- Target Missed Alarms in Epic Hack of Credit Card Data - Businessweek - Very detailed write-up.
- United Hub - Watch inflight movies and TV on your personal device - News - This is nice but, ref: all the whining in the comments, don't frequent travelers just buy and pre-load tablets these days. If not, why not? When there's personalized in-flight entertainment, I sometimes use it but it's WAY down my list of things that are important to me on a flight.
- Twitter / WIRED: East Coast snowstorm spawns ... - RT @WIRED: East Coast snowstorm spawns most hilariously comprehensive forecast ever
- The 25 Best Movies About American Politics | Vanity Fair - Interesting list with lots of movies I'm not familiar with but may want to check out one of these days. I'd probably have included The Good Shepherd; it's predominantly about the CIA but other films have similar tangential connections. Primary Colors should probably be there though it's not great. Nashville? Though it's an Altman film I never especially connected with. But a good list. There's nothing that pops to mind as seriously missing.
- David Attenborough narrates curling
- Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem - NYTimes.com
- The NoSQL “Family Tree” | Cloudant - This is maybe TOO simplistic but seems to give a reasonable overview.
- 10 Brand Websites On The First Day - Business Insider - Of course, they're still ugly but today it's because they paid lots of money for web designers to assault the senses with a vast spewing of content at the viewer.
- DevNation - New DevNation event has speaker line-up from jQuery, NetFlix, Facebook, Twitter, & more!
- Tell us why you love TiVo - I think I'm going to be violently ill:
- CIOs have a mandate to innovate | The Enterprisers Project - Business transformation and the CIO role from HBR
- Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Big-Bang Disruptions: The Innovator’s Dilemma in the Digital Economy - "Big-bang disruptions are often unplanned and unintentional. They are typically discovered through continuous market experimentation. They upend the conventional thinking on strategy, marketing and innovation, giving rise to a new set of business rules. “Nearly everything you think you know about strategy and innovation is wrong,” they note."
- 22-pound pet cat holds family hostage until police arrive - latimes.com - This is hilarious:
- Red Hat Announces Certification for Containerized Applications, Extends Customer Confidence and Trust to the Cloud - MarketWatch - RT @asheshbadani: @RedHatNews announces app container certification with @docker for @RHELdevelop and @openshift
- Fixing Fsync - Good discussion on fsync by @Obdurodon here:
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Links for 03-13-2014
Monday, March 10, 2014
Links for 03-10-2014
- Track US Flights and Global Flight Status
- Charles Marville’s Pictures Show What Was Destroyed - NYTimes.com
- Satoshi: Why Newsweek isn’t convincing | Felix Salmon - Felix Salmon has consistently written perhaps the best pieces on this ongoing saga. One point of mutual incomprehension between the "journos" and the "geeks" he misses/ignores though goes beyond the reasons he gives relating to the accuracy and credibility of the story. That point is that the journos can't comprehend that you wouldn't name someone notable like this if you discovered his identity and this fills a lot of people with real anger.
- Amtrak Sucks - Reason.com
- Twitter / paulcoxon: The power of math: 17 Equations ... - RT @paulcoxon: The power of math: 17 Equations That Changed the World, chosen by @warwickmaths' Ian Stewart FRS (pic @LarryTheTutor)
- The First Woman to Get a Ph.D. in Computer Science From MIT - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic - RT @JamesMaguire: The First Woman to Get a Ph.D. in Computer Science From MIT; talks about her life.
- Newsweek EIC tells Pando “We’ve hired security to protect our reporter.” Social media head: “We won!” | PandoDaily - "Impoco is surrounded by exactly the mix of San Francisco Glassholes and New York media types that you’d expect to find at a venue called the “Samsung Blogger Lounge.” The former contingent is here for the free bar, and most seem oblivious to the fuss surrounding Newsweek’s alleged outing of Bitcoin’s creator. But at least some of the reporters in attendance, ourselves included, are here to soak up the schadenfreude."
- Brundibar: How The Nazis Conned The World - Page 3 - CBS News
- The Satoshi Paradox | Felix Salmon - "I believe that Goodman believes that Dorian is Satoshi. I believe that Jim Impoco, my ex-boss, who’s now the editor of Newsweek, also believes that Dorian is Satoshi. But belief is not enough. Dan Rather believed that the Killian documents were genuine; Hugh Trevor-Roper believed that the Hitler diaries were genuine; Lara Logan believed that Dylan Davies was telling the truth about Benghazi. Big scoops are dangerous things."
- People Powered Front Pages Rule | The Whip - Not nearly as bad as one might fear.
