Now that the media excitement of the aftermath of Operation Aurora has calmed down and we are all soothing ourselves to sleep by the sound of promptly applying Windows Updates, it is a good time to take a look back and try and figure out what the changing threat landscape means for real-world information security (besides Selling! More! Security! Products!) and what lessons can be learned from it.

Some good thoughts here. I wrote on this subject here.

One Exploit Should Not Ruin Your Day « …And You Will Know me by the Trail of Bits

Chris Klaus founded Intenet Security Systems in 1994, while he was a sophomore at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  Chris’s product, the Internet Scanner, offered well being to companies connecting to the internet as the world wide web emerged, and it did so under a freemium model.  Beginning as a side project in his dorm room where $1,000 checks started showing up, Chris asked a professor where he could find a good lawyer for his business, and that lawyer introduced him to Tom Noonan.  Chris dropped out of Tech to pursue the business full time, John Imlay and Sig Mosely invested, and Internet Security Systems grew rapidly in an emerging market.  ISS’s rapid growth culminated in its initial public offering on NASDAQ in march of 1998 and in an acquisition by IBM for $1.3 billion in October, 2006.

Very interesting!

Atlanta's Security Cluster: Spotlight on ISS

Jello:

Been playing around with Drew Conway's scripts he demo'd at the bay area R meetup at linkedin last week - saw it here.

Files to do this yourself are here.

Information on the libraries: Igraph twitteR ggplot2

Installation (for OS X):

- Install latest Mac OS X R build 2.10
- Install latest tcltk
- In R, execute: install.packages("igraph"); install.packages("twitteR"); install.packages("ggplot2");

Have at :) Beware the API limit.

Oh, the MS zoomable thing.

Very interesting...

Social Map of #ASW3 Hashtag on Twitter (Atlanta Startup Weekend 3)

Recently, Comcast has added a "Domain Helper" to its DNS servers. Now, instead of implementing the DNS protocol as specified in the RFC, Comcast will redirect your query to a Comcast-branded Yahoo! search page, using the text of your DNS query as search input to Yahoo. Never mind that this breaks the Internet ... there are ads to be served!

This service is reminiscent of Verisign's SiteFinder service from ~2003, about which much hubbub is preserved in the MemeStreams archive. (See below.)

Comcast customers can opt out of Domain Helper:

When a non-existent web address is typed into a browser, a built-in error message is displayed. The Comcast's Domain Helper service is designed to help guide you to a useful search page that has a list of recommended sites that come close to matching the original web address that did not exist.

If you are a residential or commercial cable modem subscriber, and you wish to opt-out of the Comcast Domain Helper service, please complete the form below.

At the end of this process they inform you that it may take two days for the opt-out procedure to be completed. Meanwhile, enjoy the broken DNS!

From the archive, a small selection on SiteFinder:

VeriSign has dropped all its lawsuits against internet overseeing organization ICANN, agreed to hand over ownership of the root zone, and in return been awarded control of all dotcoms until 2012.

The Omniture server sets a cookie so that people can be watched over time to see what typos they are making.

The dispute over who controls key portions of the Internet's address system erupted into open conflict today when VeriSign Inc., the world's largest addressing company, sued the Internet's most visible regulatory body, charging that it has been unfairly prevented from developing new services for Internet users.

We all rely on them [DNS servers], and their management should be done in a way appropriate for their status.

Omniture is now tracking hits to every nonexistent .com/.net domain thanks to Verisign.

Comcast Domain Helper Opt-Out

There is just one problem: In Atlanta, The ‘California State of Mind’ is a Cancer. It is a disease. It has no applicability here and it destroys lives. The commonly stated idea that the differences between Silicon Valley and Atlanta is one purely of scale is false, and the implication of these differences cannot be understated. There are emergent properties of a startup economy that large, that do not exist at our scale whatsoever.

I can’t say that strongly enough. In Georgia, the California State of Mind will try to kill you and will ruin your life. Its not like us. It wants to kill your family. It belongs on the terrorist watch list. Without the supportive environment of the Valley, the valley game-plan has disastrous effects on human lives.

Jello wrote an article for Techdrawl as part of the series he is doing on Startup Geography. It is also up on Hacker News (presently the #1 item).

The previous piece is here.

