CIO Summit: Coming to grips with the future of Cloud computing

From CIO:

The challenges faced by the chief information officer of 2015 will include changes to outsourcing, a winnowing of the number of Cloud vendors and increasingly converged IT, according to IDC's Chris Morris.

Speaking at CIO Summit 2011 in Sydney, IDC's Asia Pacific Cloud services and technologies principal analyst said there are four trends set to change the Cloud model forever.

The first was 'Outsourcing 3.0' — the Cloud evolving to include integration with services built on mobile devices, mobile applications and information analytics.

"If you just assume that the Cloud is a place to put your application in, or replace infrastructure than you are going to get left behind," Morris said.

According to Morris, Outsourcing 3.0 will mean that by 2015 the Cloud will be just another tool in the CIO's toolkit.

"Outsourcing 3.0 using the Cloud would have a full portfolio of services from commodity to mission critical services, and because of that service management plays a critical part of the IT service cycle," he said.

"Just as we do in outsourcing, playing close attention to due diligence — where you check if the provider has long term status for your organisation — becomes very critical."

The second prediction is the hybrid environment of public and private Cloud will evolve and converge to include data centre transformation.

"There is a long way to go with data centre transformation, as the target for large enterprises is 100 virtual machines per server by 2012," Morris said. "We are getting there, because 2010 was the first year where more applications were deployed in a virtual machine environment than deployed in physical server environment," he said.

However, CIOs need to look at a different architectural approach because the deployment is taking place in systems based on older technology.

"The network and storage is being overstressed by the number of virtual machines and the ROI is not being addressed," Morris said.

Morris also predicts that the provision for 'Big Data' will become part of the Cloud suppliers' portfolios.

According to IDC statistics, in 2010 9.8 exabytes of disk storage was bought by Cloud service suppliers in the Asia Pacific.

"The Cloud service provider has a big part to play in this as they have the relationships with the storage providers that are on demand," he said.

He added that the supplier portfolio will change, as there will be fewer suppliers but each of those suppliers will offer more services.

"By 2015 public Cloud will probably be more important than virtual private Cloud because those security and reliability levels will have come up and there will be 80 per cent of new applications developed for public Cloud," Morris said.

"Your future will depend on your ability to source and manage these applications from a public Cloud environment.

"You as a CIO are going to be dealing more with Cloud service hosters, far fewer technicians, and the vendors are going to vanish. We predict that up to 35 per cent of your key vendors will be 'Wiki[pedia] trivia' by 2015."

According to Morris, many vendors will be taken over because they have good reach and a strong customer base in the Cloud market. Finally, the Cloud skills base will change as IT operations become sourcing organisations that manage technology and technicians

"If you are looking at the future mix of an organisation, it would be 80 per cent technicians and 20 per cent management. That means you need to retrain and reskill people who can manage services."

Morris said that as chief information officers offloaded more services into the Cloud, they had the potential to be more agile and concentrate on running the business.

Full article can be found here.

NIJ releases "The Fingerprint Sourcebook"

NIJ has completed their Fingerprint Sourcebook. The Fingerprint Sourcebook aims to be the definitive resource on the science of fingerprint identification. The Sourcebook was prepared by the International Association for Identification and topics covered include the anatomy and physiology of friction ridge skin (the uniquely ridged skin found on the palms and soles); techniques for recording exemplars from both living and deceased subjects; the FBI's Automated Fingerprint Identifications Systems (AFIS); latent print development, preservation and documentation; equipment and laboratory quality assurance; perceptual, cognitive and psychological factors in expert identifications; and legal issues.



Room for Debate: Is Law School a Good Idea?

Thinking about law school? The New York Times posted this discussion worth a read suggesting that law school may not be such a good idea in the shrinking job/rising debt universe. An excerpt below (full article here):

Law school tuition is rising four times as fast as the cost of an undergraduate degree, which itself is soaring. Despite the high price, students are still flocking to law schools, even if it means going into heavy debt to enter a tight job market with few top-paying openings.
Should the standard three-year model of legal education, followed by taking and passing the bar exam, be the only path toward becoming a lawyer? Could law school be shortened, or should those three years of classes have a different focus?

Police Officer That Killed Two Teens Driving Twice the Speed Limit

Reports released by the Texas Department of Public Safety Office this week indicated that an officer was driving more than 80 miles per hour when he struck a car containing two teens in Wichita Falls, Texas. The report indicates that the teens had stopped at a stop sign then proceeded into the intersection where they were struck by the patrol car. The report also indicates that the patrol car took no evasive action. The teens were both killed and the officer is recovering from injuries. The initial report indicated that the officer may have taken prescription medications prior to the accident. One of the teens killed was eight months pregnant.

The Vidocq Society: Solving Murders Over Lunch

From NPR:

The Vidocq Society sounds like something straight out of a Sherlock Holmes novel.

Once a month, the members of the 20-year-old club — mostly detectives and forensic experts — meet at an old Victorian dining room in the middle of Philadelphia to eat lunch and solve crimes that have perplexed investigators for decades.