- monkigras 2014 - YouTube - Checkout Monki Gras 2014 videos. Lots of good stuff:
- Newsweek outs Bitcoin founder — and his children, his wives, his employers… — Bob Sullivan - "Bitcoin, or whatever follows Bitcoin, has the potential to cause a revolution. It’s a real threat to central banking systems. It’s quite possibly a real boon to consumers, particularly those who want to move their money around the world without paying hefty fees for nothing. And of course, it’s a gift to criminals. Understanding Bitcoin’s origins and the founder’s philosophy is clearly of massive public interest. It’s worth violating his privacy. To a point."
- Adrian Cockcroft's Blog: Speeding Up Innovation - Cloud Expo Europe and QCon London 2014 - "Technologies and practices that have been developed in the leading web scale companies are finding their way into cloud based services that address the broadening of demand for these technologies, while packaging them to make them easier to implement. In addition, the pace of product development has greatly increased, and the ability to get faster feedback from customers and act on it conveys a significant competitive advantage."
- How Harold Ramis Invented Baby Boom Comedy With ‘Animal House’ - The Daily Beast - PJ O'Rourke. No more needs to be said.
- Getty Images makes 35 million images free in fight against copyright infringement » British Journal of Photography - RT @MatthewKeysLive: Getty making 35 million photos free to embed for non-commercial purposes -
Monday, March 03, 2014
Devs and automated Ops
Over at CIO, Stephanie Overby presents a GE Capital case study in which
The team was given some quick training in automation and given three tasks: develop the application quickly, figure out how to automate the infrastructure, and figure out how to automate more of the application deployment and testing in order to marry DevOps with continuous application delivery.
DevOps is often thought of as the breaking down of walls between operations and development. As such, it’s the IT equivalent of other types of integrated teams—an organizational style that goes in and out of fashion but is more in that out at the moment.
Looking at DevOps this way is… well, not wrong exactly but it misses important points. It’s worth stipulating here that there’s not yet a broad industry consensus around what DevOps. Nonetheless, it’s broadly recognized that historical boundaries between developers and operators and—as important—between the tooling that they use are rapidly breaking down.
Let me lead into my point with another quote from the article.
The project not only proceeded quickly -- the application was delivered within several months -- it established some new IT processes. They increased the amount of automation possible not only at the infrastructure level, but within the application layer at well.
Note the repeated use of the word automation.
A naive view of DevOps (which corresponds to how it was often discussed a few years back) was that DevOps was about the merging of developer and operator roles into one. The developer grabbed the production SQL database root password and the operator started churning out PHP. But that’s not really the DevOps story.
Much remains to be written and discovered on this topic. (By myself and others.) But one way that I increasingly think about DevOps is that the architects and operators build the infrastructure, setup developer self-service, automate scaling and deployments and then get out of the way.
For example, here’s how Paypal’s Ryan Granard described their approach with Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS at GigaOm Structure last June:
Our concept is you walk up to a portal, you pick the product that you want to work on. You're not asking VMs and RAM. You just say, I want to work on Wallet. In minutes, we have you up and running in a fully connected container and you're developing. That's the key. That's a real benefit to just the speed of innovation and ultimately not having developers or testers or any of these folks do anything that's not part of what their role fundamentally is.
Viewed through this lens, DevOps can be seen as not necessarily about developers becoming amateur DBAs or operations folks slinging a lot of code. It’s true that some of the newer management and operational tooling—think Puppet, Chef, Foreman, and so forth—is lighter weight and perhaps more suited to a degree of joint dev and ops use. However, it’s also clear that DevOps is about automating the relevant subset of operations for developers and providing easy-to-use instrumentation and controls that let them make effective us of that underlying infrastructure.
photo: CC/flickr by M Ray http://www.flickr.com/photos/mray/7249435726/
Video: Translating Open Source Value to the Cloud
Here's a video of the talk I gave at the Linux Collaboration Summit in 2013. I'll be giving a new presentation on How OpenStack is Paralleling Linux Adoption (and how it isn't) in a few weeks at this year's event in Napa.
Podcast: Cross-realm trust with Dmitri Pal and Ellen Newlands
Listen to MP3 (0:12:02)
Listen to OGG (0:12:02)
[Transcript]
Gordon:
We're going to be starting to talk about some of the new features coming
down the road in RHEL 7, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, that's scheduled to ship
later this year. Today, we're going to talk about one of the new security features
in RHEL 7, namely, cross‑realm trust.
Maybe,
get a high level view to start off. Ellen, why don't you explain what it is and
why people care about it?
