Air Force CIO lays out plan for cyber advance
by amber corrin

New requirements, new missions, new training and a new era of frugality all are playing central roles as the Air Force works with the U.S. Cyber Command as well as the other services to defend cyberspace, Lt. Gen. Michael Basla told reporters at the Pentagon on Nov. 30.

“Just like the Air Force is maturing, [Cyber Command] is maturing as well. They signed out an operational directive in April that said to the services, ‘These are the capabilities that we need to provide.’” Basla said. Those include “capabilities in support of regional combatant commands [and] capabilities in terms of areas of expertise that the Air Force might have, or the Army might have.”

That list is undergoing refinement, he said. “Given the threat, given the national imperative, what else do we need should the president and the nation call on the Department of Defense to assist?” he said, describing the criteria for revisions.

The answer to that question is one that, like the cyber threat itself, is seeing an ongoing evolution. In October, Gen. William Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command, admitted that the service’s initial approach to cyber may not have been the best, but said officials there are working to address that.

“In 2006, the Air Force published a forward-looking document on cyber, but I think we’d all agree now that we started out too big and too ambitious, so we had to narrow our definition,” Shelton said. “Just as the environment has changed, I believe our approach needs to change.”

first published week of:   12/10/2012

Amazon boosts power of rentable cloud compute and cuts prices
by jack clark

On Thursday the company cut prices in its two main data center regions and released a new range of powerful 'Standard' rentable computers, according to a post on its blog. These two announcements follow Amazon's development rhythm over the past year or so, which has seen around 10 significant announcements for the service per month. 

The two Second Generation M3 instances have more memory and computing power than M1 rentable servers, but are restricted to using Amazon's Elastic Block Store (EBS) technology by default. EBS has come in for a good deal of criticism, with a former administrator of major social site Reddit describing it as being "a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability."

“With up to 50 percent higher absolute CPU performance, these instances are optimized for applications such as media encoding, batch processing, caching, and web serving,” the company wrote in its blog post. 

Details Here

first published week of:   11/12/2012

Amazon Web Services Announces Amazon Glacier
Designed for data that is infrequently accessed, yet still important to retain for future reference
by Liz Mcmillan

“Amazon Glacier changes the game for companies requiring archiving and backup solutions because you pay nothing upfront, pay a very low price for storage, are able to scale up and down whenever needed, and AWS handles all of the operational heavy lifting required to do data retention well,” said Alyssa Henry, Vice President of AWS Storage Services, as Amazon Web Services today announced Amazon Glacier.

“Today, most businesses rely on expensive, brittle, and inflexible tape for their archiving solution. This approach requires expensive upfront payments, is difficult to operate and maintain, and leads to wasted capacity and money.” Henry added.

According to AWS, Amazon Glacier is designed “for data that is infrequently accessed, yet still important to retain for future reference.”

Examples include digital media archives, financial and healthcare records, raw genomic sequence data, long-term database backups, and data that must be retained for regulatory compliance. With Amazon Glacier, noted Henry, “customers can reliably and durably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01/GB/month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.”

Details Here

first published week of:   08/20/2012

AMD launches server processor for web-hosting providers

According to Dean Takahashi at Venturebeat.com, Advanced Micro Devices is launching a new server processor family today that targets companies that serve lots and lots of web pages to users.

The new AMD Opteron 3200 series processor family is aimed at changing the economics for single-socket servers used by dedicated web-hosting providers that operate huge data centers. AMD says its new chips offer 60 percent better performance per dollar and 19 percent less power per core.

It has enterprise–related reliability features, such as error correction code memory, and it can pay for itself in as little as seven months, or 14 percent faster than rival Intel, AMD says. Dedicated hosting providers need their data centers to become profitable faster than ever, said Patrick Patla, corporate vice president and general manager at Sunnyvale, Calif.–based AMD’s commercial business.

He said AMD is offering a server-class product at desktop prices. The launch of the new processor is part of an initiative that AMD launched in November targeting web and cloud customers. The initiative is aimed at creating servers that are densely packed with power-efficient processors. That is why AMD recently bought “micro server” company Sea Micro for $334 million.

Details Here

first published week of:   03/19/2012

Analysis: “Cybersecurity” bill endangers privacy rights

The controversy over the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act intensified on Tuesday when a White House spokeswoman warned Congress not to pass “cybersecurity”legislation without “robust safeguards to preserve the privacy and civil liberties of our citizens.” While the statement by National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden did not mention CISPA specifically, there was little doubt which legislation she was talking about.

Hayden denounced “legislation that would sacrifice the privacy of our citizens in the name of security.” This week, a broad coalition of civil liberties groups has been warning that CISPA would do just that. The legislation, which was introduced by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) late last year, is slated for a House vote next week.

The critics have a point. CISPA is a solution in search of a problem. And it threatens to undermine important privacy protections.

Details Here

first published week of:   04/16/2012

Apple Charts a New Course on Mobile Maps - Technology Review

Users of Apple’s iPhone and iPad are getting a new mapping destination.

Apple has used Google Maps since the release of the first iPhone in 2007, but today the company announced that its own mapping app will be available in the fall as part of the newest version of its mobile operating software. Apple’s senior vice president of iOS software, Scott Forstall, showed off the app, along with a slew of features new to iOS 6, during the keynote presentation that kicked off Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The announcement was widely anticipated: Apple has purchased several mapping technology companies, and taking control of mapping could open new opportunities in location-based advertising. Reclaiming such an important app also lets the company assert its dominance over its own rapidly growing mobile platform while Google's Android platform proliferates on a growing number of mobile devices.

The app, called simply Maps, was built entirely by Apple, Forstall said as he showed off colorful maps of countries including Italy, New Zealand, Singapore, and Norway.

Perhaps its most anticipated feature is Flyover, which allows users to see a crisp 3–D view of buildings. Forstall said Apple has been using planes and helicopters to capture the images necessary to build the 3-D models that appear on the map.

Details Here

first published week of:   06/11/2012

Volume 31

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