"I think of it as CSI to the 10th power but real," says journalist Michael Capuzzo. There are profilers and pathologists, experts in white-collar crime, terrorism and sadism. They have Interpol represented, and a captain from the Egyptian army — and for good measure, they even have a psychic.

Capuzzo has spent years becoming intimately familiar with the Vidocq Society, which is named for the 18th-century criminal-turned-crime-fighter Eugene François Vidocq. Capuzzo's new book, The Murder Room, details how the three founding members gathered crime experts from around the world to solve cold cases. He also profiles some of their more famous investigations.

Both Capuzzo and Richard Walter, a forensic psychologist considered to be the father of criminal profiling, join Dave Davies for a conversation about how the monthly lunchtime meetings turn into round-table discussions about possible motives and murder suspects.

Walter describes one case, the brutal 1984 murder of a night manager named Terri Brooks in Falls Township, Pa. She was stabbed inside the Roy Rogers restaurant where she had been working. The extremely violent attack — her head was wrapped in cellophane, and a knife wound had punctured her throat — was perplexing to local officers. The safe inside the restaurant had been manipulated, so investigators thought the murder was the result of a "robbery gone wrong."

For 14 years, the case went unsolved — until the case was brought to a Vidocq Society meeting. After listening to officers from Falls Township describe the case, Richard Walter stood up and told the officers that this wasn't a robbery gone wrong — and that Terri Brooks had been targeted and murdered by someone she knew.

"When you looked at the body, when you looked at the crime scene itself, it was obvious that it was not a robbery," Walters explains to Davies. "What robbery suspect would stab someone so viciously that the knife enters the tile floor and wrap the head in cellophane? A robber is simply not going to do that. It's not efficient. There's no value in that kind of an activity. So you have to look how he spends his time and his interest by what's there and by what's not there."

Walter thought the staged robbery was simply a red herring staged by the suspect to throw police off his trail. The police then asked Walter to create a profile of a potential suspect.

"Given the amount of violence at the scene and how it was personalized to the victim," Walter suspected that the murderer wasn't a stranger. "Also, the victim had to let the suspect in, and so, therefore, the presumption is that she knew him. ... There's extreme hostility, and you see that he doesn't really care when the victim dies. He cares when his anger has been sated. ... So it was simply a matter of watching and plugging in the bits and pieces along the way. In this case, it was reasonable to assume by police that a boyfriend may be involved."

Members of the Vidocq Society talked to Brooks' parents, asking them about any possible boyfriends. They remembered one, a man they thought was named O'Keefe. The detectives scoured arrest records and articles for any mention of an O'Keefe, and found nothing — until they looked at the funeral guest book for Terri Brooks.

Sure enough, a man named Alfred Scott Keefe had signed in to Brooks' funeral registrar. Police officers obtained a warrant to get Keefe's DNA — from cigarettes he threw out at the curb. It matched DNA from the crime scene. After an interrogation, he confessed. Sixteen months later, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Walter says members of the Vidocq Society try to look at cases — like the murder of Terri Brooks — from all angles.

"I think that many times, we tend to look at things linearly on a straight, flat line and don't see a relationship between evidence," he says. "I try, particularly when humans and people are involved and motives and all of these sorts of things, to look at the evidence on a differential plane. And so you get a sense of depth and insight into [the crime.]"

Full article and story can be found here at NPR.

Bitcoins: Currency of the Geeks

From Business Week:

Mike Caldwell, the founder of a small company in Salt Lake City that makes timekeeping software, considers himself financially conservative. He's also a geek, and couldn't help but get excited late last year when he heard about bitcoin, a new virtual currency. In February, on one of the handful of online exchanges that have appeared over the past year, he bought about $20,000 worth at less than a dollar per bitcoin. "I felt that maybe I would get a 20 or 50 percent return," says Caldwell, 33. By early June, when he sold the last of his stake, a bitcoin was worth around $30. Caldwell says his total return was well over 1,000 percent. "That magnitude was totally unexpected," he says.

For those who got in early, it's a gold rush. In the last few months this online cash has exploded in usage, notoriety, and value. Like dollars or yen, a bitcoin's worth fluctuates with demand, but in its short history it's gone mostly up. About $130 million worth of bitcoins are now in existence, and the value of that stash has grown more than 6,000 percent this year. Bitcoin partisans are breathless: "This is the biggest invention since the Internet," says Bruce Wagner, an entrepreneur who hosts a monthly bitcoin meet-up group in Manhattan.

The project was started in 2009 by an enigmatic programmer known as Satoshi Nakamoto. He always communicated electronically, never answered personal questions, and disappeared from online forums in December. The conspiracy-minded speculate that Nakamoto was actually a group of people, or a government cryptographer, or a pseudonym for Gavin Andresen, the Amherst (Mass.) programmer who took over the project after Nakamoto vanished. "I spoke to one guy who thought aliens might have come to earth to bring us this technology, it's so perfect," says Wagner.

Digital transactions normally require a trusted intermediary such as PayPal to credit and debit accounts properly and prevent cheating. With bitcoins, "there is no middleman, says Andresen or," more accurately, there's a distributed middleman. Individual transactions are encrypted, logged by a decentralized network running on thousands of home computers, and recorded in a public ledger. The system works similarly to peer-to-peer music-sharing networks in that files are shared among swarms of users, rather than downloaded from a central server.

