Delay and such

Alright, time to really, really, really get back on the blogging horse. This time for real or something but most folks should probably know better. Must be too content as things are largely good :)

Anyway, still owe a longer post on the previous topic with regards to how academia and research views security versus the real world. Various events interspersed since that post have really only reinforced that view but I'll withhold judgment until the process makes it way to completion. Once it works its way to completion, I promise a scathing rant.

On a secondary note, I've been doing a bit more pondering with regards to the principles of admission control and in particular systems in general. I am hoping but perhaps being naively optimistic to spend some serious time trying to sketch out a paper for HotNets this summer on the topic. The basic crux of the paper is pretty simple, we are wrongly focusing on minutia when in reality, we should really be focusing on dynamics. In my humble opinion, dynamics are what we should really be thinking about when it comes to scale. How do we keep the dynamics under control, i.e. avoid rapid change? My intuition is that we can use this as a guiding principle for system design in that things should be limited to change within a certain bound, thus limiting the emergent dynamics that can occur that we typically fail to understand.

Not sure exactly how I will go about crafting this paper but HotNets tends to align nicely with it. Worst case is that I write a nice screed that gets rejected but is ultimately quite cathartic. The public / private firewall paper seemed to go quite well along those lines despite its rocky road to publication. The paper still brings a smile to my face even almost a year after publication.

Back, this time for real (I hope)

With summer coming up, time to get the old blog posts a rolling again.

I have a nice, lengthy post coming up, courtesy of a review we just got from a journal (a good one too which makes it even more sad). The single review was in response to our paper examining public versus private firewall rules which asked the simple question, do you really gain that much by keeping your firewall rules private. Hint: the answer is way less than one would think.

Anyone, onto the money quote from the reviewer:

Firewalls are generally considered a hack, not any real guarantee of security. A backstop. Do we need to analyze this hack with such loving care?

Wow, just wow. One would be hard pressed to come up with a better example as to why industry ignores the security community.

A different kind of interface

Very cool concept with regards to streetlights. Instead of lights shining everywhere, consider this:

The lights are going down in Toulouse. Tomorrow early-rising residents of the Allée Camille-Soula in the south-western French city will have set out to work with the morning gloom held at bay by radical new technology which turns on streetlights only when pedestrians pass.

Installed on a 500-metre section of pavement last weekend, the lampposts double the strength of the light they cast when they detect human body heat. Ten seconds later they revert to normal.

Cool concept. Light pollution and in general light usage at night is quite fascinating.

Next computer?

Well, looks like my tablet might need to get an upgrade some time in the near future. I'm sure everyone in the System Interface Class would appreciate a boot time measured in the seconds rather than minutes.

Too bad our IT policy probably prevents me getting one but then again, there might be some sort of a research reason :)

Hat Tip Gizmodo

Wicked cool enhanced VR glasses

Very cool video from BMW about enhanced virtual reality glasses for mechanics. I doubt this will be making its way out soon but cool to ponder something like this for say home yard machine repair (mower, trimmer, etc.).

Link to Gizmodo

Surface Trip to Ball State

Recently, a group of staff traveled to Ball State for a mini-conference on the Microsoft Surface to see what the various groups were up to. There were attendees from Ball State, Notre Dame, and Ohio State. Eric Morgan from the library recorded a video of the various aspects of the Surface.

Surface control of the home

A bit pricey at $10k but very cool immersive app that allows the surface to use a camera to then control all of the various gadgets in the room. Might be a fairly cool app to try to duplicate as part of the course.

The approach, Cristal, uses gestures to control the various devices and I am assuming, a fair amount of under the hood operation to get things going. It would be very cool if you could blend a limited range Bluetooth to automatically discover devices but the camera input is a bit more intuitive, i.e. I see what is in my room and then can manipulate it.

Hat tip to Gizmodo