Bob Gourley

Today’s federal cybersecurity and information technology news: The U.S. Office of Naval Research is partnering with Chilean scientists to develop a mobile application to provide information helpful in countering pirates, arms traffickers, and illegal fishermen. More here. The Army’s 780th Military Intelligence Brigade. which handles cyber systems security and intelligence, is looking to hire 400 civilian employees. More here. In a recent survey of federal IT professionals, 85% said that security was an impediment to implementing cloud computing. More here. Retired Gen. James E. Cartwright, who wrote the current Department of Defense cyber policy, said that the U.S. needs a show of force in cyberspace to stop attacks. More here. The Department of Defense deputy chief information officer Richard Hale estimates that 8,000 defense contractors are eligible for the cybers... (more)

TwitPolls: Some Relevance for Enterprise Technologists

Early adopters have  been evaluating TwitPolls for the last several weeks. I’ve tested it out with our @CTOvision account and see great promise for this easy to use engagement tool. Here is a bit more on TwitPolls and some of its relevance for enterprise technologists: TwitPolls is powered by the technologies and leadership team of WayIn, so it is based on a great/scalable cloud and backed by a firm with staying power. TwitPolls is well named. You can tell from the name that it is designed to leverage the power of Twitter to enable polling. Part of the power of TwitPolls is ho... (more)

Lessons from Our Cyber Past: The First Cyber Cops

Tomorrow, Wednesday, May 16, 2012, the Atlantic Council will host a discussion with pioneers in cyber law enforcement and crime prevention moderated by Jay Healey. ”Lessons from Our Cyber Past: The First Cyber Cops” should offer some fascinating insight and I’ll be in attendance, so stop by and say hello.  It will run from 1:30 PM to 3:30 PM at the Atlantic Council, 1101 15th Street, NW, on 11th Floor in Washington, DC. To RSVP, email your name and affiliation to cyber@acus.org. Here is some more information on the event and the speakers: The Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft ... (more)

Anonymous Takes Down More Governmental Websites

This week Ustream gets an injection of political reality, Apple fixes a critical encryption blunder affecting some of its users, FBI documents are leaked detailing their worries over Bitcoin digital currency, and Anonymous takes down more Governmental websites as part of its ongoing operations. UStream Targeted by Advanced Distributed Denial of Service: UStream was the target of Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS attacks) that crippled its personal video streaming service and caused “significant” damage to site revenues.  The co-founder and CEO was quoted saying “What we... (more)

A Million Monkeys Demonstrate the Power of Hadoop

There are many great use cases for Apache Hadoop, the open source framework for scalable, reliable, and distributed computing on commodity hardware built around Hadoop Distributed File System and MapReduce, such as delivering search engine results, sequencing genomes, and indexing entire libraries of text, but the Million Monkeys Project by Jesse Anderson may be the easiest to understand and the most fun. The project was inspired by the Infinite Monkey Theorem which, in the simplest and most popular terms, states that a million monkeys with a million typewriters will, by randoml... (more)