The Dark Side of Cloud Computing

cio.com:

Companies tapping into virtual infrastructure through cloud computing should take another look at their security plans, say experts at the Black Hat Security Conference. From legal protection to phishing, here are five cloud security issues to consider.

Here are they:

1. Cloud offers less legal protection
2. You don’t own the hardware
3. Strong policies and user education required
4. Don’t trust machine instances
5. Rethink your assumptions

Interesting slides from the recent Black Hat conference here. Unfortunately the paper is missing, but probably need just a recheck next week here (or see for Haroon Meer under the speaker on the right side here.

Ganz ohne Internetsperren

Hallo Ursula, geht doch auch so:

Gesuchter Kinderschänder stellt sich

Und das nach nicht mal einem Tag Öffentlichkeitsfahndung. Beeindruckend. Da hätten die Internetsperren auch nicht schneller sein können.

Aber darum geht es ja in Wirklichkeit gar nicht. Danke Udo für die klaren Worte.

various picks

Paul Graham: Maker´s Schedule, Manager´s Schedule – and why they don´t go well together

Umair Haque: The Nichepaper Manifesto

Journalists didn’t make 20th century newspapers profitable — readers did.

…

Nichepapers, in contrast, do meaningful stuff that matters the most. The great failing of 20th century news is that monopoly power became a substitute for meaningful value creation. At root, that’s the lesson that newspapers are learning the hard way.

Vanity Fair: Palin’s Resignation: The Edited Version – interesting to see what can be made with some editing of a poor speech.

Cory Doctorow in the Guardian: Chris Anderson’s Free adds much to The Long Tail, but falls short – thoughtful critique

myMoleskine – make your own pages: MSK

Web Worker Daily: 10 Useful Thunderbird Add-ons for Almost Everybody – a lot of things I yet did not know about (but so far have not looked for as well)

LifeHacker:  The First 10 Free Apps to Install on a New Windows PC – you could argue about some picks, but there is also a lot of must-haves in the comments

BoS 2008: Seth Godin on why marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Der Unterschied zwischen Leistung und Erfolg

Michael Groß im Gespräch mit der FAZ:

Sie haben innerhalb von 24 Stunden zweimal Gold gewonnen. Waren das die zwei intensivsten Tage ihres Lebens?

Nein. Was intensiv war, war der 30. Juli. Da habe ich die 100 Meter Delfin mit Weltrekord gewonnen, relativ überraschend, es war ein Kopf-an-Kopf-Rennen mit dem damaligen Weltrekordhalter Pablo Morales. Wenn ich ein Rennen nennen sollte, das nahezu perfekt gelaufen ist in meinem Leben, dann ist es dieses. Dann war eineinviertel Stunden später die 4×200-Meter-Kraulstaffel. Da sind wir viereinhalb Sekunden unter dem Weltrekord gewesen, ein traumhaftes Rennen, es hat eigentlich alles gepasst. Und trotzdem sind wir nur Zweiter geworden, hinter den Amerikanern. Das hat mich bis heute insofern geprägt, weil ich den Unterschied zwischen Leistung und Erfolg gelernt habe. Du kannst die höchste Leistung bringen und trotzdem nicht erfolgreich sein.

Recipe for Disaster

Felix Salmon in Wired 17.03: Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street:

For five years, Li’s formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li’s formula hadn’t expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system’s foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril.

…

The damage was foreseeable and, in fact, foreseen. In 1998, before Li had even invented his copula function, Paul Wilmott wrote that “the correlations between financial quantities are notoriously unstable.” Wilmott, a quantitative-finance consultant and lecturer, argued that no theory should be built on such unpredictable parameters. And he wasn’t alone. During the boom years, everybody could reel off reasons why the Gaussian copula function wasn’t perfect. Li’s approach made no allowance for unpredictability: It assumed that correlation was a constant rather than something mercurial. Investment banks would regularly phone Stanford’s Duffie and ask him to come in and talk to them about exactly what Li’s copula was. Every time, he would warn them that it was not suitable for use in risk management or valuation.

…In finance, you can never reduce risk outright; you can only try to set up a market in which people who don’t want risk sell it to those who do. But in the CDO market, people used the Gaussian copula model to convince themselves they didn’t have any risk at all, when in fact they just didn’t have any risk 99 percent of the time. The other 1 percent of the time they blew up. Those explosions may have been rare, but they could destroy all previous gains, and then some.

…

In the world of finance, too many quants see only the numbers before them and forget about the concrete reality the figures are supposed to represent. They think they can model just a few years’ worth of data and come up with probabilities for things that may happen only once every 10,000 years. Then people invest on the basis of those probabilities, without stopping to wonder whether the numbers make any sense at all.

As Li himself said of his own model: “The most dangerous part is when people believe everything coming out of it.”

One learning: always read the fine print, folks.

Kindle 2

xkcd.com:

I had the same thought.

Peter Kafka in Media Memo on All Things Digital commenting on Jeff Bezos pitch lately in “The Daily Show” with host Jon Stewart:

That is: For some folks, the ability to download books over the air, store a gazillion titles on a single device and have a “freaky” voice read them aloud to you are compelling reasons to shell out $359 for the gadget. For skeptics like Stewart, it’s hard to see how Amazon (AMZN) has improved upon the ink-and-paper book, which uses technology that has worked pretty well for several hundred years.

