Posts by Francis Liu

If you're serious about securing IoT gadgets, may as well start here

Re: "maintaining continuity of service and security if a vendor goes under,"

The solution fixes the security issues, but doesn't address the lifecycle issues of either vendor/middle-person/device.

But that's ok.

I'm not expecting one solution to fix everything. In fact, it's better this way. A solution that fixed everything would be some thick manual that IoT manufacturers couldn't implement.

Scores of profs give hated US patent law an F minus, demand massive rewrite

USPTO and Patents are only Part 1 of the picture

The patent office and patent system is just one part of the story. There's a larger game afoot to add the same "socially wasteful litigation" to every other country. See a review of the so called extension to the Free Trade Agreement the US is pushing in Australa http://works.bepress.com/kimweatherall/27/

Amazon opens doors to Kinesis: The Hotel California of the cloud

If Amazon can build this on a commercial budget, then Snowden's revelations are obviously completely realistic.

Amazon browserizes Kindle book samples

Web kindling works well

Very nice. Pages turns are quick and text is sharp.

Well done Amazon on firing this first salvo of the next battle.

Mobile: what they need - and what they want

Fighting a rising tide

It's just you, the IT person, against a hundred or two hundred users.

You've got bigger more important battles to fight. I say pick your battles and let this one go.

Now if you insist on micro-managing the devices allowed on the network, then no matter how you do it, there will always be a formal exception. The "marketing director" must, must, must have his "yphone". So, then you'll breed envy within the organisation and you're making it clear that there definitely are two classes of users.

No, best not to go down this road. Therein lies madness.

Should we care about SLA Monitoring and Management?

Network monitoring != SLA monitoring

It's labelled clearly and the webcast topic is clearly SLA monitoring, but for some duff reason the author (and the Editor?) allow the Network Monitoring to be written.

SLA monitoring is much much more than network monitoring. When monitoring networks, it's about pings, traceroutes, and other technological wonders. But SLAs require you to watch the end-to-end statistics. So, it can be a complex combination of ping, application specific tests, and also other difficult things like understanding network topologies and failover statuses to produce a magic number. For example, if the customer has a High Availability cluster that's providing protection from downtime, is the SLA affected if 30% of the nodes are lost? Is the SLA 95% met? Or is it still at 100%?

Terminology matters.

US spooks want 'stand off' biometrics-harvesting iPhones

They're trying to justify ubying iphones for their field spooks

It's clear that this is an attempt by some folks in the Agency to try and justify spending a bunch of $$$ on iPhones for the spooks in the field. They want all that lovely goodness that the civilian have. So they've invented this twaddle.

All the managers and higher-ups have them, this is a lame excuse for them to have them too.

AMD unleashes open-source 3D code

speedstep equivalent, finally

Maybe there will finally be a power saving mode for the GPUs. You're not running fancy 3D graphics while you're reading your mail or browsing (unless you're running "Aero" or "Enlightenment" or some other energy guzzler), so the GPUs should step down their power requirements.