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There are three competitions that make up the U.S. Cyber Challenge: CyberPatriot network defense high school competition conducted by the Air Force Association; DC3 Digital Forensics Challenge conducted by the U.S. Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center; and NetWars, a vulnerability discovery and exploitation competition conducted by the SANS Institute.

(Credit:
Center for Strategic and International Studies)

The need for more security specialists in government has been acknowledged. President Obama said in May that the U.S. government “is not as prepared” as it should be to respond to disruptions caused by Internet attacks. And last week, a study from the Partnership for Public Service concluded that shortages in federal cybersecurity workers and a lack of leadership threaten national security.

Candidates with promising skills will be invited to attend regional camps at local colleges beginning next year. The top candidates will be hired by the National Security Agency, the FBI, Defense Department, US-CERT, and the U.S. Department of Energy Laboratories.

The government is launching a talent search for students with cybersecurity skills.

“Mostly now we have people (in government) writing policies and reports about security rather than people who can do it,” said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute. “And we’re getting killed.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to be a target of Internet attacks. The latest public incident involved a series of denial of service attacks the week of July 4 that temporarily took down commercial and government Web sites in the U.S. and South Korea.

The U.S. government on Monday launched a national talent search for high school and college students interested in working in cybersecurity.

With the U.S. Cyber Challenge the goal is to find 10,000 young Americans to be “cyber guardians and cyber warriors,” according to a statement from the Center for Strategic & International Studies, which is sponsoring the event.

At one level, this shouldn’t be taken too literally. Even if an increasing number of high performance computing and high-scale Web sites add servers in this kind of quantity, most aren’t buying them actually installed in shipping containers; they’re putting them in data centers a rack at a time. And vendors are designing new server form factors to reflect this shift.

Cloud computing is one area where the story of the shipping container has particular relevance. Like the container, the basic concepts aren’t new but they are being made more relevant to a wider audience by things like network infrastructure.

Many of you are probably familiar with the computing-in-shipping-containers theme that Sun most popularized but that a variety of vendors has picked up on in various forms. The idea is that a shipping container is the largest thing that can be easily transported around the world and therefore it’s the largest unit of computing that can be practically prebuilt at the factory.

Thus, in this storyline, the shipping container represents the new increment for large-scale computing infrastructures.

Process matters. At least as important as standards was changes to the labor agreements at major ports. When containers were first introduced, existing labor contracts negated much of their economic benefit by requiring excess dockworkers or otherwise requiring processes that involved more handling than was actually necessary. (For reason of both labor negotiations and infrastructure, containerization allowed the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal to largely eclipse the New York and Brooklyn commercial port.)

And the business processes are, as always, highly relevant to the computing resources that are ultimately there simply to support them. Processes that are rooted in manual approaches that have lots of human back and forth won’t see much benefit from new technology no matter how virtualized, service-oriented, or self-service.

Standards matter. Containers have been around in various forms since at least the 1800s, beginning with the railroads. In the U.S., the container shipping industry’s genesis is usually dated to Malcom McLean in 1956. However, for about the next twenty years, many shipping companies used incompatible container sizes and corner fittings. This in turn required different equipment to load and unload and otherwise made it hard for a complete logistics system to develop. This changed around 1970 when standard size and fittings and reinforcement norms were developed (with all the political jostling between the incumbents that you’d expect).

However, a discussion with HP in the context of their ProLiant SL launch got me to thinking: Literal shipping containers aside, the evolution of containerization has a lot of interesting lessons for how technologies evolve more broadly.

Existing infrastructure matters. The size of container ships is largely constrained by the width and depth of the Panama and Suez Canals. A “Panamax” container ship is the maximum size that can go through the Panama Canal; a “Suezmax” the largest that can go through the Suez Canal. “Malaccamax” ships have the maximum draught that can traverse the Strait of Malacca. (Currently, there are bulk carriers and supertankers this large but not container ships.) In a totally different context, there’s a good argument that the Segway failed, not so much because of price or poor design, but because it wasn’t a good fit with either existing sidewalks or roads.

