Curious Ellie's Annex

Will the Pentagon use a contractor to merge information networks?

I read an article the other day, Pentagon to merge information networks. The following section caught my eye in particular,

Defense Department leaders have decided that the best way to protect sensitive information from cybercriminals and internal leaks is to consolidate its 15,000 networks into a single “joint information environment.” JIE is a set of security protocols — which the Pentagon calls a single security architecture...Although the JIE is not a “program of record” with its own funding line, it will be financed under the Pentagon’s $23 billion cybersecurity budget. Leading the massive network integration effort is the Joint Staff, U.S. Cyber Command and Defense Information Systems Agency [DISA].

                                                — via National Defense Magazine, 13 September 2013

It is good that DISA will serve as the Joint Information Environment (JIE) development hub, with associated accountability. However, I noticed that the head of DISA, Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronnie D. Hawkins Jr., mentioned this:

To foil insider leaks, the JIE will track network activity using 'identity access management' technology.

I am familiar with a cloud services vendor, Amazon Web Services (AWS), who uses the same terminology, "identity access management" or IAM. AWS is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, the e-commerce retailer. 

FedRAMP

I do not know whether IAM is an Amazon.com trademark, i.e. if it is unique to AWS. I do know that Amazon was granted FedRAMP, a special government contracting credential, in May 2013.

FedRAMP is a is a cost-cutting initiative intended to do away with checking the safety of cloud services, if the products already have cleared the program’s boilerplate style security audit. It guarantees that a cloud service complies with U.S. laws for guarding federal information, but is not applicable to classified or high-security systems.

Outsourcing

In my opinion, something as vitally important as our national defense deserves to be handled internally, watched over by government employees and military servicemen whose loyalties and steadfastness is unwavering. Congress should put aside sufficient funds. I can't think of many other government initiatives more worthy of being done right! I truly hope that the new Joint Information Environment will be implemented by U.S. Department of Defense staff or civilian employees of the federal government, rather than being outsourced to Amazon Web Service's cloud.

 

Yes, it may be more costly, in the short term, but we can't have everything. We need to decrease dependency on contractors.

Update

On 6 June 2014, FedRAMP updated security controls to align with the updated security and privacy controls for Federal information systems and organizations, per NIST Special Publication 800-53.

Computing Reviews offers reviewer revue

Computing Reviews is the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) publication review website. It isn't scholarly journal peer review, but rather, book reviews and critique of trends and new developments in computer science and computing applications.

Reviewer revue!

Computing Reviews runs a monthly series, Featured in Five. No, there's no singing or dancing, like a musical revue. The same five questions are asked of each month's featured reviewer, a "reviewer revue", so to speak. I recommend the series in general. Reviewers are computer science academicians or information technology professionals at various stages of their careers. The variation in answers to the same five questions* is fascinating.

My interest is in applied math, statistics and probability. One post dwelt on data analysis more than the rest, and caught my attention.

Big data and uncertainty

The following is an excerpt from the January 2013 post, for which Vladik Kreinovich was the featured reviewer.

Modern technology allows us to generate, store, and process huge amounts of data... big data can (and will) lead to revolutionary breakthroughs in science, engineering, medicine, and so on. The biggest challenge comes from the fact that all this data comes with uncertainty...

It is essential to gauge data accuracy. Until that is well understood and accounted for, big data will be of limited usefulness.

Bounded accuracy

Why is the accuracy associated with big data different, or more difficult, to study than "medium" or "small" data uncertainty?

Big data for growth stock investing

Can big data analytic methods be used for comparing Compounded Growth Rate (CGR) for a stock versus the industry median?

So they say

That's an affirmative, according to Big Data for Finance via The Benefits of Going Big (June 2012), and posted on Twitter today, from the 2013 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Rationale

Comparing stock CGR's with the industry median over time, then filtering those that exceed the median is computationally intensive:

The growth rate has to be calculated not only for every stock in the universe but also for the industry it belongs to. Typically, this kind of analytic takes tens of seconds to compute. The Eikon data cloud - through its proprietary 'vega effect' - decomposes the query into data retrieval, data level and application analytics and applies speed and scale to each layer.

