Selil

When writing papers it is sometimes a good idea to know the structure of what you are writing before you start. The American Psychological Association 5^th edition is the current requirement for classes on citation and style. There are a variety of templates out there to help your writing but as to writing an outline we want to achieve a couple of things. We want to know where things go, we want to know what the citation style is going to be, and we want to know the structure of the arguments we are going to make. The following almost totally can be found in the APA 5 style guide currently available. [Read more →]

It is interesting how we forget that information assurance and security is not always a technology problem. If you go to a major security conference there will be plenty of hardware vendors standing around but I’ve never seen psychologists or psychiatrists trotting out methods of determining insider threats. Sabotage, and destruction of company assets has been happening for a long time. Our own innate sense of humor at beating a rental car, driving the company van a little harder than we would our own car are symptoms of this perversion towards the company’s property. When we expand the scope out beyond our own actions and start considering the actions of hostile outsiders the risks becomes greater. With distance attribution as a capability is perceived to shrink. [Read more →]

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Where have we been? What are the effects of massive surveillance programs on society, but more importantly for our purposes on the enterprise? Companies use data mining and dataveillance technologies as techniques to increase profit share and that results in significant ethical and moral consequences. Beyond should we or shouldn’t we there is a question of how, why, and when? The various government agencies have written vision papers on where computer security should try and go, but are they being applied to the corporate enterprise? Each of the articles taken in the order presented here is a narrative constructed to examine various issues that return again and again to a theme of information security as a verb rather than a noun. Instead of being a passive hole we toss money into the principles expand to the point that information security as a process is an integral part of the enterprise instead of a layer. [Read more →]

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When does the act of a nation state take on the specter of war? Consider if you will that at some point a transgression most assuredly has the emotional and physical manifestations of war. The Japanese attack against United States interests in Pearl Harbor most assuredly was war. The Gulf of Tonkin incident precipitated the expansion of a conflict but was never considered a war. As a corrolary the events of 9/11 has led to a “war on terrorism” but there has been no declaration of war against another nation state. The concept of war itself has become muddied. With a war on drugs, war on poverty, various other wars and strenuous debates it is not unusual to see the term war used as a common in sentences where there should be more periods. So, as to China v. Google was it war? Doubtful, but the incident is very interesting. [Read more →]

I’ve wanted for some time to increase the number of book reviews I publish and to get them up a little faster. I’ve been re-reading a bunch of my computer security books and the review for today is Computer Capers: Tales of electronic thievery embezzlement and fraud. This is a great, timely, interesting, and of current interest to anybody who is involved in the information security field. It was also published in 1978. [Read more →]

Welcome to the spring edition of CIT Security Topics. For those of you wondering the topics for the course this semester will be as follows:

• How to survive and other myths of graduate school
• Spying, dataveilance, other tomfoolery you don’t know about
• Sabotage, bad things happen to good people and other happy thoughts
• Fear, uncertainty, doubt and other ways to sway people
• Terror in the skies, network, and other things that go bump in the night
• Robots in disguise, tactics and responses, transformation of critical infrastructures
• Boy that is big, the grid, the cyber stuff of legend
• War and conflict, or when the in-laws stay to long
• Law and other things that are mutually incompatible with society
• Who you drink with may not be your friend, neighbors who are risky

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Back in 2007 I made some pretty significant predictions.  I would like to say that making predictions is not nearly as hard as you would think. The way technology is adapted is pretty straight forward. So to recap this is the 2007 predictions and status. [Read more →]

Here are some pictures from last night.  The snow that fell was soon covered by a half inch of ice.

That left areas like the park looking like an ice-rink. To say the footing and driving is treacherous would be an understatement.

Getting down this road with the thick coating of ice was difficult to say the least.

The students of ITS 470 Large Scale  High Performance Systems created a cloud operating system. This presentation will give you a good over view of the topic. I won’t comment on the student with the horrible British accent. I won’t comment on our opening narrator stumbling over the introduction. I won’t comment on the fact one of them completely duplicated her narration. Other than that enjoy. You can access the cloud operating system by clicking here and registering. The system is free to use until it breaks or February 1, 2010 whichever comes first. There is no encryption or expectation of privacy on this system (hint: it’s managed by students). [Read more →]

 

 ITS 470 Cloud Computing Infrastructure: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download