Amazon Aims to Make Computing Cheaper

Amazon has aspirations beyond being the world’s largest retailer. The online retail giant also aspires to be a mega force in computing, says The New York Times Bits Blog in: “Amazon Bares Its Computers.” Amazon has announced that it is taking its Amazon Web Services beyond simple cloud-computing to include specialized computers, data storage systems, networking systems, optical transmissions systems, and power substations. The overall goal is make computer cheaper and run more efficiently.

Amazon rarely discusses its AWS plans, but the recent discussion about how it plans to annually spend one billion comes as big news.
Amazon is prepping to boosts its web services by hiring power engineers to work on substations and remove power redundancies in cloud-computing. Hardware is purchased directly to reduce costs and the company created original statistical methods to limit damage from catastrophic failures. Amazon also owns its own optical fiber systems and take AWS global.

Amazon is hardly keeping their information under wraps this time, though. They are sharing their advances via open source in a direct challenge to Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Microsoft will never share its secrets and Google does share some of its toys, but it keeps the bigger stuff locked away. What about Facebook?

The article explains:

“The notable outrider among the giant computers is Facebook, which isn’t selling its own system. Instead, Facebook is focused on pure cost-cutting, and spearheads the Open Compute Project, a kind of open-source, cloud-computing architecture. Open Compute is far enough along that companies like Hewlett-Packard, which came late to cloud computing, use aspects of it in their public clouds.”

Amazon is not directly asserting it is better than its competitors, but its openness and cost-cutting procedures certainly make it look better in the consumers’ eyes.

Whitney Grace, November 30, 2013

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Evolving Hostilities in the Global Cyber Commons

Sunday, November 24, 2013

In OSINT, All Sources Aren't Created Equal

“In evaluating open-source documents, collectors and analysts must be careful to determine the origin of the document and the possibilities of inherent biases contained within the document.”
– FM2-22.3: Human Intelligence Collector Operations, p. I-10

“Source and information evaluation is identified as being a critical element of the analytical process and production of intelligence products. However there is concern that in reality evaluation is being carried out in a cursory fashion involving limited intellectual rigour. Poor evaluation is also thought to be a causal factor in the failure of intelligence.”
– John Joseph and Jeff Corkill “Information Evaluation: How one group of Intelligence Analysts go about the Task”

The field of cyber intelligence is fairly new and fortunately, thanks to the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon and the work of Jay McAllister and Troy Townsend, we can take a credible look at the state of the practice of this field:

“Overall, the key findings indicate that organizations use a diverse array of approaches to perform cyber intelligence. They do not adhere to any universal standard for establishing and running a cyber intelligence program, gathering data, or training analysts to interpret the data and communicate findings and performance measures to leadership.”
– McAllister and Townsend, The Cyber Intelligence Tradecraft Project

The one thing that isn't covered in their report is the issue of source validation and how that contributes to the validity or value of the intelligence data received. However they did write a follow-up white paper with Troy Mattern entitled “Implementation Framework – Collection Management (.pdf)”

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Jeffrey Carr on Evaluating Sources”