A California State of Mind (As a Cancer on Atlanta)

Tom Vanderbilt:

Who and where was this invisible metropolis? What infrastructure was needed to create this city of ether?

Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network.

The tilting CD tower gives way to the MP3-laden hard drive which itself yields to a service like Pandora, music that is always “there,” waiting to be heard.

But where is “there,” and what does it look like?

Have you read Vanderbilt's "Traffic"?

Ultimately, Traffic is about more than driving: it’s about human nature.

Data Center Overload

Decius, in a prescient post from 2004:

Ever wanted to know what life was like in the 30s? You will.

I still think this is at the heart of what is happening.

A massive stock market bubble blew up in the late 1990's - which were as roaring as the parties felt.
Al Queda stepped in at exactly the right time - at the cusp of a major market collapse which they would have been able to take credit for.
In order to avoid that collapse for both political and war related reasons, the government blew up a credit bubble.
That bubble has burst - but the question is - where will real growth come from?
There is no basis for real growth because, as Obama has been repeating, the American middle class has been thrown under the bus.
A solution to this is coming:
In some respects the credit bubble made this possible - when people's purchasing power is rising they aren't going to be clamoring for a raise.
The rush to offshore was fueled by greed - it doesn't work as well in practice as its proponents claimed and like anything has to be approached thoughtfully.
The political system is rebalancing, much to the horror of the press corps who find themselves among the elite who are facing a higher tax load.
But there are problems:
The symbiotic relationship between the US and China upon which much depends is rooted in America's ability to spend in spite of not producing - which is ultimately unsustainable and must eventually end.
Home prices are only about half way down. There are various policy responses designed to "stop" this. There are two ways to do it, a 20's style crash or a Japan style long, slow crush. I think policy makers are basically hoping for the later - that they can deflate these bubbles the rest of the way slowly - and possibly without much nominal price deflation - while the real economy starts to grow again.

What went down in September was some sort of mistake. "We have lost control." The question is whether or not the situation is back under control again. Regardless, attention must turn to the fundamental problems, which will take a long time to resolve.

We've been sitting on a powder keg since the late 1990's, and although we reduced the size considerably between the last decade and the load that went off last fall, a great deal remains below us. Its possible that it will go off again.

Its also possible that they intentionally set the keg off in September, knowing that an inflection point between administrations would allow us to work off a large amount of the imbalance with minimal political consequences, but they'd never admit to that - it would require acknowledging that a change in the Whitehouse was inevitable.

RE: Old Growth And The Future

Today, we’re taking Twitpay out of beta and putting it out there for everyone to use. (If you don’t like to read long blog posts: we’re turning on “real money” powered by Amazon Payments. We’re excited. Twitpay is awesome.)

Congrats to twitpay for going live with real money!

Twitpay

On February 10 at approximately 1656 GMT, the Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 communications satellites collided over northern Siberia. The impact between the Iridium Satellite LLC-owned satellite and the 16-year-old satellite launched by the Russian government occurred at a closing speed of well over 15,000 mph at approximately 490 miles above the face of the Earth. The low-earth orbit (LEO) location of the collision contains many other active satellites that could be at risk from the resulting orbital debris.

The following videos, interactive 3D Viewer files, 3D models, and high-resolution images are available to better understand this event.

See also:

... POSSIBLE SATELLITE DEBRIS FALLING ACROSS THE REGION...

Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 Satellite Collision

Jello wrote:
Intelligence is going down as fewer and fewer books are being read (news flash: the printed book industry is on the way out unless this trend stops),

This sort of hand wringing about books is the clarion call of the luddite. Books are a media. There are other media. The idea that books are a media that is intellectually superior to other media is something that children were told in the 70's when their choices were reading or watching television. The idea here was that if you taught children to read novels that they would be better equiped to read news papers, research papers, reference books, and technical books when they grew up.

People who are still clinging to the superiority of novels, particularly in the context of adults and not children, don't know what they are talking about. In the wake of online communications this belief is totally bunk. The value of novels isn't inherent. The value of reading is what is important. The internet offers lots of things to read and a lot people who spend time reading the internet are reading. Its literacy that is important and not books. The one does not require the other.

Fortunately, this particular luddic screed dropped the typical waxing on about the smell of books or the way that paper feels, but its no different. The problem is the presumption that you can't learn anything useful from other media. Thats just wrong.

RE: Technology is Heroin - What To Fix