On Tuesday September 1, 2009 Gmail, the email service provided the Google search engine, experience a widespread outage. Ben Treynor, a Google vise president said, "it was a big deal and that Google is working identifying and correcting the errors that lead to the outage." The immediate cause for the outage was that a few servers were taken offline for routine maintenance and while they were offline Google experienced experience an unexpected surge in internet traffic.
Eric Kuhn goes on to mention that at one time users would consider that the problem was stemming from their own internet connection but with social network such as Twitter that old ideology went out the door. People knew exactly why they weren’t getting any serve. According to Kuhn “Gmail problems were a top trend topic on Twitter” (cnn.com, 1)
This article directly correlates with this week’s chapter, chapter five, because two of the main topics in chapter five were backup and recovery. An organization needs to plan how often to backup information and those they also need to plan when and how minimize down time and improve recovery time. One particular method was fault tolerance in which a system has a component embedded in the system that takes over the main system in the event of an outage. Another method is failovers in which a separate duplicate system takes over while the main system is down. According to Treynor, “Google plans to increase router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom” (cnn.com, 1) with 36 million users in the US alone Google should have planned better maintenance schedules.
By: Eric Kuhn
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/01/gmail.outage/index.html
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
"Cybercrime: A Secret Under Ground Economy" in correlation with information security
"Cybercrime: a secret underground economy"
This article denounces the stereotype of geeks creating and sending out viruses and maintains that it is a growing industry. Cyber criminals steal one’s personal information such as credit card numbers or bank account numbers by way of malware, spyware viruses, Trojan horses etc. And then sell that information online to a third party. David Goldman describes this as a “multi-billion dollar business” and goes on to that if every stolen credit card was wiped clean last year that would have totaled some 8 billion dollars.
One must ask so what is the government doing to prevent these crimes? Well the FBI is currently going undercover in IRC (internet relay chat rooms) and posing as cyber criminal. Once a criminal is caught they offered deals in order to get them to help turn over more cyber criminals although Goldman cites Albert Gonzalez in saying that doesn’t always work one can always look at the TJ Max situation. A situation where a cyber criminal was working for the FBI in order to get vital information that helped his friends evade detection (cnn.com, 1). According to eh article Rowan Trollope the senior vice president of product development at Symantec the current anti-virus technology is not enough one must perform personal step to educate oneself in order to say safe from cyber criminals.
This directly correlates with this week’s text because it involves the technological aspect of protecting vital information but also states that one must also encompass an educational aspect to the technology in order to have information lost due to human error. In a discussion with one of my co-worker I discovered that Norton and McAfee antivirus systems were not that great because they are the most popular antivirus programs used and thus make it more attractive for hackers to get breach. My co-worker a computer technician recommended AVG and various other antivirus programs as alternative.
David Goldman, CNNMoney.com staff writer
http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/16/technology/cybercrime/index.htm?postversion=2009091613
This article denounces the stereotype of geeks creating and sending out viruses and maintains that it is a growing industry. Cyber criminals steal one’s personal information such as credit card numbers or bank account numbers by way of malware, spyware viruses, Trojan horses etc. And then sell that information online to a third party. David Goldman describes this as a “multi-billion dollar business” and goes on to that if every stolen credit card was wiped clean last year that would have totaled some 8 billion dollars.
One must ask so what is the government doing to prevent these crimes? Well the FBI is currently going undercover in IRC (internet relay chat rooms) and posing as cyber criminal. Once a criminal is caught they offered deals in order to get them to help turn over more cyber criminals although Goldman cites Albert Gonzalez in saying that doesn’t always work one can always look at the TJ Max situation. A situation where a cyber criminal was working for the FBI in order to get vital information that helped his friends evade detection (cnn.com, 1). According to eh article Rowan Trollope the senior vice president of product development at Symantec the current anti-virus technology is not enough one must perform personal step to educate oneself in order to say safe from cyber criminals.
This directly correlates with this week’s text because it involves the technological aspect of protecting vital information but also states that one must also encompass an educational aspect to the technology in order to have information lost due to human error. In a discussion with one of my co-worker I discovered that Norton and McAfee antivirus systems were not that great because they are the most popular antivirus programs used and thus make it more attractive for hackers to get breach. My co-worker a computer technician recommended AVG and various other antivirus programs as alternative.
David Goldman, CNNMoney.com staff writer
http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/16/technology/cybercrime/index.htm?postversion=2009091613
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Company Offers College textbooks for free
“Company Offers College textbooks for free”
This particular article informs the public of the website flatworld.com, a website where like the title suggests allows students to obtain their college text books for free. There are a few more details than that of course the website also offers printed versions of the texts book for up to sixty dollars and offers PDF versions of the text for $20 but students always have the option to read the books on a web browser for free. Another interesting fact is that they offer the books by chapter. According to John C. Abell Flatworld.com started by being patronized by 1,000 students at 30 colleges and now more than 40,000 students at 400 colleges use this website.