Suppose you're in the market for alpaca socks, one of the few consumer items you can buy with bitcoins. Step one: Get some BTC—that's the symbol—at a currency exchange site such as Mt.Gox. Then download a desktop app from bitcoin.org, which will store your lucre (some use an online service such as Instawallet.org instead) and connect you to the decentralized bitcoin network. Next, find the alpaca farms bitcoin address, a string of characters also known as a public key. Click the send coins button.

The purchase is unconfirmed until a miner certifies it. Miners are power users who crunch numbers on behalf of the network, and some have racks of computers dedicated to the task. They're called miners because, just as gold miners increase the supply of gold, they create new bitcoins, at an algorithmically controlled rate. The greater their computing power, the more they generate for themselves. Once a miner's computer has processed a transaction, the alpaca farm gets bitcoins and you get socks. It's complex but fast: The bitcoin network has handled as many as 87 quadrillion calculations per second, 35 times more than the top supercomputer.

Bitcoins have all the advantages of cash—free to use, very hard to trace—as well as its disadvantages. That digital wallet is a file on a hard drive or online, and if it's lost or stolen there's no recourse. The currency is backed only by the faith and credit of its participants and outside the scope of any banker, politician, or the Federal Reserve. To a certain breed of libertarian nerd who grew up on cyberpunk, it's the Digital Rapture.

Full article can be found here.

Speed Bumps on the Road to Virtual Cash

From the New York Times:

MONEY is accumulated, traded and transferred online every day, but can there be a form of currency that exists only online and yet has real-world value?

That is the premise of Bitcoin, an open-source virtual currency system that since 2009 has grown to a market worth more than $100 million.

But the past few weeks have shown that a virtual currency can be just as vulnerable as the paper kind. Bitcoin accounts have been subject to hacking and theft; the currency itself experienced a bubble and a crash. And at least one group that was collecting donations in Bitcoins has decided against using them because of possible legal entanglements.

Gavin Andresen, who is the lead developer of the open-source software that operates the currency, said in an interview from his home in Amherst, Mass.: “I expected it to have lots of speed bumps along the way — but I didn’t expect there to be so many speed bumps in a row.”

There are several appeals to the idea of an online currency. The standard way to ensure the validity of online transactions, according to Jerry Brito, a technology expert at George Mason University, is “to have an intermediary to keep the ledger,” that is, a service like PayPal or a credit card company that takes a percentage of the transaction.

A virtual currency would not need an intermediary. It would also make it harder for authorities to track transactions (particularly appealing for gambling sites or other quasi-legal activities).

Bitcoin began as a kind of thought experiment. In 2009, an anonymous programmer published a paper proposing a virtual currency that would elegantly solve many of the problems surrounding currency that exists only on the Internet, including the main one, that the money would simply be copied like, say, music files, and plummet in value.

Another part of the challenge was to create a currency without having to resort to a central bank to issue the currency and track the transactions. In other words, the transactions would be genuinely “peer-to-peer” rather than pass though a virtual bank.

The solution of the Bitcoin programmer, who wrote under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, was to ensure that each “coin” was its own certificate of authenticity — that the coin, in essence, would be nothing more than that certificate.

In the Bitcoin system, a new coin is produced whenever a computer can calculate an answer to a difficult problem, and then attaches that answer to a digital record of every transaction of every Bitcoin ever traded — a breathtakingly large amount of information to carry around in order to buy a pack of gum, but in a time when information can zip around the Internet, not too much to ask. Anyone would be free to create a new coin, within proscribed supply limits, by having a computer do the work needed to prove that it was in fact a valid Bitcoin.

“The incentives are right, they are a check that everyone is following the rules,” said Mr. Andresen. “Early adopters want it to succeed, because they already own the currency. And if you generate Bitcoins no one thinks is valid, you have wasted a lot of computer time.”

In fact, Bitcoin is a rarity for a currency in that it is neither a so-called fiat currency — one like dollars, which are valuable because the government says they are — nor is it a specie currency, one that gets its value because it can be converted into a precious metal like silver or gold.

But why would a Bitcoin have value if it is only a stream of numbers, unsupported by government fiat or by some underlying asset?

“Why does any tool have value?” Mr. Andresen asked. “It is valuable because it is useful.”

Starting almost as soon as the coins were introduced, they have been traded for dollars at online exchanges, serving as a crude measure of the currency’s popularity and health (and also giving a market where owners can trade in Bitcoins for real dollars).

After two years, there are seven million of these “coins” in circulation and the rate of increase — currently 50 coins are added every 10 minutes — will slow each year until the number tops out at 21 million coins around 2025. The coins, which trade for about $17 each at online exchanges, have a cumulative value of about $100 million. “I do think of it as the market cap of Bitcoin,” said Mr. Andresen. Today, a list of businesses that accept Bitcoin currency is a motley collection of companies on the fringe of the computer world, groups that conduct gambling or the like, and, notably, the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks, which accepts contributions in Bitcoins. You certainly can’t stock the pantry or furnish your home with Bitcoins.

Full article can be found here.