Posts Tagged ‘Cloud computing’

Internet content filtering in Australia

Friday, April 16th, 2010

In communications, speed and cost are synonymous. Want more bandwidth? It’s going to cost you. It’s the same in computing. Want to see less of the hour-glass? Get a faster processor. So when we consider what the Australian Content Filter is going to cost we can quantify it in speed and dollars. Internet entrepreneur Martin Rushe reports

Australian users pay in speed, potentially getting a slower Internet service. But who pays the dollars to install and operate the filtering system? The Australian Government are going to fund administrative aspects. Where will it get the money? Clearly from Australian users. The rest, the Government hopes, will be foisted onto the ISPs. Where will they get the money? Again: Australian users. Can you see a theme developing?

Last year, in an effort to quantify the speed cost, the Government tasked Enex Testlabs, a private company, to test a range of content filtering technologies. The results, championed by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE), provided, at least to the Department’s mind, conclusive proof that the content filter would have little or no impact on speed for Australian end users.

And you have to admit, the results look pretty compelling: -

• Speed degradation of < 3%

• 100 per cent blocking accuracy

• 0% incidence of blocking sites incorrectly

But dig deeper and it appears the Department may have done a little content filtering of its own. The appendices to the report, provided separately, shows that tests were run at a maximum speed of 8Mbps. The National Broadband Network, Senator Conroy’s other pet project, is going to run at 100Mbps, namely twelves times faster. Some might argue this is like testing your drains with a pipette.

Some of the speed tests were conducted using two ISPs. One has since leaked that fifteen people used the filter concurrently. If we imagine the other ISP funnelled fifteen people into it too, does that mean the filter was put through its paces by as many as thirty people at the same time?

Admittedly, this was a first pass at bottoming out the speed costs of the filter. One imagines more comprehensive tests are to follow. But it’s premature for the DBCDE to be pointing to these results as the basis for an argument.

Another flaw clearly acknowledged by Enex in its report is the ease of circumventing the filter. One possible method is to use a ‘proxy’. Proxies allow you to appear as someone, and more specifically somewhere, else. When you specify a proxy server your internet session appears to originate from the proxy and not from you. Pick a proxy outside Australia and the filter will ignore you.

If you would like to see how easy it is, whatever you do, don’t try this at home:-

Step 1: Type “open proxy” into Google.

Step 2 : Copy any of the open proxy addresses into the proxy settings of your browser.

Step 3: Adopt your smuggest tone and call Senator Conroy’s office to tell him you have just beaten his content filtering system.

To be fair, when you call Mr Conroy you won’t be telling him anything he doesn’t already know. His department acknowledges that a ‘technically competent user’ can circumvent filtering. But the instructions above do lower the bar somewhat on technical competency.

Another thing to avoid when you’re not following these instructions, is picking a proxy in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, China or any of those other countries with which we have a converging Internet filtering policy. Their filtering systems may be even more severe than ours.

Finally, when we talk about ‘beating the filter’ we must consider who is beating it and for what purpose. Consumers of content may wish to beat the filter to access restricted material and conversely providers of restricted material will be seeking to make their content available. You will recall these content providers are defined via the so-called blacklist, the list of restricted web addresses used by the filter.

If the blacklist is to be implemented at the ISP level, clearly the ISPs must have access to it. The FAQs associated with the Enex report state the Government’s intention to solve this potentially hazardous exchange by passing the blacklist between stakeholders as a secret and encrypted file.

Which is where Barbara Streisand enters the equation.

The Streisand Effect is a law of the Internet which states, and I paraphrase because it is highly technical, that if you wish to publicise something to the absolute maximum and involve the whole Internet community who otherwise would have shown indifference – make it a secret.

Barbara coined the phrase when she filed a lawsuit against some fellow who audaciously photographed one of her homes (in his defence, he was passing overhead on a plane). News of the lawsuit was met with general indifference. Until Barbara tried to hush it up and then, Yentl! It became the biggest story on the net.

