Category Archives: Intenret coordination

Skype and Windows Update

skype_logo.png So, Windows update: Skype outage cause or smokescreen?

Apparently both:

The disruption was caused by a routine Windows patch update distributed Tuesday that required users to restart their computers. When a large number of Skype subscribers began logging back in around the same time, the requests – combined with the day’s traffic patterns – began overwhelming the system, revealing a bug in the software that normally helps the system allocate resources and “self heal.”

“Skype has now identified and already introduced a number of improvements to its software to ensure that our users will not be similarly affected in the unlikely possibility of this combination of events recurring,” Skype spokesman Villu Arak said.

— Skype reveals outage source, tells customers it won’t happen again, Ryan Kim, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer, Tuesday, August 21, 2007

So we seem to have here a combination of hazards tripping each other.

This does raise the more general question of what other bugs are synchronized Windows updates exercising? And how long before such a Windows update installs a vulnerability that immediately gets exploited? And how long before such updates themselves do cause massive outages? In software monoculture, Windows may be its own boll weevil.

-jsq

Bill Gates Considered as Evil Primitive Bacterium

archaea-tree-woese.jpg Has Freeman Dyson become an evolution denier?

Whatever Carl Woese writes, even in a speculative vein, needs to be taken seriously. In his "New Biology" article, he is postulating a golden age of pre-Darwinian life, when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. Evolution could be rapid, as new chemical devices could be evolved simultaneously by cells of different kinds working in parallel and then reassembled in a single cell by horizontal gene transfer.

But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species of bacteria—and the first species of any kind—reserving their intellectual property for their own private use. With their superior efficiency, the bacteria continued to prosper and to evolve separately, while the rest of the community continued its communal life. Some millions of years later, another cell separated itself from the community and became the ancestor of the archea. Some time after that, a third cell separated itself and became the ancestor of the eukaryotes. And so it went on, until nothing was left of the community and all life was divided into species. The Darwinian interlude had begun.

— Our Biotech Future, By Freeman Dyson, New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 12 · July 19, 2007

Has he sold out for an admittedly very fetching simile?

Continue reading →

Punching Hornets

napoleoninrussia.jpg What do science fiction writer William Gibson, global guerrilla theorist John Robb, libertarian Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, and the late historian David Halberstam agree about?
Still, it is hard for me to believe that anyone who knew anything about Vietnam, or for that matter the Algerian war, which directly followed Indochina for the French, couldn’t see that going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the largest hornet’s nest in the world.

— The Late Halberstam’s Final Verdict on Bush: “He’s No Truman”, by Adam Howard, alternet.org, 5:38 AM on July 5, 2007.

One could add Napoleon in Russia and the British in America. Funny how fighting in Russia in the winter wasn’t like Italy in the summer. Continue reading →

WS-Anasazi

pueblo_bonito_aerial_chaco_canyon.jpg Gunnar usually says it better than I did:
Coordinated detection and response is the logical conclusion to defense in depth security architecture. I think the reason that we have standards for authentication, authorization, and encryption is because these are the things that people typically focus on at design time. Monitoring and auditing are seen as runtime operational acitivities, but if there were standards based ways to communicate security information and events, then there would be an opportunity for the tooling and processes to improve, which is ultimately what we need.

— Building Coordinated Response In – Learning from the Anasazis, Gunnar Peterson, 1 Raindrop, 14 June 2007

Security shouldn’t be a bag of uncoordinated aftermarket tricks. It should be a process that starts with design and continues through operations.

-jsq

ITU Stops Trying to Take over Internet

For some time there’s been a possibility of the functions of ICANN being subsumed by the ITU, but it appears that’s not going to happen:
The Internet should continue to be overseen by major agencies including ICANN and the ITU, rather than any new “superstructure,” the new head of the International Telecommunications Union said on Friday.

Hamadoun Toure, who took up the reins of the United Nations agency this month, said the ITU would focus on tackling cyber-security and in narrowing the “digital divide” between rich and poor countries.

Internet should be run by key players: new ITU boss Reuters, Fri Jan 12, 1:04 PM ET

I’m not a big fan of ICANN, but its best feature is exactly its worst feature: it doesn’t get much done, so it doesn’t do much harm. Continue reading →