Interop NY 2008 was up considerably in size from the show in 2007.  According to Lenny Heymann, the GM of Interop, this is a trend that they expect to continue.  My personal experience was that the size of the vendors was also up this year.  I think there were so few startups that “Startup City” was pulled from the show completely.  In any case, the show floor was full and there was plenty of attendee traffic to go around.

Definitely helping out from a traffic and draw perspective was the addition of the Web 2.0 Expo - Interop was co-located with both Mobile Business Expo and the Web 2.0 show. It seems like that buzzword still hasn’t lost most of its luster.

From the InteropNet perspective, the main feeling was one of being rushed.  With the show only lasting two days, and the InteropNet team only having a couple of days of ramp up time, everything was compressed into a much shorter period than in Las Vegas.  While this would normally be a challenge, it’s an even bigger challenge at the Javits where the InteropNet team was allowed to do almost nothing ourselves because of union rules.  You’d be surprised how frustrated you can make a network guy who’s told that he has to stand there and watch the electrician plug things in, rather than just doing it himself.  The only thing faster than the InteropNet team getting the Interop NY network up, was my pedicab ride to the InteropNet Booze Cruise.

In any case, everything came off without a hitch, and EM7 performed flawlessly catching a couple of power outages that last day and alerting everyone before the batteries on the UPSes had a chance to run down.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll analyze the data from the show to see how many tickets were handled, amount of bandwidth consumed, etc and we’ll do a comparison to Interop Las Vegas.

We’re (both ScienceLogic and me personally) looking forward to Interop 2009.

"We are looking at something verging on the incredibly bizarre. As she got older she got shorter and broader and was reduced to a giant gelatinous blob, carrying many thousands of eggs," he says.

"Her shape was likely to have affected her behaviour and ability to hunt. I can't imagine her jetting herself around in the water at any great speed, and she was too gelatinous to have been a fighting machine.

"It's likely she was just blobbing around the seabed carrying her brood of eggs, living on dead fish, while her mate was off hunting."

• ValidationSummary controls look at the ErrorMessage field to figure out what to display, so always use ErrorMessage in a verbose enough way that it will be helpful from a ValidationSummary control.
• If you need a shorter message to display inline (i.e., where the validation control is on the form, as opposed to the ValidationSummary) use the body of the control to define it.

In the past, I've used RequiredFieldValidator controls on my web forms to remind users that certain fields are required. I would set the ErrorMessage to something vanilla like, "This field is required", or even something simpler like "*" (an asterisk) if I didn't have much room on the form to display more prose for an error.

A friend was recently testing a new feature that I'd built for our sales team and she had a hard time seeing the little red asterisks that were showing up next to required fields. It felt to her as though she was pushing the submit button on the form but nothing was happening. It was clear that a ValidationSummary control would be helpful, especially if placed close to the submit button for the form.

I've been a bit lazy in the past about using ValidationSummary controls, partially because most of my forms are simple enough that they feel a bit redundant. But on a more complicated form, they can be very helpful to guide users back to the places on the form where there's problems.

So I threw one of those puppies on the form and immediately saw that there was a problem - my error message was set to "*", which meant that my validation summary was pretty useless - it just displayed a bunch of red asterisks! And in places where I'd used the prose, "This field is required", well that was pretty useless as an error message in the summary.

After a bit of research and experimentation, I discovered that the ValidationSummary control looks at the ErrorMessage property on each validation control in order to figure out what to display in the summary. So it's important to use ErrorMessage with a summary in mind! Don't use text like "*" or "This field is required". Be more specific so the user can find her way up to the problem field, as in, "PostalCode is required".

But if you make ErrorMessage verbose so that it's helpful in a summary, it may make your form really ugly when displayed inline next to the control being validated. The trick is to use the body of the validation control element to specify the inline error message. Then you end up with two messages: a verbose one that's used in your summary, and a more localized, brief message that shows up right next to the control being validated. Note the asterisk that's in the body of the RequiredFieldValidator below:

<asp:RequiredFieldValidator
      ErrorMessage="Zip/postal code is required"
      ControlToValidate='txtPostalCode'
      ValidationGroup='BasicInfo'
      Display="Dynamic"
      runat='server'>*</asp:RequiredFieldValidator>

I've learned a lesson from all of this. In the future when I use validation controls I'll always provide a summary-friendly message in the ErrorMessage field, and if I need something different (typically shorter) to display inline, I'll put it in the body of the validation control element.

Hope this helps!

However, I got a few emails from my readers asking me something along these line, thus this post. For example, I got asked "Should I focus more on targeting security professionals or general IT users?", "Any pitfalls I should be aware of?" as well as general questions about how to start, what content is best, etc all the way to "How did I profit from my blog?"

Q: Who should I blog to?

