Bringing it all together — distributed analysis with distributed data
by Dale Honeycutt

Recently, we were contacted by a Bureau of Antiquities and Archeology (BAA) of a Mediterranean country about issues they were having solving a classic GIS overlay problem. The BAA is responsible for the inventory and protection of archeological sites within their country. Many of these sites are on private land parcels and the BAA needs basic information about these parcels on a daily basis, such as ownership and status (whether the parcel is being sold, subdivided, or permitted for construction). The parcel database is maintained by the Land Survey department.

Both the BAA and the Land Survey use ArcGIS to maintain their databases, and both use ArcGIS for Server to disseminate information. There are approximately 25,000 archeology sites and 800,000 parcels.

To illustrate the problem, I concocted some data, illustrated below. The Sites layer is the BAA data. Each site has unique primary key (for example, ‘Ar_8496’) used to relate to other tables maintained by the BAA. The vast majority of sites are simple rectangles as illustrated below. Parcels also have a unique primary key (for example, ‘p844’) and an additional STATUS attribute that describes the current state of the parcel. The BAA is particularly interested in any parcel that is for sale, in escrow, or has a request for subdivision. As mentioned, I concocted this data and attributes—the actual attributes are far more complex, but, in essence, they boil down to a primary key and a parcel status.

Details Here

first published week of:   09/17/2012

Can a Smartphone Replace a Dedicated GPS?

How accurate can a smartphone GPS be?

Is a smartphone now good enough to replace a dedicated GPS receiver in the field?

These two questions have come up numerous times this past semester. Saratoga Springs is in the process of working on a tree survey and the GIS Center has been doing some minor supporting work. Since most people don’t own a dedicated GPS unit, tree surveyors were curious to know if a smartphone would be sufficient. This piqued [our] interest, as it could make our work easier if students could use their phones in the North Woods or around campus to collect location data.

To answer this we conducted a simple experiment. To begin, [we] used two Garmin GPSmap60CSx, a Verizon iPhone4S, and an AT&T iPhone 4S. Walking around a loop on campus, we recorded waypoints at known locations that were visible in satellite imagery and aerial photos. We loaded these waypoints into Arc Map, registered the actual locations, and then measured the relative error of the GPS units and the iPhones. Here are the waypoints, overlaid on the imagery layer of campus. The canonical location is in blue, the GPS units are in red, and the iPhones are in green.

The short analysis is that iPhones are still worse than a dedicated GPS, but not that much worse. For general positions, an iPhone is perfectly sufficient if you are fine with single–digit meter errors. If you want to be within a meter or two, a GPS is the best bet

Details Here

first published week of:   04/02/2012

Can NSA be trusted to oversee public networks?

One of the debates in cybersecurity right now — one of many — is who should be in charge of overseeing the security of privately owned critical infrastructure. That role now nominally belongs to the Homeland Security Department by virtue of a patchwork of executive order and policy, but with little legislative authority.

Some argue that the job should go to the National Security Agency, which has been in charge of securing government communications and snooping on foreign communications since before there was an Internet. They have the expertise, the argument goes.

Others are wary of inviting a military agency charged with foreign spying into our domestic networks. Without public oversight of NSA operations, that is a valid fear.

Details Here

first published week of:   03/05/2012

CIOs and CSOs Have a Costly Disconnect
Companies stand to lose millions when CIO-CSO priorities aren’t in sync
by george hulme

When it comes to securing business-technology systems, CIOs face a challenge that won’t go away.

The problem isn’t necessarily new attack techniques, insecure software or even the latest government regulations. Rather, it’s the challenge of seeing eye-to-eye with the CSO about how much security is enough.

The tenth annual Global Information Security Survey, conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers and CIO’s sister publication, CSO magazine, found that many of the 12,052 business and technology execs surveyed think that an overall lack of security leadership remains a serious obstacle to getting CIOs and CSOs on the same page, and others feel they lack an effective information security strategy.

Consider this: Only a third of respondents said security policies were tightly aligned with business goals, and 46 percent said they were only somewhat aligned.

With CIOs, business executives and IT security teams misaligned, it’s next to impossible to build a consistent, sustainable security and risk management program that is capable of stopping the highly intelligent, motivated adversaries organizations face today.

This lack of cohesiveness between executive and security teams is also a large part of why so many believe that IT security gets insufficient capital and operating budget, says Jayson Street, CIO at Stratagem 1 Solutions, a security services provider.

“Much of this disconnect falls at the feet of the IT security profession,” Street says. “It is IT security that, too often, is failing the business. We don’t communicate risk well enough, and why the risk is worth mitigating.”

Frank Cervone, vice chancellor for information services and CIO at Purdue University Calumet, says many security professionals focus more on specific risks and not on how those risks stack up against other pressing issues. “There is a difference in scope as to what the CIO has to look at as opposed to the CSO. The CSO doesn’t always see the larger issues and needs to do a better job relating IT risks to overall business risk,” says Cervone.

Details Here

first published week of:   11/12/2012

Cloud Computing:How it Is Forcing IT Evolution

To say cloud computing is having a dramatic effect on IT is an understatement. The capability and agility of the cloud is forcing a rapid evolution. Just as in living ecosystems, IT professionals who fail to adapt will, inevitably, dwindle into extinction.

Details Here

first published week of:   03/05/2012

Critical bug reported in Oracle servers

There is a critical remotely exploitable vulnerability in all of the current versions of the Oracle database server that can enable an attacker to intercept traffic and execute arbitrary commands on the server. The bug, which Oracle reported as fixed in the most recent Critical Patch Update (CPU), is only fixed in upcoming versions of the database, not in currently shipping releases, and there is publicly available proof–of–concept exploit code circulating. The vulnerability lies in the TNS Listener service, which on Oracle databases functions as the service that routes connection requests from clients to the server itself. A researcher said he discovered the vulnerability several years ago and then sold the details of the bug to a third-party broker, who reported it to Oracle in 2008. Oracle credited the researcher for reporting the bug in its April CPU, but he said in a post on the Full Disclosure mailing list the week of April 23 that the flaw was not actually fixed in the current versions of the Oracle database server.

Details Here

first published week of:   04/30/2012

Volume 31

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