Techization

UW-Stout has announced it has selected Microsoft’s Live@edu product to provide e-mail for students.  The choice will save hundreds of thousands of dollars for the University while providing the students a better e-mail system.  The aging campus-based e-mail server would have cost about $300,000 dollars to replace over a three year span.

The big draw for students will be increased storage capacity.  The top problem students encounter every single year is filling up their mailbox with messages.  So many of us today are use to unlimited storage of our data.  ‘Delete Message’, what’s that?  Services like G-mail offer the ability to keep a running archive of every electronic conversation you engage in.  The risk associated with that luxury is your e-mail is only stored in the cloud, not on your hard drive.  That is what makes so many nervous.  If the ‘cloud’ goes down, then what?  Oh my godddddd!!!!

Some administrators at other campuses cite the recent G-mail outage that occurred for one-half of a business day as a reason to stay away from cloud-based e-mail.  Really?  Do you think your universities IT department has the technology, hardware and abilities to that of Google?  Your out of your mind if you think your better off just because the server is on your campus.  Google maintains a 99.9% up-time, and that figured isn’t carefully crafted with formulas and exceptions to make it seem amazing.  It is real 99.9% up-time.  What service can even approach saying that truthfully?  Not many.

There is no question universities are afraid to ‘lose control’ over their e-mail system; a life blood of any university, especially UW-Stout.  Companies like Google and Microsoft can provide better solutions than any university IT department in the country.  Google has some of the best network infrastructure in the world.  Why not utilize the power of their technology for your students benefits?

These positives do come with risks like:

• Network outage possibilities
• Glitches in the network (See Brown University Google Glitch)
• Difficulties complying with ‘Open Record’ laws.

Microsoft Live@edu rolls out on-campus today.  I’m anxious to see the new product and all of its features.  I’ll post a follow up blog with how the transition is going here and my thoughts on using the Microsoft product first hand.

Tragic news broke Thursday afternoon as Michael Jackson was pronounced dead at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.  Jackson left many fans heart broken across the globe as he took a great deal of talent and mystery to the grave.  He almost took something else with him as well, the Internet.

Twitter had to temporarily shut down their search results, saved searches and trending topics to mitigate a full-blown site failure.  This isn’t uncommon for the micro-blogging site.  Twitter has been known to be very unstable during breaking news like the Hudson River plane crash and the Iranian conflict.  “We saw over twice the normal tweets per second the moment the story broke as people shared their grief and memories,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told The Associated Press via e-mail.

AT&T said they set a new record for most text messages being sent over their network.  In the minutes following Jackson’s death AT&T subscribers were sending 4,000,000 text messages per minute at its peak, they also said call volume was up 10% during that same time.  AT&T went on to say that the spike in volume from Jackson’s death was even greater than during the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York City.  This is an unfair comparison by AT&T because their customer base significantly increased thanks to the Apple iPhone in the past three years and mergers.  In 2001 AT&T wireless had about 20 million subscribers, in the first quarter of 2009 they had just under 80 million.

Internet giant Google was also crippled by the breaking news.  The security software that protects Google from hackers thought it was under attack with so many queries coming in.   Those on Google News had to enter a ‘CAPTCHA’ code to prove they were real users and not bot.  Google also began displaying ‘malware’ alerts for users trying to search for breaking news on Jackson.  Search queries spiked around 2pm Pacific time, skyrocketed by 3pm, and finally leveled off by 8pm. The majority of Thursday’s hot trends related to Jackson’s death, Google said.  Google provided this chart showing queries about Michael Jackson on Thursday.

Facebook unsurprisingly dominated the social media spread of Michael Jackson’s death with its 300+ million user base.  The saturation of networks is best shown on this chart. (Look at that spike for Facebook!!!!)

Yahoo.com had a record setting day as well.  Yahoo News had 16.4 million unique visitors, breaking the 15.1 million record set on Election Day 2008.

This event will likely continue to be studied for months to come.  I’m waiting to see information released on the stress placed on Google’s server farms and Internet hubs worldwide that funnel traffic in places like Chicago, New York City, Atlanta and Dallas.   Sure trend analysis like the graph’s above are nice, but I would like to see some technical break down of the event.

Google Inc. is one of those companies that makes you wish you would have listened to Uncle Jeff when he told you he knew of a sure fire hot start-up.  Ever wonder how it all came to be?   Here is a short and painless history lesson.