A: Blog to colleagues first i.e. infosecurity pros. Blogging to IT or general public is - in some sense - harder or - gasp! - will turn you into a journalist (someone who knows nothing about everything BUT writes about it as an "expert" :-)) Maybe you can broaden it later. Even better, write for YOU (!)

Q: What area of security I should focus my blogging on?

A: Focus on the area of security that you like the most or know them most: IDS? Patching? PIX administration? Linux? AD esoterica? Logs, maybe? :-) Then broaden if you feel like it or as you learn new areas

Q: Any advice on site design, themes, etc?

A: Site design, themes, etc will all come later; just pick something basic and FOCUS on content, not on SEO, design, etc. MUST have RSS feed; make it highly visible (HTML is out, RSS is IN :-))

Q: Any security blogging pitfalls that I should avoid? Any other tips?

A:

• Don't stick to only long, deep posts? Unbelievably, people often prefer shorter posts or a mix of short/shallow and longer/deep posts (that came as a shock to me early on!)
• Tips on how to do whatever useful work well; comments on hot issues (that you understand) works too for a shorter post.
• Definitely comment on other bloggers posts (more often early on, later - as you wish...)
• Avoid long breaks in blogging (>7 days); it will  lead to reader loss (you should only care about it later - focus on fun content first!)
• Join Security Bloggers Network (drop an email to Alan Shimel for it)

Q:  Has blogging in this niche generated any income for you? If so, how much?

A: Exactly $0. The reason is that I never wanted to "monetize" my blog;  I don't have banners, etc. This is by design.

Q: How did it help your professional career in a significant way?

Yes, I think it helped my career and connected me to a lot of fun people! I sure hope I am not "known only as as blogger", but blog can definitely make one much more known professionally, especially if you create fun and/or useful content.

Overall, blog is a time commitment, but it is also a passion. It does help your career, but "forcing " yourself to do it just for "career benefits" is,  IMHO, a wrong approach.

Yo, my fellow bloggers; help the newbies out, will ya?! Let's start a series of posts on "how to be a good security blogger!"

"The rigorous studies clearly show red-light cameras don't work," said lead author Barbara Langland-Orban, professor and chair of health policy and management at the USF College of Public Health. "Instead, they increase crashes and injuries as drivers attempt to abruptly stop at camera intersections."

Comprehensive studies from North Carolina, Virginia, and Ontario have all reported cameras are associated with increases in crashes. The study by the Virginia Transportation Research Council also found that cameras were linked to increased crash costs. The only studies that conclude cameras reduced crashes or injuries contained "major research design flaws," such as incomplete data or inadequate analyses, and were always conducted by researchers with links to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The IIHS, funded by automobile insurance companies, is the leading advocate for red-light cameras since insurance companies can profit from red-light cameras by way of higher premiums due to increased crashes and citations.

And, of course, the agenda of the government is to increase revenue due to fines:

A 2001 paper by the Office of the Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives reported that red-light cameras are "a hidden tax levied on motorists." The report came to the same conclusions that all of the other valid studies have, that red-light cameras are associated with increased crashes and that the timings at yellow lights are often set too short to increase tickets for red-light running. That's right, the state actually tampers with the yellow light settings to make them shorter, and more likely to turn red as you're driving through them.

In fact, six U.S. cities have been found guilty of shortening the yellow light cycles below what is allowed by law on intersections equipped with cameras meant to catch red-light runners. Those local governments have completely ignored the safety benefit of increasing the yellow light time and decided to install red-light cameras, shorten the yellow light duration, and collect the profits instead.

The cities in question include Union City, CA, Dallas and Lubbock, TX, Nashville and Chattanooga, TN, and Springfield, MO, according to Motorists.org, which collected information from reports from around the country.

He’s a bit indignant that so much energy goes to sporting events like the Olympics rather than more important news that isn’t getting reported around the world.

This is in a year when tons of journalists are getting laid off.

This is in a year when there are tons of stories around the world that aren’t getting reported on.

Could we take half of those photographers and send them to Russia, for instance

Reminds me of a feeling I had back in college as an undergrad student studying social sciences and humanities, about the way my friends who were physicists interacted with the world. They were so awed by the stars, Mars, astrophysics, and it seemed to me interesting but altogether unimportant. They argued they may find something outside our planet that could help solve Earth-bound problems like disease, or find the origins of earth and humanity — but really they were doing it because they loved it. One of my friends had a good argument, though — there are enough people right now that we can specialize in what we care about, and there will still be others covering other topics. He could be a physicist and look into the universe’s origin, while I studied social interaction and writing, and our other friends looked into solving cancer or eradicating invasive plants in the native wetlands. We have to specialize, and there are enough of us to do it too.