This is accomplished by applying techniques such as

... efficient data retrieval algorithms, vectorisation, and parallel processing... the same analysis now takes less than one second to compute.

Internet Voting in the U.S.

The tone of urgency in this newly published article Internet Voting in the U.S. in the Communications of the ACM* (October 2012) is striking. The article doesn't waste any time with niceties. The unusual urgency was, in its own right, a signal of the importance of the issue to me.

Internet voting is not trustworthy

Use of the internet is not recommended at this point in time because the possibility and variety of errors and security breaches that can occur are myriad. They are not hypothetical, but were demonstrated recently, in a large test in Michigan, which the article describes.

Sources of error can be human or electronic mishap. There is also the possibility of malicious intent. 

The 18 TB iPad 3G

via thestorageanarchist.typepad.com

The image above is an Iomega ix12-300r SMB/ Distributed Office rackmount storage array. The Storage Anarchist figured out a way for his iPad to directly access the entire usable capacity of a RAID 6-protected ix12 storage "thing":

My ix12, fully loaded with 12 2TB SATA drives turns my 64GB iPad into a 18TB portable storage tablet.

I smiled, almost lol'd. Many photos, much glee if you wish to read the original article.

Reconsider the Mainframe

The Register just published a new paper: "Reconsider the Mainframe." The authors encourage IT organizations to understand the modern mainframe's leading capabilities, and they also summarize the key organizational issues preventing proper consideration of the mainframe's role. Many of those same issues hinder quality IT service delivery generally.

via mainframe.typepad.com

Don't let bias and fashion blind you to choosing the right tool for your needs. Goodness-of-fit assessment must include matching on usability, performance, cost, customer service and reliability.

Don't forget security, either!

Profanity in your Data Quality

Many years ago when I was working with a large company, we encountered a situation where our call centers were reporting problems with profanity being entered into several of the name and address fields.  Since the “profane” data usually appeared almost always in name and address, its presence was found to be slightly detrimental to customer satisfaction when the bills were mailed the following month.

via blogs.trilliumsoftware.com

This is something that even my fertile imagination could not have anticipated.

In order to implement a profanity spam filter, it is necessary to DEFINE such a spam filter. Read the sordid details of how David Brinkley, of Harte-Hanks Trillium Software, contended with this and the consequences of "profane data".

Postscript one: The scope of this situation extended beyond spam control, data integrity and information technology. It impacted employee compensation, corporate structure and more.

Postscript two: Copious thanks are due to Henrik Lilendahl Sorensen, who continues his run of astute good humor as data quality expert par excellence.

A Short History of Search Engines from Archie to Google

Google has become so dominant in the world of search that it is easy to forget that there were search engines before Google. In fact, there were search engines before the web.

What many people believe was the very first search engine was developed in Canada. It was the creation of a McGill University graduate student named Alan Emtage. In 1989, even before the birth of the worldwide web, he developed a way to search and index public internet-based archives. He called it Archie (archives without the "v"). He neglected to tell the people running the university's computer science program what he was up to, but Archie was an instant hit among students and other early adopters of the net

By 1992, Archie's server was using about half the available bandwidth in eastern Canada. A few thousand devoted users were asking about 50,000 queries a day. In pre-web world, Archie was an effective, if cumbersome way of finding documents on the internet. If you typed in the name of the file you were looking for, it could look around the net and find it, though when things got busy on weekday afternoons, it could take Archie several hours to respond to your query....

via The Sunday Edition | A Short History of Search Engines from Archie to Google.

A History of Enterprise IT in One Slide

via aiim.typepad.com

Digital Landfill made this slide for a conference he attended recently. It got a lot of attention.

These were some of his accompanying thoughts:

... the challenge is in managing information systems that are much more distributed, informal, and ubiquitous than anything that has been known previously.

The current world of transactionally centric content management is not going away -- in fact it is bigger and more robust than ever -- but organizations need to start thinking about how they extend their thinking about governance and taxonomy and compliance and control into this new world.

 

Introducing Firesheep

 

 

via codebutler's spectacular repository of Firefox security "showoff fail." 

For more photos: githubscreenshot series of firesheep in action