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BOL 1079: Bing's still pooping his diapers
There's a little panic over the fact that Bing's market share dropped last month, but you have to remember, folks, Bing is young. Rafe puts it in perspective for us. Also, Kindle gets a price cut and goes worldwide, yo. That's big. What is also big is the keylogger network that's hijacking everyone's Web mail accounts. We can help you out with that, a bit.
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EPISODE 1079
Another Kindle price cut…and it goes wireless internationally
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/10/06/financial/f210208D88.DTL&tsp=1
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10369321-93.html
AT&T to allow VoIP
iPhone apps on 3G network
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10368955-37.html
Huge Web mail phishing scam spreading fast
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8294714.stm
Australian ISP in court for not disconnecting users
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/australian-isp-in-court-for-not-disconnecting-users.ars
Court rules for software ownership over licensing
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/10/06/2245214/Court-Rules-For-Software-Ownership-Over-Licensing
HitWise says Microsoft Bing fell 0.5 percent to Google’s gain
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/HitWise-Says-Microsoft-Bing-Fell-5-to-Googles-Gain-529954/
DoubleTwist unveils an alternative to the iTunes music store, powered by Amazon MP3
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/06/doubletwist-unveils-an-alternative-to-the-itunes-music-store-powered-by-amazon-mp3/
E.U. approves test of
Windows 7 ‘Browser Ballot’
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2353906,00.asp
Fans come together to complete "Star Wars Uncut"
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/09/10/06/1647234/Fans-Come-Together-To-Complete-Star-Wars-Uncut
“Apps for Innovation” Developer Contest
http://www.ce.org/GovernmentAffairs/Innovation_Movement/apps-contest.asp
VOICE MAIL
Rick on Vonage
Stewart on gas masks
E-MAIL
Hey Buzz-Crew,
In ep 1077 you asked for a CIO/CTO to weigh in on the IBM Inotes vs Goolge Docs hypothetical prize fight for our hypothetical business. While I am not of that stature at my company I do sit right outside the out CIO’s office so I wrestled him down, duct taped him to his chair and made him answer this very question!
Okay, well not really that first part but he did answer and here is what he said:
“We actually looked at Google Docs for cost reduction and there is no way we could use it. With all the customer data that we have and the nature of our business (not to mention internal systems) having something in the cloud would be much to risky. Cloud stuff just isn’t reliable enough for us to even consider using it. Not only that but there was no way that Legal would let us (not to mention that it didn’t clear SOX compliance). And let us not forget about our ‘wonderful’ users. The learning curve that they would have to deal with might just break them.”
So there you have it. The argument against clouds at my company are (1) Reliability, (2) Legal / SOX issues and (3) Inept users.
Love the show,
M
The overweight I.T. Ninja
P.S.- Sorry for the anonymity but I’m just covering my bacon (if you know what I mean).
**********
Hey, Buzz crew,
With all the discussion about mobile OS platforms and developers in
yesterday’s show (episode 1078), I’m surprised you didn’t mention the
announcement Adobe made on Monday about how they’re going to enable
Flash developers to code apps in Flash that can then be converted into
native iPhone apps. Technical merits aside, it’s an interesting move by
Adobe to keep Flash application and game developers from abandoning
Flash to take a swing at developing apps solely for the iPhone, and you
have to wonder if Apple is somewhat annoyed that five iPhone apps
created with this technique made it into the app store.
–Brian from Bowie, MD
**********
Hey Buzz Crew,
I am listening to Episode 1076, (I’m a bit behind) and upon hearing Tom’s dreams of “Tenspeed and Brownshoe” being streamed online, I ran over to Google to find out what in the world he was talking about. So of course, I wound up at IMDB reading up on the subject, how mundane right? Why would I be emailing to tell you this? Well, I noticed at the top of their page, a popularity ranking, and had to laugh when I saw that the popularity of the series went up 34% this week. Glad I wasn’t the only one left wondering “wtf?” after that comment!
Love the show!
Patrick Sullivan
Augusta, GA
**********
Hey guys,
I’m a couple episodes behind, so you may have already talked about this but: things just got real with Palm http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/05/palm-throws-the-doors-open-review-free-app-distribution-over-th/
What better way to compete with the iTunes app store than to lower the barrier of entry for open source apps and decentralize the distribution of free apps.
