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Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) on security:

Schmidt: Transparency is not necessarily the only way you achieve security. For example, part of the encryption algorithms are not typically made available to the open source community, because you don’t want people discovering flaws in the encryption.

BZZT. Wrong. Let’s hope he’s not in charge of Google’s security. Bruce Schneier is all over this one.

Over the past 1.5 years, CentreSource has become an expert LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl) development shop in the Nashville arena. In a thumbs up to the direction we’ve chosen, Venture Capitalists are hungry for LAMP oriented firms that have ASP based products.

According to Drew Clark, director of strategic insights for IBM’s venture capital group, building software using Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) is one of the key requisites for VC investment today.

Read the full article here:VCs warm to LAMP and services | The Register

A friend of ours, Jackson Miller, sent this highly interesting article our way. It touches on the points of Push, Pull, and Push/Pull when it comes to computing shifts.

Here is a small excerpt:

No. 1, the Law of Pull. That which is CHEAPER pulleth more mightily than that which is easier to use. Ease of use hath nothing to do with it. (See Law No. 2.)

Law No. 2, the Law of Push. At a certain point, an arrogant corporation can alienate its customers so much that the customers, formerly thought to be insensible sheep, suddenly become capable of amazing feats of technical prowess.

A brief update on the release of Debian 3.1 “Sarge”. Originally, Sarge was slated to release today, but:

Well, just in case it wasn’t obvious to everyone from looking at the
release-critical bug stats, we should probably come out and say it: the
the count of release critical issues affecting sarge is still going
down, but it’s not yet down to zero, which means no release this
weekend.

Looks like they are now targeting a June 6 release. Kudos to them for all the hard work on this.

Over the past year, I’ve heard about people making money in Online games. Basically, they would utilize real world skills like trend spotting, design, and actual gameplay to amass things of value within online games.

Now, I read an article that actually confirms what I’ve heard… people making as much as $100K per year playing in the MMO RPG (massively multiplayer online – Role Playing Game)

The article below brings up two thoughts:
1) This is going to be an Intellectual Property Lawyer’s worst nightmare…
2) People around the world would be smart to move to countries with lower costs of living and therefore could make their primary job to play video games… and still live prosperous.

The ever-evolving face of digital threats… BotNets are a growing risk for all those connected to the Internet.

Botnets or zombie networks are groups of computers that have been infected by malware that allow the malware to control the infected PC and use it to send spam or launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

A recent survey of CipherTrust estimated that 350,000 PCs a month are being recruited into this zombie army. So far in May, CipherTrust researchers found an average of 172,009 new zombies identified each day. Other surveys have suggested that there are millions of PCs worldwide that can generate spam or create DDoS attacks. Researchers from the Honeynet Project tracked more than 100 active botnets, including one containing 50,000 compromised “zombie” machines.

I saw an article on CNET about third world countries and their growing spam problem.

If you think your spam is bad, you should try living in some of those third world countries… where the ISP’s lack sophisticated Spam filtration products (like Swirbo) and also harbor spammers on the same networks as good customers.

In addition to clogged inboxes and wasted time, the businesses in these countries also suffer from lost bandwidth. In the US, many businesses have broadband – and the onslaught of spam is bearable in regards to their total bandwidth. This is not the case in foreign countries.

It makes me feel good that the government is actually concerned about this. As we deal with more and more customers that have their entire business & personal life stored on their computers – it’s become painfully obvious to me that there will soon be a new target for those who aim to cause damage.

Wired News: CIA: Take That, Cyberterrorism!

A news article in Wired Magazine (online) touches on Biometrics as it relates to international security. I’ve been particular fascinated with the shift in security since 9/11 – especially the surge in bio verification.

Chris posted an interesting news clip about Intel rolling out DRM (digital rights management) into their new chipset. Typically, I gloss over DRM since it doesn’t relate to CentreSource or Swirbo, but the news clip inspired the following thought:

“What motivates a firm towards innovation & new features…”

I think a majority of people would instantly say that ’sales’ to the target customer are what drives these developments… And most of the time they would be right! However, things change when you have a monopoly.