And cnet Crave on Designing the Kindle 2:

“One of the great things about Kindle is it doesn’t ever get hot,” Amazon Vice President Ian Freed said in an interview at Amazon’s downtown office here. That’s important, Freed said, given that the company has one main goal with the Kindle–making the product as invisible to users as possible when they are reading.

“The most important thing for the Kindle to do is to disappear,” Freed said. That was the goal with the first device and was also a key factor in deciding what would go in the sequel, which started shipping on Monday. There are the obvious factors, like the thinner, sleeker design. But there are also things like an improved cellular modem. As a result, Kindle users will find themselves out of range in fewer places to get updates or buy a new book.

Well, for us Europeans it is anyway not yet available. I will have a look at it, when it comes over, but for the time being I like my dead tree library.

Bunte Mischung

so, noch ein paar Sachen in deutsch…

Der SpON erklärt, wie das neue US-Einreiseformular funktioniert. Und hier ist die ESTA-Seite in deutsch. Ist denn jetzt das grüne Formular, von dem ich regelmäßig 2-3 brauche (ja, bin auch einer von denen, die in das Feld für das Geschlecht immer die Flugnummer – oder umgekehrt reinschreiben) endlich weg?

Wenn der Preis stimmt, könnte das mein nächster Computer sein: Dell Mini 10, auf der CES in Las Vegas im Januar angekündigt. Ansonsten halt ein Samsung NC10, von dem man vielerorts gutes hört.

Ivan Blatter von imgriff.com fragt: Was sind Deine 3 liebsten Hilfsmittel? und bekommt interessante Antworten.

Die Karrierebibel mit einem klasse Tip (nicht, dass ich den brauchen würde…): Arbeitsillusion – Wege, wie Sie möglichst beschäftigt aussehen:

Gut, sicher, klar, die Zeiten sind gerade nicht die besten für Arbeitnehmer. Kurzarbeit, Zwangsurlaub, vielleicht sogar Kündigung – das sieht nicht gut aus im karriereoptimierten Lebenslauf. Was also tun, wenn die Arbeit immer weniger wird und die Chefcontroller mit dem Rotstift durch die Flure wandern?

Nun, eine Alternative ist: Sehen Sie möglichst beschäftigt aus. Engagierte und fleißige Mitarbeiter landen schließlich nicht so schnell auf der Streichliste. Und wer die Attitüde eines Leistungsträgers pflegt, sichert nicht nur seinen Job – er tut auch was gegen die Langeweile, wird aktiv und kreativ. Kurzum: Das bisschen Show muss sein – und macht Spaß dazu.

Holger Schmidt, der Netz-Ökonom der FAZ, mit einem sehr guten Artikel über Twitter: Das nächste große Ding im Netz

Oliver Jungen bespricht auf fazjobs.net “The Big Switch“, das neue Buch von Nick Carr: Arbeitsplätze nur noch für die Internet-Elite?

Saturday night mix

The PersonalMBA on “Experimenting with Delegation and Outsourcing“. Sure he is inspired by Tim Ferriss, isn´t he? But this might be an interesting approach, especially when you want to offload work to free up your capacity.

WebWorkerDaily: 6 Strategies Freelancers Can Learn From Corporate Cost-cutting. Yes, when everybody is tightening the belt, also freelancers have to adjust.

The Crisis of Credit visualized. Excellent.

Mindfuck Movies:

Some movies inform. Some movies entertain. And some pry open your skull and punch you in the brain. MATTHEW BALDWIN gathers up the films that have caused him to clutch his head and moan.

David Pogue shares his greatest hits from TED.

I had a separate post on better presentations a few days ago, but here are Edward R. Tufte´s Presentation Tips – not dependent on a particular tool.

Going for a Netbook? GigaOM with 5 Resources for Netbook Helps, Hacks and How-To’s

Louis Gray asks: Is there room for anyone else besides Twitter? Yes, there is, even though Dave Winer is still looking for Twitter´s WordPress. Look over to identi.ca, folks. I am @arminauth

Quite some commentary on the deal between IBM and Amazon to Deliver Software via Cloud Computing With Amazon Web Services.

Nick Carr: Another little IBM Deal

It doesn’t seem like such a big deal, and it probably isn’t. But you never know. The licensing of MS-DOS seemed like small potatoes when it happened.

Vinnie Mirchandani: Will IBM regret this also?

So, IBM now announces a relationship with amazon for its web services ostensibly to expose more of its software to the lower end of the market.  In the meantime,  it continues to do similar stuff in its own data centers for larger outsourced clients.

The question is will history repeat itself.

Dana Gardner: Who makes most rain from IBM-Amazon cloud deal? Oracle.

So we come to Oracle. Larry Ellison’s entertaining position on cloud is a hedge. He knows the substantial cloud economy is inevitable, and he knows its at least 10 years in the making. And he knows the transition will be ugly and bloody.

…

It’s too soon to tell whether the rainmaker-enabled marketplace approach of IBM (remember Java, Linux, n-tier) will beat out the shoot-for-the-moon strategy of Microsoft when it comes to the cloud. But I like Oracle’s margins better through 2016 as the battle ensues.

Twitter 10 Commandments from @thealmightygod:

I saw God the other day – he had just come down from the mountain (OK, so it was Camelback Mtn) and Tweeted to me in my sleep. He told me he had come to bring me the 10 Commandments of Twitter

The NY Times (Registration required) on Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu: A Software Populist Who Doesn’t Do Windows

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