Jake (the computer science student in Grand Rapids)
Tom Merritt appears on
CNET TV, specializing in help and how-to and the ever popular Top 5
lists. He also co-hosts CNET's The Real Deal podcast. 
Jason Howell can
often be found producing Buzz Out Loud from the audio studios at CNET,
updating XML feeds from the comfort of his cubicle, and saying "uh-oh"
from time to time. 
Regulatory Issues
Security experts have told me that HIPAA and the clouds can not work. The jury is out on PCI and SOX.
Legistrative Issues
James Urquhart has an excellent post on legistrative issues concerning clouds. There are issues about laws and privacy. For example, the Stored Communications Act recently allowed the FBI to access data without a warrant or consent.
Geopolitical
Reuven Cohen, Co founder of Enomaly, has a great article about how foreign governments are creating laws to prevent storing of data in US based clouds due primarily to the Patriot act.
Security Vulnerabilities
Unknown vulnerabilities in a shared hypervisor. The other night this question came up at a cloud meeting and it was suggested that people have hacked the Xen hypervisor in the past. The question was also raised that ?has Amazon?s hypervisor ever been hacked?? The answer was no one knew. Also during that specific discussion a local Atlanta security guru suggests that Amazon?s invulnerability might be suspect because they might run a customized version of Xen and the patch update process could be delayed due to a customized hypervisor.
Application Architecture
Some applications just don?t make sense in the cloud. Today the two most successful models in the cloud are the elastic LAMP stack model and the batch queuing model most used for digital trans coding. Most blog?s don?t need a cloud and can be designed in a shared hosting environment to be less costly and as elastic as needed. Some cloud vendors limit the amount of IP address that are required and the applications some times need to be re-designed to accommodate this.
Hardware dependencies
If an application uses specific hardware, chips or drivers, it might not be a good candidate for the clouds. Low level assembly based applications might have disruptions if the cloud provider upgrades or changes chip sets in the future.
Control over your servers
If your IT computing model demands complete control over everything that is running, then the cloud is not right for you. Some clouds do not even allow your root access. If your model needs detailed control over the amount of memory, CPU, hard drive specs, or the interfaces, then a cloud might not fit.
Cost of the cloud
A 24 by 7 operation on the cloud in most cases is going to cost around a $100 per month (millage varies). If you run an application that keeps a persistent sustainability this could equate to a very high cost on a cloud. In a recent CloudCafe podcast Brad Jefferson the CEO of Animoto suggested at some point he might actually flip the cloud. His point was that at some point they might achieve a level of consistent usage that it ?might? make sense to bring their core servers in house and use the cloud for elasticity only. There is also this new concept emerging called Cloud Bursting where legacy business models might be able to burst resource usage for on demand only scenarios.
If it Ain?t Broke Don?t Fix it
My wife?s brother?s wife?s sister?s husband (I love saying that) is the co-founder of Blippr and we met at a recent family outing. He told me about his business and I quickly asked him why he wasn?t using a cloud. He said the application seems to work fine as-is and that they were in a ferocious development cycle for new feature requests. Revamping their infrastructure just wasn?t on their immediate road map.
Because this post might make it on the Amazon Web Services ?In the news? page
NOT!
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by ClintHuffman
October 13, 2009 4:59 PM PDT
- Hey Buzz Crew,
-
Like this
Reply to this comment
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(4 Comments)I think it was this show where you talked about it being okay to write down passwords that are too complex. I have a Windows Mobile phone and I use the SPB Wallet software to manage my passwords, membership cards, etc. Also, it integrates with Internet Explorer, so it can populate the login fields to the *many* web sites that I have accounts with and that have different password complexities. I've used eWallet as well with similar results.
Also, instead of using a small, extremely complex password that is hard to remember, use a "pass-phrase". For example, the phrase "The sky is blue." is a very long password (16 characters) that has complexity (spaces, caps, and special characters (the period)) and best yet... it's easy to remember!
Password length is one of the best attributes of a secure password.
Love the show!