I think it’s the same way in journalism — whether it’s sports, celebrity journalism, or coverage of politics and war, there are a lot of opportunities right now for journalists. Of course the business model is changing, and some old-schoolers won’t know how to roll with that, but generations change slowly; we’re learning.

Also, the Olympics is seen as more than a sporting event, it’s also a symbol of world competition and cooperation too — a way for countries to come together and share entertainment globally. I think that’s worth covering.

In the second post, Robert Scoble says there are plenty of great journalists but the public doesn’t care. In some ways I have to agree with that, but I don’t think it’s negative, necessarily. I had a conversation with someone the other day about world news reportage. He says, “I was just reading this story, but what does it matter to me if there’s a flood in some city in another country I’ll never visit and some farmer lost his sheep?” World news is only important when it’s relevant, so it’s no wonder that many people don’t care — if they don’t know much about the area, and it doesn’t affect them, they have no incentive to give it full attention. You can call that apathy, but I think it’s an important selectivity skill that humans have. We have to choose what to give priority to, so if nothing stands out as being particularly important, we just ignore it or gloss over it. Human nature…

Also I think the common person today just gets desensitized and doesn’t know where to turn their energy, when surrounded by so many crises. Either you focus on one specialty and do your best to work toward one cause in your life — and maybe that’s just in the course of your daily work — or you become a complete Attention-Deficit-Disorder case and bounce from one problem to the next, without knowing how to solve anything. That just causes a sense of bewilderment, despair, and either that bogs you down or eventually you get desensitized.

There’s a commenter on Scoble’s blog, Spencer, who talks about this generation’s apathy. There are so many people who want to blame today’s generation or the young generation for this “apathy” that they sense. But I see it as a survival mechanism that arises from the way information flows these days. We’re surrounded by crises, everyone wants us to know about them — the water shortage, global warming, death in Iraq, the national deficit. Okay, crisis, I get it. But no one gives a real clear idea on what any individual is really supposed to do to solve the problem. You can’t get involved with one global cause, without ignoring all the others, and if you do get involved it’s likely to become your life’s purpose. Most people are concerned with other things — their families, their work, personal development, their homes and futures, and really that’s enough to take up all their time.

I’m always amazed when I read about the early unionists. Emma Goldman for example, the activist who pushed for the 8-hr workday, and campaigned for free love in the early 1900s when women were still wearing corsets, used to work 16 hour factory days as a seamstress, then lead meetings late into the night. Today we lead cushy lives comparatively–8 hour days, plus commute and lunch, family time, dinner time, gym maybe, sleep… but it still doesn’t seem like we ever have enough energy and time.

What Emma had that most people today don’t, is a community living in the same conditions as herself, with clear goals about what they were campaigning for, and a cause that affected their own daily lives. Today, unionism and local activism is in much shorter supply, in part due to the many people who work fairly comfy desk jobs, and the problem that everyone has his own specialization, works in a cubicle, does his or her own thing. The problems we’re facing today in terms of global warming, global water shortage, aren’t the same kinds of problems that activists have fought for in the past, and there’s no clear road map for how to solve them. Our leaders sure aren’t leading the way.

What we do have, at least, is the Olympics, which is an age old symbol of international cooperation, play and competition…so, uh, go sports! As for full disclosure, I don’t actually have a TV and haven’t watched the Olympics in many years, but I do try taking short showers–does that help?

Mr. Peters nodded, and then looked down at the sheet which I had filled out and signed. “I’m going to have to make some calls to verify your identity.”

I nodded.

He pulled out a cell phone. I had assumed that we would be going to some separate screening room, but that wasn’t the case. He stood facing the silver table, and I leaned back against it. So this was the dreaded interview. People walked past us with bags and luggage.

"Hello," he said. "Security." Long pause. It sounded like he was transferred. He said a number that I think had the same number of digits as a phone number. Then he said a shorter number. "No, she doesn’t." He wrote something in small letters on the form. Then he spelled my name over the phone. "D-A-V-I-D-O-F-F. That’s Indigo Delta… yes."

He looked at me. "What’s the name of a street that you lived on prior to your current address?"

"Inman."

"Inman," he repeated. There was a pause. "Where did you live in 2004?"

"Hmm…" I said. "New Mexico? I think? Maybe Massachusetts."

He conferred with the person on the phone. "That’s fine." He hung up.

"All right," he said. "You’re going to go through full security screening." He wrote "SSSS" in red marker on my printed boarding pass. He handed my form to one of the officers at the podium, and then gestured to the first screening line. "Right here."

This only works if you've lost your ID, not if you refuse to show it.

Complex event processing (CEP) is a new technology. It can be applied to extracting and analyzing information from any kind of distributed message-based system. It is developed from the Rapide concepts of (1) causal event modeling, (2) event patterns and pattern matching, and (3) event pattern maps and constraints. Complex event processing can be applied to a wide variety of Enterprise monitoring and management problems, from low level network management to high level enterprise intelligence gathering.