1995

• Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford. (Larry, 22, a U Michigan grad, is considering the school; Sergey, 21, is assigned to show him around.) According to some accounts, they disagree about most everything during this first meeting.

1996

• Larry and Sergey, now Stanford computer science grad students, begin collaborating on a search engine called BackRub.
• BackRub operates on Stanford servers for more than a year — eventually taking up too much bandwidth to suit the university.

1997

• Larry and Sergey decide that the BackRub search engine needs a new name. After some brainstorming, they go with Google — a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.

1998

August

• Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim writes a check for $100,000 to an entity that doesn’t exist yet: a company called Google Inc.

September

• Google sets up workspace in Susan Wojcicki’s garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park.
• Google files for incorporation in California on September 4. Shortly thereafter, Larry and Sergey open a bank account in the newly-established company’s name and deposit Andy Bechtolsheim’s check.
• Larry and Sergey hire Craig Silverstein as their first employee; he’s a fellow computer science grad student at Stanford.

December

• “PC Magazine” reports that Google “has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results” and recognizes us as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998.

2003

September

• Google News launches with 4000 news sources.

2005

February

• We hit a milestone in Image Search: 1.1 billion images indexed.
• Google Maps goes live

Source:  Google Inc.

Google is the dominant force on the Internet, especially when it comes to search engines.   They now have nearly 60% of the market share when it comes to search engines, that is a commanding stance.  Here you will find a graphic showing their stock price from the time they went public in 2004.

It may have all of your e-mail (Gmail), your appointments (Google Calendar) and even your last known location (Google Latitude). It may know what you’re watching (YouTube) and whom you are calling. It may have transcripts of your telephone messages (Google Voice).

It may hold your photos in Picasa Web Albums, which includes face-recognition technology that can automatically identify you and your friends in new photos. And through Google Books, it may know what books you’ve read, what you annotated and how long you spent reading. (Computer World)

Literally, if you used many of the popular Google owned web tools, Google could provide one amazingly accurate and scary profile on you.  How Google uses personal information is guided by three “bedrock principles,” says Peter Fleischer, the company’s global privacy counsel. “We don’t sell it. We don’t collect it without permission. We don’t use it to serve ads without permission.” But what constitutes “personal information” has not been universally agreed upon.  So what you may see as private information, Google may not.

Does this mean you should shut off your Gmail, cancel your Orkut and flush your G1 cell phone down the toilet?  Hardly.  Google continues operations on the basis of trust, similar to another data giant like Facebook.  People know their data is being archived and stored on Googles servers but they trust the corporation will make the correct ethical decision.  However, not all are so trusting.  Google received a lot of criticism over its toolbar that integrates in your web browser.  It’s not just a convenient way to search the web, it reports your surfing habits which Google shares to third party companies and clients.  However, none of the data is linked to personally identifiable information about the user.

Bob Cringely of PBS says this about what Google is up to, “The answer is pretty simple. Google intends to take over most of the functions of existing fixed networks in our lives, notably telephone and cable television.”

I think Mr. Cringely is a little far fetched and paranoid.  Google’s entire business model flows around packets, bits and bytes being shot from A to B.  Their life blood, their very foundation of success is their computing power and server capacity.  Investments in such technology in crucial areas that provide the best chance at un-interruptible power seems quite logical.

Is Google preparing a global take over?  Not likely.  But it will be very interesting to watch them grow and progress in the next few years.

14% of Google’s user base experienced extremely slow services or none at all for about 90 minutes this week.  Google cited a server error began routing traffic through their servers and Russia consequently overloading it causing slow traffic or unavailable error messages.

Can you imagine trying to 50% of all of Googles packets through one server farm? No wonder my Gmail slowed down!

The outage occurred at 9:45am to about 11:20pm Central time in the United States.  The outage quickly made ripples on twitter and became known as #googlefail.

Google prides itself on reliability.  Imagine if an important business document was saved on Google Docs and you could not access it any other way, or your entire calendar for work is on Google and not synced with Outlook.  This little hiccup likely caused lost productivity, profits and lots of headaches around the world.

Really makes me re-analyze how much stock I put into online web tools and applications, though I have the utmost faith in Google.  (Bows down on knees in submission to ‘The Google’)

National security officials have announced the U.S. electricity grid was recently compromised by foreign hackers.  Current and former national security officials stated the spies left behind software that could be used to disrupt the electric grid in the United States. 

