October, 2007

Overheard: Zombie army is not just a scary Halloween story

“What’s scarier than a Zombie flashmob at an Apple store? John Naughton’s article about how the Storm worm is being used to assemble a Zombie Army.”   This is really scary stuff.

‘If Storm were a disease,’ says Bruce Schneier, ‘it would be more like syphilis, whose symptoms may be mild or disappear altogether, but which will come back years later and eat your brain.’

Naughton writes: Storm has been spreading steadily since last January, gradually constructing a huge botnet. It affects only computers running Microsoft Windows, but that means that more than 90 per cent of the world’s PCs are vulnerable. Nobody knows how big the Storm botnet has become, but reputable security professionals cite estimates of between one million and 50 million computers worldwide. To date, the botnet has been used only intermittently, which is disquieting: what it means is that someone, somewhere, is quietly building a doomsday machine that can be rented out to the highest bidder, or used for purposes that we cannot yet predict.

Storm is different. It spreads quietly, without drawing attention to itself. Symptoms don’t appear immediately, and an infected computer can lie dormant for a long time.

Overheard: High Definition Plasma Display Panel technology in India

“Our group’s research is directed towards the measurement of the SEE yield (γ), which is a crucial parameter for characterization of dielectric layers and their applicability in plasma display panels. This project is a part of a larger academia-industry collaborative project aiming to develop indigenous High Definition Plasma Display Panel technology in India.” Sanjay Ram, Dielectric-Emissive Coatings in High Definition Plasma Display Panels

Overheard: Hulu hoopla is genuine

“How much time are people going to spend scouring YouTube, trying to find a chuckle among all the junk, when Hulu’s offering recent episodes of shows like “The Simpsons,” “Heroes” and “The Office” for free, on-demand, legally and in high quality straight from the source?” Brier Dudley, Experimenting with Hulu, here’s The Simpsons

IMHO, Brier Dudley’s the only one who’s correctly identified why Hulu will succeed. When it comes right down to it, viewers don’t care about who’s controlling the back end distribution. They just want free, high-quality video. And to be able to watch The Simpsons on their phone while they’re waiting for Mom to pick them up.

Brier demo’s Hulu. Check out the link above.

Overheard: Fast Infoset explained

To effectively improve web service performance, you need to reduce the overhead associated with parsing, serializing, and transmitting XML-based data. Fast Infoset is an open, standards-based solution for doing just that. Young Yang, Boost Web Service Performance in JAX-WS with Fast Infoset

Overheard: Bovine energy is serious alternative energy source

Bovine energy is a hot topic in biofuel research. Don’t laugh. There are 1.5 billion cows on planet earth and each of them manufactures an average of 100 pounds of manure a day. That’s a lot of methane gas.

Before I read about bovine energy, I pictured it pretty much the way the folks at the One Laptop Per Child initiative are using it. (see photo below) Not very efficient.

But as I read more, I began to understand how serious a source of energy cows could be. With a methane digester, even a small farm can recycle the gas cows produce in their manure to produce some serious electricity. The farm in the video (middle) brings in an extra $30k a month from selling their cow-generated electricity.

Instead of asking “got milk” maybe we should be asking “got fuel?”

Cows being used to power a generator for the OneLaptopPerChild initiative.Sumner Lemon

Using the cow’s digestive system to power energy cells. Hannah Velten

Overheard - Why aren’t there any Google jokes?

Why aren’t there any Google jokes? – Margaret Rouse

I just finished reading Robert Scoble’s blog post about Google’s page rank being dead and bloggers needlessly obsessing about their Google page rank (PR) numbers — and it reminded me of a question I’ve been meaning to ask somebody for awhile. How come there aren’t any Google jokes?

You can do a search and come up with literally hundreds of Microsoft jokes. There are Linux jokes. There are Unix jokes. There are Cisco jokes. IBM jokes. There are even jokes about bloggers.So how come there aren’t any jokes about Google?

Is Google’s power so formidable that it’s not funny? Are we afraid that if we joke about Google we’ll be punished and sent to SEO hell? Isn’t there anything funny about Google?

Or are there lots of great Google jokes floating around out there and I’m just the last one to know?

Back to work now.

– Margaret Rouse

Overheard: Digital resume - What you perceive is what you believe

“What is a digital resume?” you might ask. Well, think of it as everything you do online that can be viewed by others. This includes MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, forums, websites where you leave comments, etc. It is how your employers, clients, and customers will perceive you, whether it’s the “real” you or not. To them, it’s the real you. Period.” Shane Eubanks, Your Digital Resume Can Make or Break You

Overheard: Verizon and AT&T

“The fact is, the old Bell system that was broken up 25 years ago has reassembled itself into a duopoly that dominates the Internet backbone and both landline and wireless phone service. Verizon and AT&T are also among the largest Internet service providers. The old, overregulated AT&T was hostile to innovation, but as stodgy as it was, it saw itself as the steward of a public trust. The company’s lightly regulated successors view the world quite differently.” Stephen Wildstrom, Get Your Hands Off the Web

Overheard: What is a pre-green bill?

“Get a copy of your company’s electric bill. Determine how much you actually spend per month in energy for your data center. This is considered your “pre-green” bill.” Jimmy Ray Purser 5 Easy, Cheap Ways to Green Your Data Center

How do you actually do that?

Overheard: Google’s first production server

‘…with the hair pulled back, revealing a rack of cheap networked PCs, circa 1999.’ jurvetson’s photos, flickr

Jurvetson writes: Each level has a couple of PC boards slammed in there, partially overlapping. This approach reflects a presumption of rapid obsolescence of cheap hardware, which would not need to be repaired. Several of the PCs never worked, and the system design optimized around multiple computer failures.

Here’s another photo from the Computer History Museum.