Standards will matter–at least to get to the point of interoperable clouds (which admittedly may not be as pressing a need as in the case of the electrical grid and the world’s logistics system).

(Credit: photohome_uk CC flickr)

As human beings we like analogies. Admittedly, we sometimes overextend them and end up obfuscating rather than clarifying. Such is arguably the case with cloud computing and the electric grid. However, a good analogy can not only make the new and unfamiliar more comprehensible but can even bring fresh insights based on history and past patterns.

Marc Levinson’s “The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger” has lots of detail on the labor and other aspects of shipping containers. 

Shipping containers in Clyde.

A new third-party offering from Jajah known as Jajah@call is expected to go into beta Thursday morning that will allow Twitter users to initiate a two-way voice chat with other users by typing “@call @username”–where “username” is someone’s Twitter ID–into any Twitter client. During the beta period, the company said, the calls will be limited to two minutes, but the company will evaluate that length during beta. However, it sees the two minute period–after which the call will end–as “the verbal equivalent of a tweet.”

Coming on the heels of the announcement earlier this week that Facebook users will now be able to communicate with each other via voice–using a third-party application from Vivox–it’s clear that there is a strong interest, among service providers, at least, in taking leading social networks beyond strictly text communications. Whether large numbers of users choose to get on board is unknown at this point, of course. And given that neither the Facebook nor the Twitter voice services are being provided by the social networks themselves means that some users will choose not to get involved for fear of privacy, stability or other concerns.

One important element of the service is that users can keep their phone numbers private, yet be able to have voice chats with just about anyone on Twitter. To be sure, since the calls are initiated by one person, the recipient may well not be online, or may choose to ignore the call if they don’t want to talk.

Still, if these third-party services end up being successful, it would be natural to expect that Facebook and Twitter may decide they need to step up and directly embed such technologies into their offerings. And there is a precedent for such a move. After Vivox began offering Second Life users a third-party voice solution, the virtual world’s publisher, Linden Lab, decided it needed to take advantage of the technology. Today, thanks to a formal partnership, Vivox’s voice service is formally integrated into Second Life.

And while it may be some time before such a thing happens with either Facebook or Twitter, or any other major social network, one would have to think that it’s only a matter of time.

According to Jajah, an Internet communications provider with tens of millions of users, the service will allow a user to place a call to any other user, so long as the second person follows the first on Twitter and both have Jajah accounts. The service is free to use and is expected to work on any Twitter-enabled device, from PCs to smart phones.

There are currently several applications that allow users to create voice-to-text Twitter posts–known as tweets–but it does not appear that anyone has yet made it possible to initiate voice communications directly between Twitter users.

Twitter users on Thursday will, for the first time, be able to make voice calls directly to each other through the microblogging service.

A 67-year-old man who has suffered from Parkinson’s disease since his early 40s has become the first person in the world to be implanted with the Brio neurostimulator, which St. Jude Medical says has just earned CE Mark approval (CE stands for Conformite Europeenne).

(Credit:
St. Jude Medical)

With the longest battery life of any rechargeable DBS device currently on the market, the Brio comes with a 10-year battery longevity approval. This means not only less replacement procedures for patients, but also a sustainable therapy with minimal recharging. The battery is charged conveniently through a portable, wireless charging system, allowing patients to multitask while recharging.

Weighing in at just 1 ounce and measuring a mere 10 millimeters thick, the Brio is the smallest, longest-lasting rechargeable deep brain stimulator (DBS) that aims to treat the symptoms of Parkinson’s in the world, according to its creator. One battery is supposed to survive a decade of recharging.

The Brio, barely larger than a typical wristwatch, is implanted near the collarbone and sends mild electrical pulses to specific targets in the brain. It is not yet approved for use in the U.S.

Illustration of a male patient with the Brio neurostimulation system for treating the symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

“Deep brain stimulation therapy is often the preferred treatment for many Parkinson’s disease patients,” says Dr. Volker Sturm, chairman of neurosurgery at the University Hospital of Cologne. “For these patients, device size and longevity are important considerations. The small size of the Brio neurostimulator is a real improvement and was a good choice for this patient.”

