This is interesting.  We know that Cisco routers form a large percentage of the internet traffic yet that is now about to be disrupted by Software Defined Networking (SDN).  Cisco are smartly not allowing this trend to get ahead of them and have been secretly working through a Cisco funded start up, Insieme, to remain firmy part of the new trend. One of the key drivers was when Amazon replaced a planned purchase of $1bilion of routers with an $11 million purchase supported by SDN software. Here’s What Happened When Cisco Lost A $1 Billion Deal With Amazon SDN is … Continue reading Even routers are going virtual – Insieme & Cisco

I recently noted the efforts spearheaded by the Bank of England to create a more integrated (across Banks) cyber security strategy. The Canadian Bank regulator, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) has developed this template which they will use in future oversight visits.  Frankly I find it weak, lacking breadth in its content and approach.  It is overly skewed towards black and white automatic shutdown in case of events for example.  Rather, art of the reality of cyber security lies in managing greyness and acknowledging such realities as the potential similarity of Denial of Service attacks and … Continue reading OSFI releases Cyber Security Self-Assessment Guidance

The death throes at Blackberry continue.  Cut and paste gaming of reviews at the Google Play Store are the latest.  The ars technica folks are very kind in their review here. Blackberry’s Android BBM app drawing lots of suspicious 5-star ratings A tremendous number of the reviews all contain identical or near-identical awful text, including missing commas and a painfully absent preposition: Continue reading The death throes at Blackberry continue with apparently fake reviews on Google Play Store

I’ve been using Amazon as by back up / hard drive replacement for 7 years now, most recently through Bitcasa.  So I am always interested to watch Amazon grow in their cloud services, and they just continue to exude confidence.  Now they are approved and to provide cloud services to the CIA which would require some serious diligence to obtain. Amazon reports quarterly net loss of $41M, sales above $17B, exceeding expectations It’s been a big quarter for Amazon, which saw the launch of new models of the Kindle Fire, a new Kindle Paperwhite, as well as sealing the deal … Continue reading Amazon to provide cloud services for the CIA, beating IBM

With all the attention being received by the site performance of healthcare.gov and after hearing that CGI from Canada were the developers, I thought I would take a quick look. Obviously I cannot comment on things like the reliance of this site to performance of the other sites it has to link to because I am not American and can only go so far.  However at least I can look at the registration process. I was surprised at basic errors in even in the registration process.  There are some basic issues that simple QA testing would have caught.  I have … Continue reading A quick QA test of healthcare.gov shows some very basic mistakes even in the customer registration system