“Eric Frank cofounder told WIRED (Abell) that the key buy in has been from the teachers who make the assignments and this can attributed to the economy” (cnn.com, 1). Frank believes it will come down to price especially after new formats are developed for the Sony’s e-book reader and Amazon’s kindle. The Company still aspect the PDF copy to be the package of choice e-book and similar devises are capable of reading PDF formats.
I found this to correlate with Chapter three because it offers a new option for students to use the internet and is a perfect example of how the internet has evolved to facilitate the needs of different individuals.
John C. Abell
Sept. 8, 2009
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/21/free.college.textbooks/index.html
This particular article informs the public of the website flatworld.com, a website where like the title suggests allows students to obtain their college text books for free. There are a few more details than that of course the website also offers printed versions of the texts book for up to sixty dollars and offers PDF versions of the text for $20 but students always have the option to read the books on a web browser for free. Another interesting fact is that they offer the books by chapter. According to John C. Abell Flatworld.com started by being patronized by 1,000 students at 30 colleges and now more than 40,000 students at 400 colleges use this website.
“Eric Frank cofounder told WIRED (Abell) that the key buy in has been from the teachers who make the assignments and this can attributed to the economy” (cnn.com, 1). Frank believes it will come down to price especially after new formats are developed for the Sony’s e-book reader and Amazon’s kindle. The Company still aspect the PDF copy to be the package of choice e-book and similar devises are capable of reading PDF formats.
I found this to correlate with Chapter three because it offers a new option for students to use the internet and is a perfect example of how the internet has evolved to facilitate the needs of different individuals.
John C. Abell
Sept. 8, 2009
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/21/free.college.textbooks/index.html
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Why there are no Mac Viruses
Why are there no Mac Viruses
In this article Philip Elmer-Dewitt discusses the reason for the lack of Mac OS X viruses. He argues that there aren’t any viruses capable of infecting the Mac OS X system. He defined a virus as a program that infects a computer and has the ability to spread to other computers. He argued that spyware and Trojan horses, and spam are not considered viruses. He state that many people argue that the reason Mac OS X has a lack a virus is the lack of consumers. He argue that the real reason lack of viruses is hackers’ lack of interest, due to low consumer base, to some extent, the UNIX base file system and kernel is more difficult to infect, and viruses are going out of style.
He closes by stating that apple my just be lucky, or that it could infect offer better protection for its customers and that Windows 7 may offer similar protection. I like to believe the latter from, what I have heard is that since Mac builds programs specific to one type of computer they are better able to work out all the litter bug that may hinder the systems capabilities, whereas Microsoft develops programs for a wide array of computers e.g. Toshiba, Dell, HP, etc. This correlates to Chapter One in the sense that a company must decide what type of operating system to use the need to weight out what they want to accomplish and other issues such a security within that system. The Company I work (BestBuy) uses Microsoft I believe it’s because it offers a greater compatibility with external aspects of the company.
Posted by Philip Elmer-DeWitt
September 2, 2009 10:53 AM
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/09/02/why-are-there-no-mac-viruses/
In this article Philip Elmer-Dewitt discusses the reason for the lack of Mac OS X viruses. He argues that there aren’t any viruses capable of infecting the Mac OS X system. He defined a virus as a program that infects a computer and has the ability to spread to other computers. He argued that spyware and Trojan horses, and spam are not considered viruses. He state that many people argue that the reason Mac OS X has a lack a virus is the lack of consumers. He argue that the real reason lack of viruses is hackers’ lack of interest, due to low consumer base, to some extent, the UNIX base file system and kernel is more difficult to infect, and viruses are going out of style.
He closes by stating that apple my just be lucky, or that it could infect offer better protection for its customers and that Windows 7 may offer similar protection. I like to believe the latter from, what I have heard is that since Mac builds programs specific to one type of computer they are better able to work out all the litter bug that may hinder the systems capabilities, whereas Microsoft develops programs for a wide array of computers e.g. Toshiba, Dell, HP, etc. This correlates to Chapter One in the sense that a company must decide what type of operating system to use the need to weight out what they want to accomplish and other issues such a security within that system. The Company I work (BestBuy) uses Microsoft I believe it’s because it offers a greater compatibility with external aspects of the company.
Posted by Philip Elmer-DeWitt
September 2, 2009 10:53 AM
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/09/02/why-are-there-no-mac-viruses/
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