a small list of things to consider.

1. Cloud computing is not safer computing. It still has many single points of failure, probably more than before. This  time the failure points are vendor associated. If your vendor goes down so does your service.
2. Cloud computing is not safer computing. Your security team, you have one right, must now work on at least {vendor X service X application } security interaction lattices.
3. It requires administrators of greater skill. Debugging large scale networked applications means that your people must be able to read, and understand, tcpdump logs.
4. It runs over networks. If your link is down your computing is down. Even if it is not down you sure are not receiving any benefits from it.
5. It is not necessarily cheaper, if you migrate license based servers unto a cloud platform you still need to pay the server licenses plus the platform costs.
6. Cloud computing as a term is new, as a practice is as old as the first data center farm. Sure there was not virtualisation back then, still.

Please somebody post a positive review of cloud computing so I can link to the pros of it.

–

Αιθεροβάμονες: Greek for skywalkers

Για να φταχτεί μια Google, πρέπει να υπάρχει όραμα του μέλλοντος στον τόπο που θα φτιαχτεί απο τους ίδιους τους ανθρώπους για τη θέση τους στον κόσμο.  Στην USA κυρίως αλλά και αλλού στον δυτικό κόσμο υπάρχουν πολλές παράλληλες κοινότητες που οραματίζονται και δουλεύουν γι’ αυτό το μέλλον. Οι κοινότητες αυτές λέγονται είτε συγγραφείς Sci.Fi.,  κομιξάδες, ή ακόμη και κατασκευαστές διαστημοπλοίων ή και καλά καλά μουσικούς που οραματίζονται νέους δρόμους. Όλες αυτές οι – ας μου επιτραπεί η χρήση της Αγγλικής -  futurist subcultures δημιουργούν ένα υπόβαθρο, ένα millieu πάνω στο οποίο χτίζονται googles , facebooks, twitters, RSAs, Scaled Composites etc. etc. κλπ.κλπ.  Οχι ότι δεν έχουν προβλήματα προσαρμογής και εκει πέρα αλλά αυτό είναι μελέτη για τους κοινωνιολόγους.

Ένας νέος/νέα λοιπόν που μεγαλώνει/σπουδάζει εκεί οραματίζεται κάτι άλλο, κάτι νέο, κάτι δημιουργικό, ένα νέο σύνορο, ένα ultimate frontier που έλεγαν και στο Star Trek. Ειδικά στις Η.Π.Α.  η κουλτούρα τους είναι κατα κόρον βασισμένη στον όρο frontierism δηλαδή στην επέκταση των συνόρων ή όπως θα λέγαμε εμείς στους ακρίτες.  Φυσικά αυτό δημιουργεί αποικιοκρατικές διαθέσεις αλλά ταυτόχρονα και μια κουλτούρα με ανοιχτούς, άπλετους ορίζοντες. Οι ορίζοντες δεν είναι εκεί για να μας περιορίσουν, να μα δείξουν ένα απόλυτο όριο πέρα απο το οποίο δεν μπορούμε να πάμε, όπως ας πούμε το κλέος της Αρχαίας Ελλάδας. Οι ορίζοντες , τα σύνορα, είναι εκεί ως πρόκληση για να τους κατακτήσουμε και να πάμε πιο πέρα, πιο μακριά ακόμα. Είναι εκεί  για να βρούμε το επόμενο σκαλοπάτι των δυνατοτήτων μας.

Ας  ψάξει κάποιος να μου το βρεί αυτό εδω πέρα στην Ελλάδα. Ποιο είναι το μέλλον που οραματιζόμαστε για τα παιδιά μας ? Οραματιζόμαστε οποιοδήποτε μέλλον ή τελικά είμαστε λειψανολάτρες εμείς  αυτοί που μένουμε πίσω? Εαν φαίνομαι πως είμαι λίγο απαισιόδοξος αναλογιστείτε την αγαπημένη αττάκα του μακαρίτη του παπά , πως τον έλεγαν, αποκαλούσε τους  πάντες μη νεο-μεσαιωνιστές “ευρωλιγούρηδες”…