complexity

President Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell address, warned that the military-industrial complex could "endanger our liberties or democratic processes." Today WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange is warning that the surveillance-industrial complex is even more dangerous.

A set of nearly 300 documents that the document-leaking Web site published today reveals how extensive and privacy-invasive the secretive multi-billion dollar industry devoted to surveillance technology has become.

"We are in a world now where not only is it theoretically possible to record nearly all telecommunications traffic out of a country, all telephone calls, but where there is an international industry selling … Read more

Chris Hoff, a former colleague now at Juniper Systems, and a great blogger in his own right, penned a piece last week about the weak underbelly of automation: our decreased opportunity to react manually to negative situations before they become a crisis. Hoff put the problem extremely well in the opening of the post:

I'm a huge proponent of automation. Taking rote processes from the hands of humans & leveraging machines of all types to enable higher agility, lower cost and increased efficacy is a wonderful thing.

However, there's a trade off; as automation matures and feedback loops … Read more

The extended outage of Amazon Web Services' EBS storage services in one of their service "regions" the week of April 21st has triggered so much analysis--emotional and otherwise--that I chose to listen rather than speak until now. Events like this are tremendously important, not because they validate or invalidate cloud services, but because they let us see how a complex system responds to negative events.

You see, for almost four years now, I've believed that cloud computing is evolving into a complex adaptive system. Individual services and infrastructure elements within a cloud provider's portfolio are acting … Read more

I spend a fair bit of my working life meeting with people, listening to their plans for their next product, project, strategy, initiative, or campaign. My job? Review, evaluate, and give feedback. It's great when I can confirm they've got things right. Check! Good! Yep! Oh, yeah, I like that! I help confirm and build confidence in the plan.

It's a good thing I have the opportunity to be positive, because the larger and more important part of the job is decidedly less affirming: figuring out where they've gone wrong. What's missing? What's vague … Read more

GNU XaoS 3.5 is a free, open source fractal generator and "zoomer" that offers smooth, fluid navigational movement as you zoom in or out of a fractal. It includes 24 well-known fractal formulas with many possible variations in effects and appearance, but you can also use it to generate your own fractals. It offers effects like a starfield generator, embossing, motion blur, pseudo 3D mode, and even a text display.

The program's 32-bit installation executable includes the 64-bit version for recent editions of Windows like Vista and 7, both of which we used for testing. The … Read more

IBM has just released its fourth annual survey based on 1500 face-to-face interviews with global CEOs. Past studies have been rich sources of understanding the trends that company leaders are seeing shaping their businesses. The opening statement by IBM's own CEO, Samuel J. Palmisano, sets the stage for this year's study:

"[E]vents, threats and opportunities aren’t just coming at us faster or with less predictability; they are converging and influencing each other to create entirely unique situations. These firsts-of-their-kind developments require unprecedented degrees of creativity — which has become a more important leadership quality than attributes … Read more

May 6, 2010, may long be remembered as one of the most significant events in the young history of electronic trading. As has been widely reported, at about 2:15 p.m. EDT on that Thursday, several financial indexes experienced a sudden and precipitous drop, losing around 8 percent of their value at the beginning of the day in a matter of minutes. The market recovered much of that loss quickly but closed the day down overall.

While there has been no definitive cause identified for the day's events, many financial market experts have identified the increasing presence of … Read more

I know this is TLDR fodder of the highest order, but I'd like to read to you from a press release--for a security product, even. Here it goes:

The entire line of Spyrus Hydra PC USB encryption drives are invulnerable to such attacks because no password authentication values or keys are ever stored on Hydra PC devices after logoff or removal. Unlike any competing USB encryption drive, the Hydra PC reconstitutes a Master Key Encryption Key at logon using a FIPS-approved Key Derivation Function which utilizes, at a minimum, an Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) public/private key pair … Read more

In many ways, 2009 seems to be the year download-only games hit their stride. Between the iPhone and iPod Touch dominating the portable market with the ever-growing App Store; the release of the completely disc-free PSP Go; and the Nintendo DSi--which also can download games from an online store--portable gaming has started to move beyond the cartridge and disc. Even in home consoles, there's been a continuing focus on lower-cost downloadable games and DLC sold on Sony's PSN, Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade, and the Nintendo Wii's WiiWare as alternatives to pricier disc-based titles.

While download-only … Read more