So I hope that encryption is good, because when the blacklist comes out the world’s hackers will be putting on extra coffee.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in BIG PICTURE, EMERGING IDEAS | No Comments »

Connect me

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Glenn Wightwick manages 600 scientists, most of them smarter than he is. As chief technologist and director of the IBM Australia Development Laboratory, he oversees projects as varied as huge space telescopy, enterprise collaboration technology, and the instrumentation of our environment. Interview and podcast by Mike Hanley.

BUSINESS21C: Where do you get inspiration in terms of managing your people? Clearly you’re managing a large number of people, most of whom are likely smarter than you.

WIGHTWICK: It’s absolutely true. The people I manage tend to be very creative types, deeply technical and very interested in exploring all sorts of different technologies and ideas. I get an enormous amount of my inspiration from just being part of that team.

I was in Perth recently with one of our teams, whose background and area of expertise is developing software for our mainframe. Our mainframe in IBM traces its history back to the 1960s, but it’s been evolved and modernised. The discussion I had with our team was quite inspirational. They’d come together and brainstormed for about half the day and came up with 14 or 15 ideas for potential projects to do interesting extensions and development, and new technologies, new ideas on the mainframe platform. Most of my time was just spent listening to the team, and they came up with some wonderful, different approaches.

BUSINESS21C: How does IBM direct the efforts of its research? How does it decide which areas look promising and which ones, not so much?

WIGHTWICK: We have a global innovation management system that has developed over the decades. It is a huge undertaking in itself. Thirty or 40 years ago, we had a more linear technology development process, in which we would understand a particular key trend or make some sort of observation about a key trend, assemble a team of people around it, think about the business opportunity that might evolve, plan a development project and program around that, and go off and execute that; then, five years later, bring some sort of product to market.

These days, things are happening in a far more organic fashion with inputs and advances and inspiration coming from all sorts of places. IT has become so pervasive that you and me at home can create a new idea and take that to market tomorrow. As a consequence we have to be far faster and more nimble in terms of thinking about where we get to and where we need to drive things. So we developed this global innovation management system that has many different elements to it. We have global innovation outlooks that are deep studies in important areas within society where information technology has a significant part to play.

We also have an IBM Academy of Technology, which is modelled on the US National Academy of Science and Engineering. You have these sets of programs that all contribute perspectives, and that gets integrated both from the ground up and from the top down, through mechanisms that ultimately lead us to the specific investments we make.

BUSINESS21C: IBM is pushing the vision of the Smarter Planet. What does that actually mean, and what does it mean for the nature of technology development and how society achieves its longer-term goals?

WIGHTWICK: A couple of years ago, our Global Innovation System observed increased instrumentation, with a lot of sensors and actuators being infused into all sorts of different places. A lot of the devices we carry and appliances we have at home now have computers inside them. Also, a lot of wireless networks are being set up, and not just in the home but in all sorts of interesting places – some of them in the environment. We’re seeing a range of different environmental sensors being deployed, and the sensor network is being used in rainforests and all sorts of interesting places.

As a consequence of that, we recognise that there is this opportunity to interconnect all of those systems and try and make sense of information flowing from them. We describe this as the concept of instrumentation. Interconnection is not just the physical network connections but all of the information technology standards that allow you to integrate information from all these different instruments. Probably the most interesting part as far as we’re concerned is the insider intelligence that can be gained as a consequence of all of that information flowing together.

One of the things we’ve done in response to that is to focus very much on what we’re calling business analytics and optimisation.

From a business or organisational perspective, how do you make sense of all of the information that’s flowing to you from this range of different instruments and systems? We’re seeing a substantial interest in that area, and we’ve been making a number of different investments in terms of developing technology in that space.

BUSINESS21C: Can you give us some examples of where this is happening?