(Credit:
St. Jude Medical)

Parkinson’s, categorized as a movement disorder, can lead to muscle rigidity, tremors, slower physical movements, and even a total loss of physical movement. Several famous figures have suffered from the disease, including Salvador Dal?, Muhammad Ali, Pope John Paul II, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, and of course more recently, Michael J. Fox.

Sturm’s colleague, Dr. Mohammad Maarouf, implanted the Brio at the University Hospital of Cologne. Though the neurostimulator has been deemed safe in Europe, it has yet to be approved for use in the U.S. (Other existing DBS devices have U.S. approval, so the Brio is not the first of its kind, but purportedly the smallest, lightest, and longest-lasting.)

The Brio sends mild electrical pulses to specific areas in the brain, targeting and stimulating motor control structures. The neurostimulator is the device that generates the pulses; leads carry those pulses to the targets to influence the “irregular nerve signals” responsible for the symptoms of Parkinson’s.

I was mildly shocked to see these people ignore the 50 or so standard laptops behind them and focus solely on Netbooks. So, I began querying the sales guy and one of the customers. It came down to essentially two things: price and selection (surprise, surprise). Best Buy now has a large selection of Netbooks–10 or so on display. A far cry from the Best Buy display of six months ago: a single, tiny, neglected Asus Eee PC pushed into a corner.

But there is just too much marketing momentum now behind Netbooks at large PC makers–and in retail. Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Toshiba, Sony, and Acer all are pushing Netbooks. And in Japan, easily one the largest PC markets in the world, the Netbook is a hit–despite initial resistance from Japanese PC makers–for all of the same reasons cited above: small, light, inexpensive–and add fashionable. Major Japanese tech Web sites (such as ASCII) and large retailers (like Yodobashi Camera) have a significant Netbook focus now because that’s what readers and consumers are demanding.

Best Buy has a large Netbook selection

People like cute, light, and cheap–especially in a laptop. This sentiment won’t be overcome, as Intel believes, by the emerging ultrathin laptop category, which ranges from about $500 to $1,000 (formerly called CULV or consumer ultra-low-voltage). Certainly not this year. Ultrathins are not different enough in appearance from a standard laptop and not cheap enough. (And recent reports indicate that the ultrathin category is not taking off as expected.)

And I just don’t think performance is that much of an issue for many consumers. Some, of course, will return a Netbook because their expectations were too high (I heard this from a sales person at Frys Electronics), but a lot of people across all consumer segments (kids, students, business people) will continue to buy these things by the boatload (unless Intel intentionally sabotages the category–which I hope Intel is savvy enough not to do.)

(Credit:
Hewlett-Packard)

Apple’s products and marketing are good but not infallible. And the lack of a Netbook may come back to bite Apple at some point. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not next month. But maybe next year. One of the Best Buy customers eying a Netbook made a comment that was a powerful counterpoint to all the Apple Mac-PC ads. To paraphrase: “You have to pay an arm and a leg for Apple (pointing to the Apple corner), I’m trying to make a practical business decision here.”

(Credit:
Best Buy)

And I visited a second Best Buy where a sales guy gushed about Netbooks. “They’re extremely popular,” he said, adding that “almost all of my customers” just want to do e-mail and surf the Web.

Intel will never admit in a thousand years that it has created, in the Netbook, a Frankenstein monster of sorts. Intel will, of course, take credit (which it should) for the creation of a new category of computing devices, but my sense is that the company is not head over heels about the Netbook business model–and this is also a reason for Apple’s very conscious decision not to make a Netbook. And, as many people are predicting, its reason for pursuing a more upscale tablet-like touch device.