Ellen
Newlands: Microsoft’s Active Directory is installed in many, many of
our customers' accounts. In addition, of course, customers also are using Red
Hat Enterprise Linux.
One
of the things that we will be shipping in the latest version of RHEL, which
will be RHEL 7, is the ability to easily integrate identity management from
Linux with Active Directory, something that centralizes identity and makes the
management of those identities much easier than it has been in the past.
Gordon:
Dmitri, could you tell us at a reasonably high level what this cross‑realm
trust is?
Dmitri
Pal: Cross‑realm trust is the capability of the identities from one
domain to access systems and resources in another domain. So instead of systems
having to be directly connected to the Active Directory as they have been in
the past, we can have a central server that would manage those systems while
enabling users to come from Active Directory and access those systems and
access the resources provided by those systems, for example, NFS and things
like that.
Gordon:
From the point‑of‑view of a system admin, how is what they can do with
cross‑realm trust simplified or different from how they would do things today?
Dmitri:
Today, with the solutions that are available, Linux systems are usually
joined directly into an Active Directory domain. That means that they need to
be managed through the Active Directory tools or found by the tools related to
or integrated with the Active Directory.
In
some cases, that's the preferred method, but that requires the protocols that
are driven from Active Directory. Linux systems have their native needs in terms
of POSIX attributes, the SELinux capabilities, the sudo capabilities. Linux
systems are really not exactly the same as Windows systems, so turning Linux
systems into Active Directory directly requires a lot of remapping things.
We
had a solution for managing Linux systems, but it was isolated. The idea is to
provide the best‑of‑breed services for the Linux systems on one hand, and to
enable the users from Active Directory to access those systems on the other
hand. It's the best‑of‑breed of both worlds.
Gordon:
This is really a way of essentially federating identities.
Dmitri:
Yes, but using domain‑to‑domain. It's federation on the Kerberos level.
It's domain federation rather than other ways of federating like SAML or
OpenID. This is on a lower level, on the infrastructure level rather than on
the application level.
Gordon:
Is there a particular audience for this type of approach versus other
approaches? In other words, who's been asking us to do this?
Dmitri:
The main consumer is the part of the organization which is responsible
for the infrastructure, for maybe cloud services or storage services, the
things that provide the fabric required for the enterprise to do their
business. The applications can be on the top of that, consuming the cloud or
the big data that is running on top of this infrastructure.
Clearly,
having a set of the systems that constitute the infrastructure as a part of
Linux and joined into the Active Directory through the trusts is that domain
audience.
Gordon:
Ellen, what have you been hearing in terms of demand for this?
Ellen:
One of the things that I find quite interesting is we are now in the high‑touch
beta phase for RHEL 7. A number of the customers who have shown a great deal of
interest in this particular capability, the cross‑realm trust, are in banking,
telecommunications, retail, healthcare, and public sector.
What
we find is that these are accounts where Active Directory may be what we call
the authoritative source for compliance.
But
there's a large infrastructure component for Linux that also wants to be
involved in the higher levels of compliance but managed with the Linux
capabilities. As Dmitri explained, there are certain native Linux capabilities,
like automate and sudo, et cetera, that this enables that area of the
corporation to maintain while still falling under the corporate architecture
where maybe Active Directory is the authoritative source.
We've
seen a lot of interest from generally very large customers who have a complex
or heterogeneous environment.
Gordon:
That's pretty common these days.
Ellen:
Yes it is. It seems like very, very few customers have only one vendor or
one operating system Linux is very often in a division or the development group
or whatever in a wider context.
Dmitri:
I want to add one important factor of the cross‑realm Kerberos trust.
That kind of a deployment allows great integration from whatever solution the
enterprise has at the moment to the future vision and the future architecture.
By deploying identity management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux that comes with
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0, you can establish this trusted domain and then
gradually move your systems into that domain.
One
of the important things is that you don't need to move to the latest versions
of Linux. You can serve with this solution both the latest the version, the
7.0, and the latest version of RHEL 6. You also can integrate earlier Red Hat
Enterprise Linux versions as well as non‑Linux systems.
Gordon:
This highlights what the analysts are telling us. What we see is an idea
that IT is increasingly hybrid, and that solutions that force homogeneity are
increasingly uninteresting, nonviable even, at customers.
Ellen:
That's absolutely true. Increasingly, it's a heterogeneous world.
Increasingly, also, the corporate boundaries are somewhat porous. The ability
to move in and out of vendors' various environments is very valuable,
especially when we offer centralized management. It takes less time, less work
and is easier to manage and, to some extent, update.