WIGHTWICK: I’ll give you an example from home. People are interested in reducing their carbon footprint. So we’re starting to see pilot projects – some of them driven by government, some of them driven by utilities – that provide instrumentation to measure the amount of electricity use in your home. For example, I have a meter that connects to my incoming electricity cables and measures in real time the amount of electricity I’m using. I can alter the pattern of behaviour around the house to reduce my electricity usage as a consequence of that simple instrumentation.

Electricity companies are interested in helping people reduce their electricity usage but they also have a challenge in terms of the increased amount of electricity being used and how they can manage that efficiently across their grids. We’re working with Energy Australia doing instrumentation. They’re deploying it and we’re building some of the back-end systems to actually instrument their transmission and distribution network. They have a plan to deploy about 12,000 of these sensors into their transmission distribution network to help monitor their operation in real time.

BUSINESS21C: So it goes from the consumer level all the way through to the wholesale, power-generation level?

WIGHTWICK: Right, but all sorts of value can flow from doing that. You can start to have far more effective network planning. Now that more electricity is being generated by solar panels or wind turbines, you need to be able to take that into account as you plan and operate a network in real time. All sorts of benefits can flow as a consequence of this instrumentation. The grand vision would be, potentially, to be able to create a very smart city – if we could help analyse patterns of people travelling, transport, major events that are on, energy usage, the weather. All of those things coming together could help us make a much smarter, more efficient urban environment.

BUSINESS21C: How do you see social technologies changing the nature of organisations?

WIGHTWICK: I think one of the first observations is that there is no universal set of technologies or system that meets the needs of all sorts of different users. We expect to see people collaborating and using a range of different technologies. Sometimes that can be driven by generational issues. A lot of people are more comfortable with email. Others focus very much on instant messaging or using various social networks – Facebook and so on – to communicate. I think we’ll continue to see an evolution of those. Twitter is finding great traction in certain areas. So I think we’ll continue to see this richness and diversity of collaboration technologies. What’s interesting to see is how different organisations exploit those for significant value. We, in fact, have a number of experiments going in which we’re using social networking technology to support teams collaborating right around the world. A lot of our development activity is done in a network of development labs that are located in multiple time zones. And we have our own internal version [of Facebook] we call Beehive. It is finding great traction because teams can communicate; they can leave messages for each other and they can do it in such a way that everybody who is part of that team can contribute and interact.

BUSINESS21C: How do you see the migration to ‘the cloud’? Is it inevitable?

WIGHTWICK: I think of a cloud as being the provision of IT services across a network such that the user of those services can get access to as little or as many resources as they need, without having to be burdened by the overhead and management and operation and provision of those sorts of services. The Google infrastructure or people like Amazon have an elastic computing cloud: they’re examples of external or public clouds.

Increasingly, we are seeing the development of private clouds, which deliver the same sort of value in terms of IT services, flexibility, elasticity, lower cost. Ultimately, the private clouds and the public clouds intersect, because you might use the public cloud offering to supplement resources for your private cloud, as appropriate. So this whole field of cloud computing is growing enormously and I absolutely see significant value being created and delivered to organisations [through it].

BUSINESS21C: If you could recommend one simple technology that would change the way people look at things, what might that be?

WIGHTWICK: It’s absolutely evident that mobile computing is going to continue to revolutionise the way we work. Just look at smartphones and their power in terms of integrating a range of different applications: collaboration tools, email, messaging, GPS, cameras, music players, creation of content. These are incredibly powerful devices. Their potential impact on the many billions of people in the world without access to fixed-wire networks who suddenly have mobile communications rolled out in their areas will be phenomenal.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in BIG PICTURE | No Comments »

Google Wave: Collaboration, synchronisation, design thinking

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Google have tried to reinvent email from the ground up. The resulting technology just might provide the basis of twenty-first century collaboration. Business21C Information Designer Scott David reviews Google Wave.

googlewave1r2

Google Wave is a communication sharing and interaction platform, writes Scott David, Business Information Designer at Business21C. It is still a little mysterious whilst in its development pre-release cycle, yet a lot of people are excited for a good reason – it is viewed as the future of internet-based collaborative communication. In essence, Google Wave is equal parts a technology and a vision, which can enable an even more interconnected experience for friends, a more open and collaborative way ahead for the knowledge-based future of business, and a multi-user environment for developers of hosted applications and games.