HP 'Mini' promo: more than a few of the newer Netbooks are not low quality

That is circuitous way to get to my point. The Intel Netbook is not going away and is just getting more popular as this marketing research report indicates. Apple’s Tim Cook dissed Netbooks back in April for what seemed like acceptable reasons: cheap, “junky hardware” (Cook’s words) equates to downmarket, shoddy products. But that Apple reasoning needs an update–the fall 2009 version: a lot of the newer Netbooks coming out now are not shoddy or cheap feeling. (And I am hereby updating my previous pessimistic take on Netbooks too per this post.)

Friday night at a Best Buy in Southern California–maybe not the hippest place to be, but some interesting dynamics were at work.

Intel’s sales chief, Sean Maloney, has intimated in the past that Netbooks are not huge money makers. Speaking about the expected emergence of the ultrathin laptop category back in May he said that this is “an opportunity for upsell. We don’t need to give this stuff away. The industry doesn’t need to give this stuff away. We can reach new price points and we can also get paid for it.”

A typical flow of people passed through the laptop section in the 20 minutes I was there. Toward the end, all of the remaining customers (a few men and women, each) were marveling at all the cute, inexpensive laptops. Cute, inexpensive laptops to them, Netbooks to us in the media who like cut-and-dried categories.

With so many URL shortening services out there, this was bound to happen to at least one of them: Trim is shutting down. According to a blog post by parent company Nambu Networks, it was an expensive and fruitless effort.

What the company hasn’t said: what will happen to existing Trim URLs? It’s likely that Nambu Networks hasn’t yet decided. If Trim is completely closed, that would mean that those shortened URLs would turn into broken links. It’d be possible to close it to new entries but keep existing ones, except that wouldn’t solve the financial problem.

“We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential,” the post read.

The blog post was tinged with more than a hint of bitterness. Twitter, the service that led to the explosion of URL shorteners as Web users needed to truncate lengthy addresses to fit into a 140-character space, has shown a clear preference for Trim rival Bitly. Twitter uses Bitly as its default URL shortener, and it’s even been rumored that Twitter may acquire it altogether.

Those expenses may have been particularly encumbering recently, when the service, found at Tr.im, was hit by a denial-of-service attack last week that knocked it offline.

“Twitter has all but sapped us of any last energy to double down and develop Tr.im further,” the post read. “What is the point? With Bit.ly the Twitter default, and with us having no inside connection to Twitter, Tr.im will lose over (in) the long run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future.”

One commenter on the Trim blog post suggested that perhaps the service could live on in the form of an open-source project. But for now, its fate remains up in the air.

Trendsmap gives you a birds-eye view of trending topics on Twitter, per city, region, or worldwide.

Where the site shines though, is in letting you dig even deeper by giving each city its own trends page. Here you can cruise through info boxes without first having to find each tag, as well as see all of the trending charts stacked up against one another–something I think makes for a better experience. It also collects all of the related media like photos and videos in one single section (try giving it a spin for Las Vegas).

See also Palm’s Trendtracker, which lets you see trending topics not only geography but by time of day as well. We checked it out last week.

All of this information is organized into something resembling a tag cloud, which floats around without any specific, or pinpointed location within each city. Clicking on any of them pops up a small info box that aggregates the latest tweets, local and global seven-day histories of that trend’s popularity, as well as some top-related news links that change depending on what’s trending.

One thing the service doesn’t do very well though, is serve smaller towns. This wasn’t a big deal killer for me since I’m based in San Francisco, but if you want to use it for somewhere that’s outside a major city, you’re out of luck. This may simply be a limitation of how deep the data set is, but it keeps you from seeing trends starting up in smaller towns, which can be more interesting than in major cities.

(Credit:
CNET)

Stateless Systems, the creators of BugMeNot and PDFMeNot, have a new tool called Trendsmap that hasn’t been designed to solve any productivity problems. Instead, it does just the opposite and serves as entertainment. It tracks trending Twitter topics by geographical location by combining data from Twitter’s API and What The Trend. It then sticks it onto a Google Map where users can sort by city or general region and see trending topics in real time.

Windows 7 isn’t officially out until October, but if you want to start an online backup service and make sure you can still use it once upgraded to the new operating system, Proxure has something to offer.

