We had an email recently from an observer "curious as to why the webcam that was inside the shop/bar is no longer there, or at least, functional". The email was from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in the United States.

When we replied that it was simply a short term technical problem, we asked why on earth they could be interested in the comings and goings of a small Distillery off the West Coast of Scotland. Were there secret manoeuvres taking place in Loch Indaal, or even a threat of terrorists infiltrating the mainland via Islay?

The answer we received was even more surreal. Evidently the mission of the DTRA is to safeguard the US and its allies from weapons of mass destruction -chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high explosives. The department which contacted the Distillery deals with the implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, going to sites to verify treaty compliance. Funnily enough chemical weapon processes look very similar to the distilling process and as part of training there is a visit to a brewery for familiarization with reactors, batch processors and evaporators. As they said, it just goes to show how "tweaks" to the process flow or equipment, can create something very pleasant (whisky) or deadly (chemical weapons).

As they say: "In the post-Cold War environment, a unified, consistent approach to deterring, reducing and countering weapons of mass destruction is essential to maintaining our national security. Under DTRA, Department of Defense resources, expertise and capabilities are combined to ensure the United States remains ready and able to address the present and future WMD threat. We perform four essential functions to accomplish our mission: combat support, technology development, threat control and threat reduction. These functions form the basis for how we are organized and our daily activities. Together, they enable us to reduce the physical and psychological terror of weapons of mass destruction, thereby enhancing the security of the world's citizens. At the dawn of the 21st century, no other task is as challenging or demanding".

The announcement is of course Good News — because once the PCeU is up and running next Spring, it should plug (to the limited extent that £2 million a year can plug) the “level 2″ eCrime gap that I’ve written about before. viz: that SOCA tackles “serious and organised crime” (level 3), your local police force tackles local villains (level 1), but if criminals operate outside their force’s area — and on the Internet this is more likely than not — yet they don’t meet SOCA’s threshold, then who is there to deal with them?

In particular, the PCeU is envisaged to be the unit that deals with the intelligence packages coming from the City of London Fraud Squad’s new online Fraud Reporting website (once intended to launch in November 2008, now scheduled for Summer 2009).

Of course everyone expects the website to generate more reports of eCrime than could ever be dealt with (even with much more money), so the effectiveness of the PCeU in dealing with eCriminality will depend upon their prioritisation criteria, and how carefully they select the cases they tackle.

Nevertheless, although the news this week shows that the Home Office have finally understood the need to fund more ePolicing, I don’t think that they are thinking about the problem in a sufficiently global context.

A little history lesson might be in order to explain why.

Back in 1930’s, Bonnie and Clyde and other US bank robbers were using the new-fangled automobile to flee across state lines — creating jurisdictional problems as a result. The US solution was to make bank robbery (along with auto-theft and other related offences) into federal offences rather keeping them as state-specific infractions. In particular this meant that the FBI could provide federal level policing (tracking down and killing John Dillinger for example).

We have the same jurisdictional issues dealing with cyberspace, with criminals in one country fleecing consumers in another while using systems hosted in a third. The Convention on Cybercrime addresses part of the problem by trying to ensure international consistency where eLaws are specifically needed (which of course is only the case for small parts of eCriminality, fraud is fraud whether eEnabled or not). However, there is limited inter-jurisdictional co-ordination for eCrime investigations — for example Interpol (often incorrectly perceived to be international police force) merely keeps a large database and passes faxes from one place to another.

In practice, most cross-border investigations are done as “joint operations” and the jointness is usually very limited — one force does all the legwork and a liaison officer in the other country deals with local paperwork. There’s usually a quid pro quo element to these joint operations, for budgeting reasons if no other.

What isn’t happening, or at least only in a handful of very specialised areas, is any international co-operation in setting priorities or selecting cases to pursue. Every country is doing its own thing about eCrime, and there’s a widespread impression that any criminal who can operate from “across the state line” is essentially immune from serious investigation.

We identified this problem last year when we (Ross Anderson, Rainer Böhme, Tyler Moore and myself) wrote a report on Security Economics and the Internal Market for ENISA. It’s not an easy one to fix whilst politicians (and populaces) are unwilling to see “foreign” police officers operating in their country, and the establishment of a truly international “cyber police force” seems equally unlikely.

Our policy proposal to tackle the issue harks back to WWII’s SHAEF, which has morphed into similar arrangements within NATO. In essence liaison officers from multiple forces would sit around a single table, working with a central coordinator, to set policy and decide which investigations to pursue. They would then communicate back to their own countries, who have specifically budgeted to provide appropriate assistance. So it’s very like “joint operations”, but the scheme is multi-laterial, and has a true command and control function in the centre — who will quickly learn to shy away from politically sensitive topics and make a real impact on eCriminality.