The technology

As a technology, much of ‘what it is’ is highly specialist. Under the simple interface is an extremely sophisticated and detailed synchronisation infrastructure, with version control; instant messaging; online document sharing; custom gadgets; buddy lists and real-time conversations. And as with other Google apps, like Google Docs or Google Mail, it is a hosted service, which holds all user and document data online – making the ‘waves’ available to any machine or device that logs on via a modern browser.

What is new and unique about Google Wave, and what’s not been done before because of the mind-boggling level of complexity, is the creation of the Google Wave Federation Protocol and the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol which allows users to keep all of the changes in step in real time. If you imagine any number of people in any number of locations, connected to any number of wave servers, making any number of simultaneous edits or additions at any place within any document or custom gadget, and able to look back to any previous moment-by-moment version – you can imagine the order of magnitude this complexity computes to.

Google Wave doesn’t only run as an application with its own interface and tools. A wave can add its collaborative communication method into blogs, or other websites to replace the postings there, turning them into more instantaneous living feedback environments. And as an open source code project, any business who wishes to install their own corporate, firewall-protected wave servers for internal collaborative communications can do so.

The vision

The best way to start thinking about Google Wave’s potential is how its creators first did – with a determination that email is an old form of communication, one which is increasingly out of step with the social media revolution and its methods of collaborative interaction. Every day, personal and business use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Docs, Twitter, Skype and Yammer reveal that email has become one of many mediums which serve up specific communication problems. By the time an email CC and Fwd chain has extended to a group, and the reply quotes are 10 deep, the communication model it was based on starts to break apart. Email lacks the extensible workflow process to be a great collaborative tool – but Google Wave can be.

Google describes it as “equal parts conversation and document”, and as being a “new model for communication and collaboration on the web” – so it enables any number of people to come together, (as a group, on instant messages (IM), documents, email-type messages, and other social media,) in real time, through any modern browser-enabled device. It is a fluid multi-user, overlapping communication medium. But it doesn’t stop there, Google Wave can also be integrated into corporate environments, websites, extranets, and have custom created gadget applications dropped into waves.

The business wave

The Google Wave vision is actually in step with an emergent shift in authorship and document ownership, which will bring about a new way of thinking about collaborative communication. This will align very well with current trends in the business world. Knowledge capital and the harnessing of collective intelligence, even across different geographies, has been a growth area for many years. Corporate extranets, hosted web services, online meeting tools, and strong search and categorisation tools have been a mainstay of IT departments for a decade.

As with other social software environments, it will ultimately be the huge global developer base that will revolutionize the potential of this technology as they begin creating their own applications to run within Google Wave. Games; spell-checkers; real-time translation engines; mapping; location-aware collaborative shopping; and other as yet unimagined solutions will emerge.

Even before Google Wave is out of preview release, companies such as SAP, Salesforce.com and Mingle are developing workflow Gadgets that link into their own products and services. For SAP that means collaborative business process modeling, to reach mutually diagrammed and signed off solutions, between people across several company divisions with distinct specialist knowledge. For Mingle, Google Wave offers the next level of participation for their project management solution.

And to take the group communication up one notch further, Google have also announced their purchase of Gizmo5. This will add a VoIP service with landline and mobile gateway, to rival Skype, into the braided world of waves.

