A systems scientist looks at virtualization, scalability, and Ruby on Rails.

A Conversation with Jason Hoffman

ZuiPrezi is a nonlinear presentation editor, with a very intuitive interface support for many platforms and online sharing. With the help of ZuiPrezi you can create dynamic and visually structured zooming presentations using texts, videos, drawings, and present it as a very dynamic and free experience.

ZuiPrezi - nonlinear presentation editor

Bell Canada is slowing down access on its Sympatico internet servers for users who file share during prime time to prevent them from clogging the network, a spokesman said Tuesday.

Bell crimps P2P file-sharing during peak hours

Taffy DB is a free and opensource JavaScript library that acts as thin data layer inside Web 2.0 and Ajax applications.

Taffy DB : A JavaScript database for your browser

If the research efforts succeed, this would enable the development of new kinds of portable computers and would help computer engineers tackle areas as diverse as speech recognition, image processing, health care systems and music.

Industry Giants Try to Break Computing’s Dead End

The idea was to create a search page that instead of hiding metadata, brings it to the front, thereby showing the user just how much metadata is out there for any given query. After a few months of hacking and tweaking and some more time spent on getting permissions to share with the world, I’m now happy to say that our demo is finally online, and you can try microsearch for yourself.

microsearch

Nowadays, it’s pretty much over. We’re all slowly coming awake to the realization that we’ve squandered vast tracts of our future for an illusory past, our intellectual capitol for a culture that’s lost its memory, our once-noble ambitions for a population hooked on cheap thrills, our emotional strength for a brittle autophobia. Boxed in by increasingly limited options and driven to near madness by denial and distraction, the population casts about uselessly, desperate to ignore the darkness at the periphery. Eruptions occur with increasing frequency, stressing the structure at all strata, applying constant pressure on the facade, laying more and more bare the true face of what’s in store for us. The smart ones are just trying to keep still while they wait for the other shoe to drop — best to not stir up the dust any more than necessary.

But that’s all changing in the world that’s coming.

1975: And The Changes To Come

The software developed at Mason, CAULDRON, allows for the transformation of raw security data into roadmaps that allow users to proactively prepare for attacks, manage vulnerability risks and have real-time situational awareness. CAULDRON provides informed risk analysis, analyzes vulnerability dependencies and shows all possible attack paths into a network. In this way, it accounts for sophisticated attack strategies that may penetrate an organization’s layered defenses.

CAULDRON’s intelligent analysis engine reasons through attack dependencies, producing a map of all vulnerability paths that are then organized as an attack graph that conveys the impact of combined vulnerabilities on overall security. To manage attack graph complexity, CAULDRON includes hierarchical graph visualizations with high-level overviews and detail drilldown, allowing users to navigate into a selected part of the big picture to get more information.

Next-Generation Software to Identify Complex Cyber Network Attacks

Adam Shostack has a new book.

Why is information security so dysfunctional? Are you wasting the money you spend on security? This book shows how to spend it more effectively. How can you make more effective security decisions? This book explains why professionals have taken to studying economics, not cryptography--and why you should, too. And why security breach notices are the best thing to ever happen to information security. It’s about time someone asked the biggest, toughest questions about information security. Security experts Adam Shostack and Andrew Stewart don’t just answer those questions--they offer honest, deeply troubling answers. They explain why these critical problems exist and how to solve them. Drawing on powerful lessons from economics and other disciplines, Shostack and Stewart offer a new way forward. In clear and engaging prose, they shed new light on the critical challenges that are faced by the security field. Whether you’re a CIO, IT manager, or security specialist, this book will open your eyes to new ways of thinking about--and overcoming--your most pressing security challenges. The New School enables you to take control, while others struggle with non-stop crises.

The New School of Information Security

All online conference proceedings are now freely available to everyone. This significant decision will allow universal access to some of the most important technical research in advanced computing. In making this move USENIX is setting the standard for open access to information, an essential part of its mission. Click here for more information.

USENIX - Publications - Proceedings