Why Enterprise Software will hit a Wall When Moving to the Cloud
by david linthicum

We have a crisis afoot in the world of cloud computing. It’s not cloud outages that cause a reliability crisis. It’s not looming security breaches. It’s the fact that enterprise software providers will hit a wall when they move to cloud computing, and I’m pretty sure they don’t know it yet.

At issue is the fact that most enterprise software providers, including big CRM and ERP systems, won’t find an easy path to the cloud and their users will pay for it. Here’s why, and how you can mediate your risks.

The core problem is around architectural limitations that are built into the core products, which are largely on-premise software systems that are decades old. Unlike the larger cloud computing providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Rackspace, which are purpose-built around the model of a cloud, existing enterprise software is locked into older structures and architecture that will severely limit that software’s ability to support features that are expected in cloud-based technologies.

The heart of the problem is how traditional enterprise software deals with multi-tenancy and elastic scalability.

Details Here

first published week of:   11/19/2012

Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger
Thanks to real-world data, the keys to your digital kingdom are under assault.
by Dan Goodin

In late 2010, Sean Brooks received three e-mails over a span of 30 hours warning that his accounts on LinkedIn, Battle.net, and other popular websites were at risk. He was tempted to dismiss them as hoaxes—until he noticed they included specifics that weren't typical of mass-produced phishing scams. The e-mails said that his login credentials for various Gawker websites had been exposed by hackers who rooted the sites' servers, then bragged about it online; if Brooks used the same e-mail and password for other accounts, they would be compromised too.

The warnings Brooks and millions of other people received that December weren't fabrications. Within hours of anonymous hackers penetrating Gawker servers and exposing cryptographically protected passwords for 1.3 million of its users, botnets were cracking the passwords and using them to commandeer Twitter accounts and send spam. Over the next few days, the sites advising or requiring their users to change passwords expanded to include Twitter, Amazon, and Yahoo.

"The danger of weak password habits is becoming increasingly well-recognized," said Brooks, who at the time blogged about the warnings as the Program Associate for the Center for Democracy and Technology. The warnings, he told me, "show [that] these companies understand how a security breach outside their systems can create a vulnerability within their networks."

The ancient art of password cracking has advanced further in the past five years than it did in the previous several decades combined. At the same time, the dangerous practice of password reuse has surged. The result: security provided by the average password in 2012 has never been weaker.

Details Here

first published week of:   08/27/2012

Wikipedia of Maps Challenges Google
Google starts charging for its maps, and developers jump ship

OpenStreetMap is exactly what its name implies—a wiki of maps and location data to which anyone can contribute, just like Wikipedia. With the help of some deep-pocketed boosters, including MapQuest and Microsoft, it’s suddenly a legitimate challenger to the hegemony of Maps.Google.Com.

Google announced two months ago that it was going to start charging the heaviest users of its Maps API, which countless sites use to geo–locate their data. Then its sales team fanned out to contact those websites, which Google publicly estimated would represent only 0.35 percent of the users of its Maps API.

In what seems to have been a surprise to everyone, the prices that Google asked of its heaviest Maps users apparently dwarf the revenue of at least some of those sites, which is leading to a very public move away from Google and to OpenStreetMap.

Ed Freyfogle, cofounder of UK property search engine Nestoria, writes in a post on his company’s switch from Google to OpenStreetMap that despite its being run almost entirely on volunteer labor, and as a nonprofit, the free (as in software) alternative to Google Maps is every bit the equal of what the search giant has managed to assemble.

OpenStreetMap’s great strength is that anyone can contribute. Since the project started over 500,000 people around the world have signed up to do just that, often going into insane levels of detail. Fixes can be added and reflected in the maps very quickly. It is a fundamentally different model than the traditional “only and expert from the government can come make the map” model.

It probably doesn’t hurt that the price Google quoted for Nestoria to continue using its Maps API on just one of the eight websites it runs “would have bankrupted our company.”

Details Here

first published week of:   01/09/2012

Windows 8 Beta, according to David Pogue

Microsoft released the free public beta of Windows 8. You can download this Consumer Preview right now. (It’s a very far cry from the crude early version released last September.)

It’s a huge radical rethinking of Windows — and one that’s beautiful, logical and simple. In essence, it brings the attractive, useful concept of Start–screen tiles, currently available on Windows Phone 7 phones, to laptops, desktop PC’s and tablets.

I’ve been using Windows 8 for about a week on a prototype Samsung tablet. And I have got to tell you, I’m excited.

For two reasons. First, because Windows 8 works fluidly and briskly on touch screens; it’s a natural fit. And second, it attains that success through a design that’s all Microsoft’s own. This business of the tiles is not at all what Apple designed for iOS, or that Google copied in Android.

Here’s how I described the design (called Metro) when I reviewed Windows Phone 7. All of it applies to Windows 8:

Details Here

first published week of:   03/12/2012

Working with HTML5 Map Tag
by Neeraj Chaurasia

This article will cover the basic idea of HTML 5 tag to display the image based maps. tag uses the tag and tag to implement the maps.The tag is supported by all major browsers.

Tag:

The tag is a image-map with clickable area’s. An image is used to display the map and map tag is used to display the areas on map-image. Image tag provide a property called “usemap“ which correlate map with an image. Note that map tag does not display any image while tag is required here to display the map-image.

Map tag have areas define inside. Each area has corresponding clickable links associated with. You can define the different types of shape in different areas. For example you can define the rectangle, Circle, Polygon.

The area is defined by

• rect: left, top, right, bottom
• circle: center-x, center-y, radius
• poly: x1, y1, x2, y2, ...

first published week of:   08/27/2012

Worst Security Snafus of 2012, So Far

Could things really be this bad? From the embarrassing hack of a conversation between the FBI and Scotland Yard to a plethora of data breaches, security snafus have ruled the first half of 2012. Here's a look at some of the worst snafus month-by-month.

Details Here

first published week of:   07/16/2012

Volume 31

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