Security analyst’s said the attacks stem from Russia and China, both are trying to map our power grid infrastructure and its inner-workings.  Government officials stress no immediate threat can be seen. 

The software the hackers left behind were meant to be stealthy and hidden, ready to be turned on for malicious reasons in time of attack, but was luckily found by U.S. Intelligence and Security agencies. 

The Kansas City Star is reporting that In 1997, Kansas City Power & Light saw about 10,000 such “events” each month. Now it’s 10 to 20 every second.

The espionage appeared pervasive across the U.S. and doesn’t target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official. “There are intrusions, and they are growing,” the former official said, referring to electrical systems. “There were a lot last year.”

Officials said water, sewage and other infrastructure systems also were at risk.

“Over the past several years, we have seen cyberattacks against critical infrastructures abroad, and many of our own infrastructures are as vulnerable as their foreign counterparts,” Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair recently told lawmakers. “A number of nations, including Russia and China, can disrupt elements of the U.S. information infrastructure.”

A senior Pentagon official said Tuesday the Pentagon has spent $100 million in the past six months repairing cyber damage.

Security experts from the U.S. government have stated the attacks are so sophisticated, they are likely perpetrated by China and Russia. 

Conficker, Ghost spy network, PowerPoint attacks and now the U.S. electricity grid.  Are these breaches overblown media stories meant to instill fear and pump sales of security software?  It seems like there are more and more stories about the latest worm or breach of security of epic proportions.

I believe there is definitely a risk of any box that is connected to the Internet, no matter how many software or hardware defenses you have on it.  Nothing is perfect, no security unreachable.  If we have learned anything from Kevin Mitnick, it’s that the hardware is not the weakest link.  The weakest link of any network is almost always the users who manage it orhave access to it.  Social engineering is a real threat and the only defense against it is training every single person who has access to your secured network.  I wish more details were available on how these networks were penetrated, but we will likely never know. 

Even with all the training in the world, no one is perfect.  All the security in the world, none of which is perfect.  Therefore, any network is not 100% secure.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is about to begin hearings on how to expand broadband access to consumers here in the United States.  Barack Obama’s $787 billion dollar stimulus package directed the FCC to come up with a strategy on how to spend billions of dollars on our nations network infrastructure.  Telecommunications companies are already gearing up for fight with the FCC after talk about hearings ignited another heated debate about net neutrality between telecom companies and consumer groups.

$7.2 billion dollars has been allocated to broadband networks and other related projects.  This money will be invested into expanding broadband service and speeds on those networks.

What does this mean for small private telecom companies that currently serve rural areas?  Will this government investment finally make the government to take a hard stance on net neutrality?
“[The new infrastructure investment is ]the biggest responsibility given to the FCC since the Telecom Act of 1996,” acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps, said in an interview. “The market has done a lot, but it hasn’t done enough to keep us competitive in the world.”

Obama has stressed that he plans on closing the gap when it comes to broadband Internet access. The FCC’s new plans will go into affect February of 2010. Starting Wednesday they’ll open up the floor to comments from interested parties. It’s likely that current industry heavyweights will have plenty to say as the future of broadband Internet access in the U.S. is defined.

CNET news is reporting that for the first time in company history, computing giant Google unveiled their server design this past week at a data center efficiency conference.  Google has literally hundreds of thousands of servers worldwide and they are all custom built, not outsourced to popular companies like Dell or Sun Microsystems.

The servers are your run of the mill Intel/AMD 2U servers with a few modifications.  One of which is an emergency battery back-up.  Each machine has its own dedicated 12-volt battery to provide power in emergency situations.  Why batteries you may ask?  Large UPSs (Uninterruptible Power Supplies) only have efficiencies levels in the low 90’s, while batteries allow Google to obtain more than 99.9% efficiency.

Google stores these servers inside of shipping containers, known as modular data centers.   What you get is one enormously powerful data center which holds about 1,160 severs inside.  You thought keeping your office cool with three machines running was bad, huh?

What makes modular data centers so great is they cost considerably less than your bricks and mortar facility, and can be shipped like any other container to places in the world where building a traditional data center just isn’t feasible.  The design of the actual data center within the container also makes it very scaleable.

My reaction after reading this article was, “oh, so that’s how Google runs the world, I get it”.