To summarise then, a welcome to the Home Office for finally finding a small amount of funding for some country-wide ePolicing; but it’s well past time to be working on world-wide initiatives.

Traveling towards VMworld 2008

I, along with thousands of others, wended my way through a vast dimly lit cavern of a place helped along by the strangely surreal sight of ushers in black waving wispy red flags to guide us not to the empty seats in front of us, but to the ones 50 yards on. (Ah Vegas, my feet hurt already.) Perhaps the point was to live in the moment, soak in the pre-rock concert atmosphere complete with a hip and cool soundtrack ripped off from Apple commercials. (Do they all use the same ad firm?) A better way to build the anticipation for, yes, the kickoff keynote session at VMworld 2008. (photo credit: lodev)

To the sounds of Hey Ya (Shake it like a Polaroid picture), we shifted forward in our uncomfortable temporary seating placed, as at all tech conferences, too close for all but the skinny girls. The moment was here – one of those videos started playing on the dozen or so huge monitors floating above the convention crowd. You know this video; you’ve probably seen it before from HP or someone like that. One of those videos with instrumental Coldplay music in the background with time lapse/speeded-up video of people in motion and floating captions dropping into the images that leave you with a slight smile on your face as you “get” the relationship between image and text. (Do they all use the same ad firm?)

And here he is, announced like a Vegas headliner, Paul Maritz, the new CEO of VMware. Hmm. After all that hype, I rather expected someone in a black turtleneck and jeans to come out. Instead here’s this guy with pleat-front pants and an admittedly cool accent (New Zealand?) who looks a little like Al from Home Improvement. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – everyone likes Al.

And then the real fun begins.

• 30 years ago, Paul Maritz started off his business career as a developer
• 10 years ago, VMware was founded by Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum (BTW, 10 seconds spent showing a slide with cartoon-ized images of the founders, “thanks for what you did for the company for the past 10 years”. 10 seconds after 10 years…but maybe more would have been hypocritical…)
• a retrospective of centralized vs. decentralized computing initiatives from the 1960’s to today
• of course VMware milestones from 1998 to today
• and then an analyst-ready diagram showing the product roadmap (to be delivered in 2009) with, you guessed it, finally a connection between VMware and cloud computing (remember Maritz’s cloud-computing company was bought by EMC just a couple of years ago and that’s the section he headed up at EMC before being brought into VMware).

Forward Looking

2008 (and probably much of 2009) will be a very busy year for VMware. If you believe the roadmap, VMware seems to be taking on the management of everything – from chargeback and capacity planning to virtual storage and virtual networking (more to come on just what the planned vStorage and vNetwork will deliver) – but all of it VMware-centric. As we said in an earlier post, they’ve moved away from “defending” the hypervisor business proposition to focusing on management services on top of their own hypervisor platform. Revenue pressures must be excruciating – who wants to be a public company these days?

The best part of that new “Virtual Data Center Operating System” diagram/roadmap was the addition (and I mean addition) of something called Cloud vServices. (Did anyone else find it odd that Cloud vServices is kind of on its own in the Infrastructure vServices area? AND, I’ll have to get the other version of the diagram/roadmap I actually saw at the show because that one shows an inexplicable 4^th box in the Application vServices area titled “…”. Really. Maybe to balance out the addition of Cloud vServices?)

What was clear is that the move from VirtualCenter to vCenter –and the new vServices for rolled-up management of virtualization components/capability to span multiple VirtualCenters (or future vCenters) for reporting, monitoring and management at scale – has been in the works for a bit (but in tech time, that could mean 6 months), but the cloud stuff…not so much.

Beyond the very high-level speak appropriate to a keynote (100+ service provider partners for off-premise cloud…suspended VM’s that you don’t have to pay for until you need it), the details are uber-fuzzy. There was a session that Dave went to which was supposed to shed more light, but when questions were asked about how it really works, the answers seemed to be TBD. Does anyone know more? If VMware really has figured out practical cloud computing for enterprises, kudos to them. But I fear they’re like everyone else (except maybe AT&T) and are still working out the details.

Interop NY

• East Coast version of this major networking show. ScienceLogic is the official provider for network monitoring and help desk for InteropNet, the world’s largest temporary network. See us in action in the NOC. Stop by the booth, #1045, to chat, pick up your own deck of EM7 cards, or fill out a survey for a free t-shirt.
• When: Conference runs from Mon 9/15 – Friday 9/19. Expo days are Wed 9/17 – Thurs 9/18.
• Where: The Javits Center, NYC.