Gordon:
I would be remiss and some of my friends would disown me if I didn't
mention that Red Hat Summit is coming up mid‑April in San Francisco. For
listeners who are interesting in this sort of thing, there are going to be a
lot of great sessions around identity management at Red Hat Summit.
Ellen:
Yes, indeed. Dmitri will be doing demonstrations not only of the new
cross‑realm trust coming out in RHEL 7. One of the other features that I think
is interesting is, we've done some work in what we call OTP, which is one‑time
password capability.
Dmitri,
would you like to explain a little bit about why that would be of value?
Dmitri:
We have been working on the one‑time password technologies and
integrating them directly into the identity management solution for quite some
time. It's not going to be available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0, but it is
in a stage of development that is ready for us to talk about that.
It's
coming down the road. It's pretty solid technology right now. We will
demonstrate it in the booth at the conference.
The
main value is that you can authenticate with two‑factor authentication, like a
token fob that you have or a token that you have on your smartphone, and then
acquire, as a result of this authentication, Kerberos trust, that would allow
your enterprise single sign‑on between different services within your
enterprise.
In
the past, there has been no solution that allowed you to do that in an
integrated fashion. There has always been a password hidden somewhere. You
authenticate with two factors. With that you unlock a password, and then that
password is played against Active Directory or LDAP or any kind of
authentication server.
With
identity management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we are building it in such a
way that it is single stack. That's pretty powerful. There is a lot of
potential in this technology going forward.
Ellen:
By the way, I think everybody in your listening audience will know that
two‑factor authentication increases your security.
Gordon:
Pretty dramatically
Ellen:
Very dramatically.
Gordon:
Thank you for your time today. Anything else either of you would like to
share?
Dmitri:
Come to the conference, join us in the booth, and join us at the talks
that we'll have during the course of the summit. There will be some labs, also,
dedicated to identity management. See you there. Thank you.
Ellen:
Looking forward to seeing you at summit. Thank you.
Links for 03-03-2014
- So Long IT Specialist, Hello Full-Stack Engineer - CIO.com - RT @AndiMann: So Long IT Specialist, Hello Full-Stack Engineer - GE Capital takes on #DevOps via @CIOonline
- Red Hat | How Red Hat brings OpenStack into the enterprise - Have a new whitepaper up on bringing OpenStack to the enterprise:
- Twitter / jimaley: Frank Sinatra steps out of ... - RT @jimaley: Frank Sinatra steps out of a pre-Uber vehicle while carrying a handheld social networking device.
- Untitled (https://plus.google.com/+GordonHaff/posts/WS8xdVAmdpG) - Don't understand why so little consideration given to desires of neighboring towns in Mass casino process.
- Coursera.org - RT @Pogue: TED speaker, Duke prof, and author Dan Ariely is giving an 8-week course in behavioral economics. And it’s FREE.
- Quote Investigator | Dedicated to tracing quotations
- 36 Hours in Kyoto, Japan - NYTimes.com
- Oscar Picks: How to Beat Your Film-Geek Friends — Editor's Picks — Medium - I always lean heavily on the wisdom of the crowd for my Oscar picks but this year I didn't fight it at all.
- Farsite was right: 2013 Oscar prediction results | Farsite Forecast - I'd just point out that this "big data" analysis pretty much matches Internet collective wisdom re: Oscars.
- Whole Foods: America’s Temple of Pseudoscience - The Daily Beast - "From the probiotics aisle to the vaguely ridiculous Organic Integrity outreach effort (more on that later), Whole Foods has all the ingredients necessary to give Richard Dawkins nightmares. And if you want a sense of how weird, and how fraught, the relationship between science, politics, and commerce is in our modern world, then there’s really no better place to go. Because anti-science isn’t just a religious, conservative phenomenon—and the way in which it crosses cultural lines can tell us a lot about why places like the Creation Museum inspire so much rage, while places like Whole Foods don’t."
- Slo-mo for the masses - O'Reilly Radar - "Matter later matriculated at MIT, and he sent in images of those golf balls to Edgerton, along with a fan letter. He ended up taking a class from Edgerton, and his admiration for the idiosyncratic engineer only grew. “He was the quintessential maker,” Matter says of his mentor. “Almost everything in his lab was slightly radioactive from all his field work photographing atom bomb and hydrogen bomb tests. He’d look at a problem and come up with a solution. Sometimes his solutions were crude and ugly, but they worked. That was part of his philosophy — better to have something crude and ugly that works than something elegant and expensive that doesn’t work as well.”"
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