• Low-tech is very effective. Movie-plot threats -- terrorists with crop dusters, terrorists with biological agents, terrorists targeting our water supplies -- might be what people worry about, but a bunch of trained (we don't really know yet what sort of training they had, but it's clear that they had some) men with guns and grenades is all they needed.

• At the same time, the attacks were surprisingly ineffective. I can't find exact numbers, but it seems there were about 18 terrorists. The latest toll is 195 dead, 235 wounded. That's 11 dead, 13 wounded, per terrorist. As horrible as the reality is, that's much less than you might have thought if you imagined the movie in your head. Reality is different from the movies.

• Even so, terrorism is rare. If a bunch of men with guns and grenades is all they really need, then why isn't this sort of terrorism more common? Why not in the U.S., where it's easy to get hold of weapons? It's because terrorism is very, very rare.

• Specific countermeasures don't help against these attacks. None of the high-priced countermeasures that defend against specific tactics and specific targets made, or would have made, any difference: photo ID checks, confiscating liquids at airports, fingerprinting foreigners at the border, bag screening on public transportation, anything. Evenmetal detectors and threat warnings didn't do any good:

  "If I look at what we had, which all of us complained about, it could not have stopped what took place," he told CNN. "It's ironic that we did have such a warning, and we did have some measures."

  He said people were told to park away from the entrance and had to go through a metal detector. But he said the attackers came through a back entrance.

  "They knew what they were doing, and they did not go through the front. All of our arrangements are in the front," he said.

If there's any lesson in these attacks, it's not to focus too much on the specifics of the attacks. Of course, that's not the way we're programmed to think. We respond to stories and not analysis. I don't mean to be sympathetic; this tendency is human and these deaths are really tragic. But eighteen armed people intent on killing lots of innocents will be able to do just that, and last-line-of-defense countermeasures won't be able to stop them. Intelligence, investigation, and emergency response. We have to find and stop the terrorists before they attack, and deal with the aftermath of the attacks we don't stop. There really is no other way, and I hope that we don't let the tragedy lead us into unwise decisions about how to deal with terrorism.

When I park my car in the garage, I lock it. Why? Well, although I would hate for someone to steal my snow shovel and hockey sticks, my car is much more valuable to me. Security is about managing risk, specifically protecting valuable assets like my car. I have a higher level of protection on my car than on my garage. In dollar terms, the contents of my garage are orders of magnitude less valuable than my car. I could spend a lot of money fortifying my garage, and that would add some security to my car while it is parked there, but it is not a cost-effective investment. First, my car is the asset of value, and second the garage - no matter how well protected it is - doesn't move. 

Car manufacturers know this, insurance companies know this, consumers know this. Even media publishers know, yet in the common enterprise, programmers and architects seem to roam in ignorance. Your average download of a Michael Bolton song carries a far higher level of security than valuable user data, like passwords, social security numbers, and credit card details. Why do we keep protecting critical data with point-to-point security solutions (like SSL) that protect the transmission channel, but leave the valuable assets being transported wide open everywhere else? This is a critical question that needs to be answered in order to successfully add an effective layer of security to an SOA.

Gov. Janet Napolitano, D-Ariz., is smashing the idea of a border wall, stating it would be too expensive, take too long to construct, and be ineffective once completed.

"You show me a 50-foot wall and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border. That's the way the border works," Napolitano told the Associated Press.

Instead of a wall, she said funds would be better utilized on beefing up Border Patrol manpower, technology sensors and unmanned aerial vehicles.

I am cautiously optimistic.

“We’ve updated! On November 14, 2008, LinkedIn published revised versions of our Privacy Policy and our User Agreement. Using LinkedIn means you consent to these policies, so please take a few minutes to read and understand them.”

However, if you log out and back, the notice will be gone– so if you weren’t looking too closely, you might not even realize you’ve just consented.

Rebecca Herold at Realtime IT Compliance looked into this and found that the FTC doesn’t much like this kind of implicit privacy changes. Instead, companies should be getting explicit consent, also called “Affirmative express consent,” says the FTC:

As the FTC has made clear in its enforcement and outreach efforts, a company must keep any promises that it makes with respect to how it will handle or protect consumer data, even if it decides to change its policies at a later date. Therefore, before a company can use data in a manner materially different from promises the company made when it collected the data, it should obtain affirmative express consent from affected consumers.

This would imply that if LinkedIn is updating its privacy policy with such a minimal notice, it may not have changed in any way “materially different” from before. But if it is different, they might face a bit of trouble.

So I was very interested when I heard that Opus Interactive, a customer of ours, had “joined the VMware vCloud initiative as a VMware Service Provider”. I talked to Eric Hulbert, CTO of Opus Interactive, to get some details directly from the source.

Eric shared our own caution about making “cloud-ready” announcements. There have simply been too many companies talking about cloud solutions that lack any substance – usually based on definitions of cloud computing that are hazy or just too broad. The backlash against the cloud hype is often quite justified. But in Opus’ case, there are real components that if they don’t add up to a “full” cloud computing solution just yet, are well on their way – and enabled by VMware’s program for service providers (VSPP).

Opus Interactive is serious about virtualization, which is an indispensable tool in their stated goal of creating a high-density micro-data center with the smallest footprint possible. They are 100% wind-powered and have already virtualized much of their data center, reducing the amount of hardware necessary to run the business and driving down costs to produce even more competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace.

VSPP for vCloud provides a rental model of VMware licenses – e.g., for Enterprise ESX or VDI. VMware Service Providers report on their customers’ virtual machines (vm) and pay only for what is actually used. This model lets Opus Interactive quickly spin up a vm to get a new customer up and running in about an hour and stay very cost competitive at the same time; Opus offers their vClustr entry-level virtual server for only $99.

Cost-effective, rapidly scalable computing “on-demand” based on shared resources, managed by “expert” third-parties, enabled by virtualization technology and pay-per-use vm licenses. Cloud computing? Instead of thinking about a single definition of cloud computing, perhaps it’s more relevant as the market matures to think about a continuum of cloud computing. And by that definition, Opus Interactive is providing cloud services, enabled by VMware’s VSP program. Next on the schedule, automated provisioning and perhaps in the future, API’s that make it even easier for application developers to test and deploy apps on Opus Interactive’s cloud platform – which, by the way, uses EM7 for its core management solution.