The rise of the robots

With collaboration, also comes complexity, and new data management and communication challenges and opportunities. Assistive ‘robots’ already manage and redirect customer service traffic for our telephone equiries. These robots can be dropped into waves to perform the same kinds of assistance online, redirecting unresolved issues to humans – which is what Salesforce.com have now created. Other robots available now include real-time translation engines and highly context-aware spell-checkers.

As more businesses and application developers see the opportunities that collaborative communication can offer, we will see a rise in assistive robots in our everyday lives. The emergence of Google Wave may well become one of the prime change agents for this emergent trend.

googlewave2r2

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in BIG PICTURE, EMERGING IDEAS | No Comments »

Outsource to the cloud: Lose the IT department

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

Information technology will soon be like any other utility – supplied by dedicated providers who simply charge you for what you use, rather than by an entire in-house department of boffins who cost you a fortune, says Julian Edwards.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, as large scale manufacturing and production were spreading across the newly industrialised world, a key function of every large company was the generation and management of power.

Before the establishment of a national grid with centralised power stations and centrally managed power functions (backup, recovery, maintenance) each company needed to ensure it had the wherewithal to ensure power to its factories.  They had to own their own generators, and employ people to run and maintain them to ensure constant and consistent power was supplied to the factory.

Over time this function was “outsourced” to specialist companies whose job was to provide power to the factory.  This occurred to such an extent that a critical business resource, power, became supplied through a “socket in the wall”.

Now think about the 21st century. Nearly all businesses in the 21st century have a function called IT.  For an increasing number of businesses this is a critical aspect to the functioning of the business.

Over the years the IT function has grown more complex as business users armed with PCs and mobile devices use a wider range of software to do their everyday business. Applications as simple as email, office programs (like Microsoft’s Word and Excel), and more complex ERP applications  (such as SAP or Oracle Financials) are now standard tools of many businesses.

With the increasing number of computer systems comes an increasing complexity of supporting functions for the IT department to manage. For example, managing backup and disaster recovery, managing network performance and security, managing upgrades of applications and so on.  This complexity of functions requires software, hardware and people to ensure everything works in the IT function.

Imagine now the equivalent of the “socket in the wall” for computing. What does this look like? Well, you are most likely already using it in some form – the internet.  The internet represents a set of computing resources that are publicly available through a “socket in the wall”.  Often this socket in the wall is only used for information – presenting information about the business or collecting information from others (Google search, for instance). However, it is increasingly being used for doing business, from undertaking business transactions online, establishing and managing relationships with customers and partners or some other form of business interaction.

These more complex transactions often require the business to have a full set of computing resources of their own – their own computers, networks, software, data centres, IT staff and so on. It’s like a 19th century factory owner understanding that electricity rather than water power is the way of the future, but then building their own power station rather than connecting to the power grid.

In more recent times this concept of utility computing, which conceptually has been around for some time, has re-emerged under the name “cloud computing”. Cloud computing is the name given to a set of computing resources that exist “out there in the internet” (the internet has typically been represented by a cloud symbol).  Cloud computing resources can be purchased on a pay-for-use basis like other utilities (gas and electricity, for instance). In the case of computing resources the units are things like storage space (gigabytes), processing units (like CPU transactions), access to software programs and so on.

This cloud computing model means there is no need for each business to build its own power station – they simply connect to the grid and pay for what they use. The result is no more IT department. Rather a service provider – like and electricity company – that manages the IT functions and services required by the business.

Of course, like many things, it’s not always that simple – but this is more a matter of experience and the establishment of business processes than it is a technical issue.  There certainly are technical issues such as security, performance and so on.  But these are well on their way to being solved.

So when you next consider your company budget and look at the IT department and IT spend – consider the analogy of the 19th century factory owner and power supply. Do you want to build your own power station or would you rather connect to the grid and get on with business?  Even if the time is not right, the speed of progress in this area means you should be investigating the impacts now – it may give you a competitive advantage and at the very least you don’t want to be left behind!

Tags: , , ,
Posted in BIG PICTURE, EMERGING IDEAS | No Comments »