Author Archive
The Annals of Privacy: Revenge of the Nerds
Like everyone else, I’ve been following Facebook’s privacy debacle – but I’ve also been wondering – what’s the actual fall out going to be? We know the company called an “all hands” meeting to discuss the situation internally. We know that press has abounded: In addition to the general criticisms of Facebook’s privacy policies (and general blasé attitudes toward consumer information) from industry insiders, there have been numerous consumer facing articles about the difficulties of deleting Facebook profiles, step by step instructions on limiting access (or as we call it “opting out” from what you’ve been unwittingly and automatically “opted into.”).
But what will the real consequences look like? The New York Times gave us a sneak preview in its feature on Diaspora*, an open source social network that allows people to “set up their own personal servers, or seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share.” Four NYU students developed the idea as a direct response to the invasive privacy policies of existing social networks. So far, they’ve gotten over 2,000 Twitter followers and raised nearly $25,000 from 739 backers through KickStarter, the online site that helps people get funding for creative projects and ideas.
Remember the movie “Revenge of the Nerds”? Of course you do, but I’ll remind you anyway. To stop harassment from fraternity jocks, a band of nerds beats them at their own (Greek) games. The nerds use their intelligence to beat them at the athletic activities, they make a computer programmed musical production to out-flash the frats, and they get the dean’s support to kick the Alpha Betas out of their house. In short, they did exactly what the NYU students are doing to the big social networks: using their smarts to see opportunities, developing sophisticated software and garnering public support.
Whether Diaspora* will be successful is yet to be seen, but here’s what’s clear: this is going to be just one of many potential threats that Facebook will have to contend with if it doesn’t take privacy seriously. If they don’t, doors will open to the millions of the nerdy college students who, with some intelligent code and a few good ideas, will soon be the cool kids.
For Networks and In Life: When Things Go Down (Because They Will)
Yesterday, the stock market jumped around more wildly than a bull in a rodeo.
This morning, newspapers are reporting a rumor that suggests a human error caused the market to go down. To quote: “Even though there are legitimate factors to market jitters, such as the Greek debt situation, it’s widely believed that a trader’s error—typing in a “b” instead a “m,” creating a trade for $16 billion instead of $16 million—spurred the sell-off.”
The hyper-connected market responded in milliseconds causing a loss of billions of dollars in a matter of minutes. The networked age, more than others, can be particularly unforgiving.
Even outside the Internet, we live in a world of networks. We were served a reminder of our connected world during the Northeastern Blackout of 2003, an evening when I couldn’t see the face of the person mugging me in New York City.
The next morning the sun dawned with an illumination for many: even the world’s greatest city in the world is not invulnerable to an outage. They happen. And as any CIO worth her or his salt will tell you effective disaster management starts with recognizing that disasters happen, and planning for scale and availability.
The Northeastern blackout was in no way an isolated incident. In our networked world, hardware and software rates are non-negligible and increasing. They have a severe impact. The Yankee Group estimates that one hour of downtime can cost an organization up to $4.5 million – the figure is exponentially higher for powerhouses like Walmart and Amazon.
With so many points of failure, systems cannot be entirely modeled for reliability analysis. It’s especially difficult to predict failures in advance.
And it’s not just the machines that are to blame. Human error by system operators during system maintenance and upgrades are a major cause of system failures. It’s important that we view these disruptions as inevitable incidents that have to be coped with – rather than problems that can be solved.
Here are some pointers for coping effectively with outages:
- Recognize that they will happen.
- Emphasize recovery from failures rather than failure-avoidance
- Like hardware, datacenters are single points of failure. When you design systems, do so with this vulnerability in mind.
- Isolation and Redundancy are key. A failure in one component should not affect the rest of the system.
- In the event of an outage or failure, you should be able to add new systems while increasing performance at a proportional rate.
By taking these simple precautions, companies, cities and entire countries can plan effectively for failure. It’s the very least they can do.
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| The Pontiflex CPL Blog | Domain Mapping (blog.pontiflex.com) | June 6, 2010 | Upgrade |
Arun Krishnan
Jason Penta
zlasker
Roshan Bangera
Jordan Cohen
eadlman
Geoff Grauer
Jerrie Gullick
Jon Beardsley
Nick Herman
Stacy Huggins
Tiffany Sumner
Avantika Banerjee
Daniel Egan
Lisa Khan
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