The KeepVault backup solution is available now and you can try it risk-free 15-day trial version here.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)

The KeepVault backup solution offers an online storage account and an easy-to-use interface to provide continuous, real-time, off-site backup for Windows computers. Apart from online storage, the software can also perform local backup to internal and external hard drives.

The company also announced a special version of KeepVault that works with Windows Home Server, a special OS from Microsoft designed specifically for network storage devices such as the HP MediaSmart LX195.

The company announced Tuesday the availability of version 3.15 of its KeepVault backup solution. The new version provides support for Windows 7 (both 64-bit and 32-bit) as well as Windows Vista and Windows XP.

Proxure offers online backup services that start at $4 per month for 40GB, which is a rather good deal. In addition, the KeepVault software can be installed on an unlimited number of computers at any location and supports an unlimited amount of users. Many other backup software programs only allow for a limited amount of computers or users. Proxure online backup also allows for failure notification via Twitter, e-mail, or SMS in case a backup job doesn’t finish properly.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET)

A smart meter on a refrigerator at GE's labs.

GE’s Consumer & Industrial division announced in October 2008 that it was developing home appliances that could ease the strain on electrical grids by coordinating with a grid’s off-peak hours to perform flexible functions.

Previously, GE began testing its smart appliances in select homes in Louisville, Ky., in conjunction with the Louisville Gas and Electric Company.

The two-year pilot project with GE appliances will include refrigerators, stoves, and European-style washer/dryer machines that run on 220volt/50HZ platforms and will be installed in 10 residences.

Abu Dhabi’s planned green community, Masdar City, will be testing General Electric’s smart appliances in a handful of residences and coordinating them with its power grid, GE said Monday.

A refrigerator equipped with a “smart” meter, for example, communicates with the local power utility. That refrigerator then waits to run its automatic defrost cycle until it has received a signal from the electrical grid that it’s an off-peak period.

The installation, to be completed in early 2010, will include a communication system between the appliances and Masdar City’s utility grid that will allow the appliances to transmit real-time data and run nonessential functions during off-peak usage hours. Since Masdar City is not scheduled to be fully inhabited until 2013, the city’s grid will simulate peak usage strains in order to test the system.

Masdar City is under construction in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. It aims to be the first carbon-neutral and zero-waste city. It’s also home to the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology. The post-graduate research center, a collaborator with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began offering courses and research facilities in alternative energy and sustainable technology for graduate students in September.

Gmail outages hit Google itself sometimes, providing extra incentive to improve reliability. One company spokesman, Adam Kovacevich, said on Twitter, “Gmail down (for Googlers too).”

On the Google Apps status dashboard, the company said at 7:29 a.m. PDT that it was aware of the problem. However, using IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) to access e-mail through software such as Outlook or Thunderbird still works, the company said.

Updated 9:15 a.m. PDT - Many users are reporting that their e-mail is back to normal, but there are still problems with Gmail contacts. Google posted the following advisory at 8:29 a.m. PDT.

Updated 10:10 a.m. PDT - It’s now safe to return to your computer, according to Google. “The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.”

Updated 9:54 a.m. PDT - Google asked for more time before it feels ready to declare an all-clear. “We are continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by September 24, 2009 10:30:00 AM UTC-7 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem.”

Google had Gmail outages in February, April, and very widely on September 1.

Gmail was working for me Thursday morning, but slowly and without access to my contacts at 8 a.m. PDT. By 8:13 a.m., it was behaving properly.

“The Gmail issue should now be resolved for most of our users. There still might be issues with your contacts. For Gmail users: Use www.google.com/contacts to access your contacts For Google Apps Customers: www.google.com/contacts/a/yourdomain-name.com.”

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Even a small subset can be a lot of people, though, as carping on Twitter indicates.

The Google Apps status dashboard flagged the Gmail problem Thursday morning.

Tom Krazit contributed to this report.

Gmail was unavailable Thursday morning for what Google said was a “small subset of users,” the latest outage from a company that prides itself in running advanced computing systems.