Applications of Complex Event Processing:

• Instant Insight  - hierarchical event viewing applied to the Enterprise IT layer. (coming soon)
  • Analysing business processes (paper in pdf format)
• Network Level Monitoring and Management (Powerpoint presentation)
• Cyber Security: Network Intrusion Detection
• Enterprise Monitoring and Management (coming soon)
• Modeling and Simulation of Collaborative Business Processes
• Business Policy Monitoring. (coming soon)
• Analysis and Debugging of Distributed Systems (coming soon)

Presentations:

• “Complex Event Processing: An Essential Technology for Instant Insight into the Operation of Enterprise Information Systems,” lecture at the Stanford University Computer Systems Laborary EE380 Colloquium series. Video of the lecture (duration: 60 minutes).

Publications:

• Complex Event Processing in Distributed Systems. David C. Luckham and Brian Frasca, Stanford University Technical Report CSL-TR-98-754, March 1998, 28 pages.Abstract: Complex event processing is a new technology for extracting information from distributed message-based systems. This technology allows users of a system to specify the information that is of interest to them. It can be low level network processing data or high level enterprise management intelligence, depending upon the role and viewpoint of individual users. And it can be changed from moment to moment while the target system is in operation. This paper presents an overview of Complex Event Processing applied to a particular example of a distributed message-based system, a fabrication process management system. The concepts of causal event histories, event patterns, event filtering, and event aggregation are introduced and their application to the process management system is illustrated by simple examples. This paper gives the reader an overview of Complex Event Processing concepts and illustrates how they can be applied using the Rapide toolset to one specific kind of system.
   
• Event Mining with Event Processing Networks. Louis Perrochon and Walter Mann and Stephane Kasriel and David C. Luckham, The Third Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. April 26-28, 1999. Beijing, China, 5 pages.Abstract: Event Mining discovers and delivers information and knowledge in a real-time stream of data, or events. We show that the process of delivering knowledge by searching patterns in data and subsequent abstraction of found patterns can be applied in real-time to a complex, asynchronous system. Our event processing engine consists of a network of event processing agents (EPAs) running in parallel that interact using a dedicated event processing infrastructure. The agents can be configured at run-time using a formal pattern language. The underlying infrastructure (1) provides an abstract communication mechanism and thus allows dynamic reconfiguration of the communication topology between agents at run-time and (2) provides transparent, location-independent access to all data. These features allow dynamic allocation of EPAs to different threads and processes on different machines at run time.
   
• eJava - Extending Java with Causality. Alexandre Santoro and Walter Mann and Neel Madhav and David Luckham, Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, June 1998, 10 pages.Abstract: Programming languages like Java provide designers with a variety of classes that simplify the process of program development. Some of these classes allow one to easily build multithreaded programs. Though useful, especially in the creation of reactive systems, multithreaded programs present challenging problems such as race conditions and synchronization issues. Validating these programs against a specification is not trivial since Java does not clearly indicate thread interaction. These problems can be solved by modifying Java so that it produces computations, collections of events with both causal and temporal ordering relations defined for them. Specifically, the causal ordering is ideal for identifying thread interaction. This paper presents eJava, an extension to Java that is both event based and causally aware, and shows how it simplifies the process of understanding and debugging multithreaded programs.
   
• Event-Based Execution Architectures for Dynamic Software Systems. James Vera, Louis Perrochon, David C. Luckham.
  Proceedings of the First Working IFIP Conf. on Software Architecture. 1999. San Antonio, Texas.Abstract: Distributed systems’ runtime behavior can be difficult to understand. Concurrent, distributed activity make notions of global state difficult to grasp. We focus on the runtime structure of a system, its execution architecture, and propose representing its evolution as a partially ordered set of predefined architectural event types. This representation allows a system’s topology to be visualized, analyzed and con-strained. The use of a predefined event types allows the execution architectures of different systems to be readily compared.
   
• Using Context-Based Correlation in Network Operations and Management. Louis Perrochon (work in progress, mail author for newest version)Abstract: Network operation consists to a large degree of reaction to activities happening in the network. Better knowledge of the network at any time allows more appropriate reactions. On the example of intrusion detection, we show how context-based correlation of such activities can provide a more detailed view of the network in shorter time. We first present how we model context and then describe the architecture of the Stanford University CEP context-based correlator. Correlation is specified as event patterns in a declarative language that allows us to specify what needs to be detected, instead of specifying how it should be detected. CEP introduces the concept of causal context to intrusion detection. The correlator is able to process events on-line, as they are generated and it can be reconfigured at dynamically. We then show how it increases detection rate, reduce false alarms, and detect large-scale attack patterns at an early stage.