Links List 09.25.09

September 25th, 2009 by Valerie Barber

“IPv6 is not inherently more secure,” says Brett Thorson, a network security advisor to the North American IPv6 Task Force. Since many networking tools are not designed to work with IPv6 traffic (EM7 supports IPv6!) these products often ignore or cannot see IPv6 traffic, creating blind spots that could be compromised. And for now, since it’s not widely used, some administrators monitor or block IPv6 traffic. This will have to change as enterprise fully embraces IPv6 and the available IPv4 addresses are exhausted, which is expected in about two years.

The Enterprise Security Group has issued its top 10 tasks for the yet-to-be-named federal cyber-security coordinator:

1. Prepare an emergency response plan in case of a cyber-attack
2. Public education on the threats and risks
3. National IDs (will never happen)
4. Watchdog role to keep policies from being politicized (we can only hope)
5. Build a skilled cyber-security workforce
6. FISMA 2.0 that focuses on  real business and security risk rather than compliance check-off boxes
7. Standardize federal privacy laws
8. Incentives for private sector security compliance
9. Unify and simplify communications (lose the acronyms)
10. Represent US cyber-security interests to the world

According to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Sun is losing $100 million a month due to delays caused by the European Commission’s anti-trust investigation of the proposed deal. Ellison also discounted rumors that MySQL will be spun off to ease concerns about the deal.

Our blogger-friend John Willis, posted his top 10 cloud denial statements. His list is on target as I’ve thought, read or heard every statement on his list. A highlighted few:

• Doesn’t it have to connect to one of those puffy diagrams in order to be a cloud?
• I thought it had to be over there, not here.
• Yeah, but I still don’t get it.
• Oh, we did this same thing back in the 90′s.

Besides reading his list, you can see him perform a catchy ditty about ScienceLogic.

As the government pushes into cloud computing, there are a number of non-technical challenges, like culture and regulation that must be overcome to make cloud computing a reality. In Washington, ownership is king and no agency wants to trust its resources to another agency. Similarly, many existing laws defining ownership by pure physical properties will need to be updated to fall in line with the shared-resources foundation of cloud computing.

“Before cloud computing can gain widespread use within the Federal government, we need to focus on important peripheral issues…”

Jon Oltsik

Finally, for all its good, it seems the Internet is more frequently causing the downfall of many. First up is the burglar who seemed a bit pre-occupied with Facebook and decided to check his status while “on the job” stealing two diamond rings. He left his account open on the victim’s computer and was easily traced back to the crime. Next up is a former IBM employee is appealing his dismissal for visiting an improper chat room during work hours, claiming that post-traumatic stress from combat in Vietnam turned him into a sex and Internet addict. FYI – Internet addiction is not recognized as a disorder by the American Psychiatric Association and is not generally covered by insurance. Also, some interesting stats on the number of Facebook fans and Tweets of government agencies.

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