VMworld 2008

• The largest virtualization show put on by VMware, the leader in the space. VMworld is only a couple of years old but growing like gangbusters. This year’s show should be an interesting one in light of all the turmoil surrounding VMware and Microsoft’s putsch, oops I meant push, into the space with Hyper-V.
• When: Mon 9/15 is Partner Day. Conference runs from Tues 9/16 – Thurs 9/18
• Where: The Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas.

Hosting Transformation Summit

• Executive-level hosting/service provider show run by The 451 Group (and Tier 1). The analysts at The 451 Group and Tier 1 discuss state of the industry and trends.
• When: Mon 9/15 – Wed 9/17
• Where: The Mirage, Las Vegas

ICE Summit

• Also run by The 451 Group, the ICE (Infrastructure Computing for the Enterprise) Summit will focus on “virtualization in context”. This overlaps the last day of VMworld (personally making my life a little harder).
• When: Thurs 9/18
• Where: The Mirage, Las Vegas

Inc 500 / Inc 5000 Conference & Awards Ceremony

• Since we made it on the list (#350!), we thought we should show the flag at the Inc 500 conference, culminating in an awards gala on Saturday night.
• When: Thurs 9/18 – Sat 9/20
• Where: Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at the National Harbor (DC)

Stay tuned for live blogging and video from the various events with always lively commentary from the ScienceLogicians.

Fourth US airline to go Wi-Fi: Aircell says they have a fourth airline--after American, Delta, and Virgin America--on board for its in-flight Wi-Fi service. The aerial broadband provider's latest partner will be announced soon. Aircell's service went live in 15 American Airlines planes two weeks ago, and there's been a surprising lack of reporting from regular travelers or journalists since the big splash at the launch.

Microsoft, two universities research methods for better Wi-Fi handoff for vehicles: The researchers developed a method they call Vi-Fi, writes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Todd Bishop, which allows a system to maintain connections with several base stations at once, using a primary access point for traffic until a discontinuity is predicted or encountered. This allows seamless handoffs and continuous voice conversations.

Speaking of autos and Wi-Fi, concerns raised about Chrysler's in-car Wi-Fi option: Randall Stross wrote nearly two weeks ago in The New York Times about the problem of distraction. With the Internet at your fingertips, can you restrain yourself? The only problem with the humorous and accurate analysis is that millions of business travelers have 3G access via laptop cards already, so you'd think we'd already be seeing the bad effects of automotive area networks.

A Wi-Fi booster can't post availability signs on highway: The Nebraska town of Louisville has free Wi-Fi downtown, and wanted to post "Visitor Wi-Fi" on a highway sign as another amenity. The state highway department has a policy that doesn't allow the promotion of Wi-Fi, because they believe they'd be inundated. A resident who runs a local Internet firm installed his own signs on the highway; the roads department removed them; he remounted them; they were removed again. The idea of zoning and mounting a billboard apparently hasn't come to the city officials' minds (or perhaps they're prohibited).

The folks spreading misinformation about Wi-Fi health effects cause Ulster school to disable network: I can understand why non-technical folks might think that Wi-Fi has been proven to be unsafe, given the kind of information that's available on the Internet about wireless safety. While there are ongoing studies about the safety of cellular signals--and I'm convinced at this point there's no increased risk to an adult's health by using a cell phone--there is no specific and credible research linked to Wi-Fi, which broadcasts signals at a far lower level than a cell phone, most of the time in most uses.

Washington state shuts down rest-area Wi-Fi: The $3 for 15 minutes, $7 per day, or $30 per month Wi-Fi service at 28 of Washington's 42 rest areas has been turned off after a year for lack of use. Figures. The fees charged by Parsons and Road Connect aren't unreasonable for a nationally scoped plan, but are ridiculous for limited use. States should either bite the bullet and offer these service for free, partner with national roaming operators who can resell service into large networks of business travelers, or use ads to support the service. Highways in remote areas can typically pick up cell data networks, and ongoing costs should be minimal to operate such networks.

IEEE approves fast-roaming standard, 802.11r: This new standard is designed to improve the handoff of devices between base stations. This is accomplished in part by allowing base stations to communicate security and quality of service information so that a VoIP over WLAN phone can immediately reassociate without the delay of authentication and other handshaking.

Denver airport sees 7,000 connections on a single day last week due to Democratic National Convention: FreeFi released the usage figures recently to show how their service is operating. The network started with about 600 daily users when the switchover from fee to free happened 10 months ago, and now carries about 3,500 daily connections.

Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf goes free: The chain of about 700 cafes will have free Wi-Fi installed by now in all its company-owned stores (about 300).