Posts tagged System
SEO Partner Now Offers Streamlined Bulk Buying And Extra Reporting System – PR Web (press release)
Feb 6th
 PR Web (press release) |
SEO Partner Now Offers Streamlined Bulk Buying And Extra Reporting System
PR Web (press release) SEO expert James Schramko streamlines the bulk ordering process for SEO Partner and has included extra reports, available upon request. All our SEO Packages are now available at uniform pricing for both resellers and direct buyers alike. |
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Google Public Alerts: Innovative System Provides the Public with Emergency Alerts
Jan 26th
Yesterday, Google launched its new Public Alerts page, which provides emergency information and warnings related to floods, tornadoes, winter storms, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. The information for this innovative project is provided by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Weather Service, and the US Geological Survey (USGS). A user that [...]
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Extreme Scale File System to Premiere in Windows Server 8
Jan 17th
The one really big problem with file systems designed for compatibility with PCs – and by that, I mean IBM Personal Computers – truly is the “big” problem. They do not scale, and as the size of databases expands far beyond the capacity of any cluster of storage devices, let alone any single device, a new class of “sharding” technologies has had to be deployed to let fragments of huge virtual volumes to be stored in multiple systems. This is, in fact, what much of cloud storage technology is all about.
Two weeks ago, Microsoft acknowledged something it had hinted at during its Technology Preview for Windows 8 last September: It will be integrating a simplified form of storage pooling technology called Storage Spaces into Windows 8. Late yesterday in an MSDN blog post, engineer Surendra Verma, expanded on that theme by revealing new details about a very-high-capacity file system alternative for Windows Server 8, based around a modified resiliency architecture that should be in-place compatible with the existing NTFS.
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The concept of resilience, or resiliency, in system architecture is based on tolerance and failure allowance. As the number of volumes encompassed by a huge file increases linearly, the threat of the file losing continuity increases exponentially. Resilience architecture utilizes the principle that certain failures must be fully expected, so systems must be planned for redundancy and loss avoidance.
Microsoft’s new system, to be premiered in Windows Server 8 (which will be tested throughout 2012 and probably rolled out generally in 2013), is entitled ReFS. It is not, despite how its title may sound, a resurrection of the WinFS file system that Microsoft announced way back in 2003. That would have been an object file system geared for distributed search, and which the company hinted at the time could eventually render the use of Google search in the enterprise unnecessary.
ReFS is not about metadata or object storage in the sense of representing files as objects with characteristics. Rather, it’s a multi-tier system of key/value pairs represented as B+ trees, with the pairs written as tables. A main object table serves as a root index, comprised of root trees, each of which represents a storage structure.
A “file” in ReFS looks to the rest of the operating system like a file in NTFS. Inside the file system, however, the directory table doesn’t point directly to files, but instead to a B+ tree structure. That structure may be comprised of metadata tables that each point to various separate components of the file (pictured above) or perhaps to an access control list (ACL) designating access rights and privileges.
The implication here is that scaling the scope of any ReFS file, even beyond the sizes we’re becoming acquainted with now, could be a simple matter of scaling the metadata tables. In Microsoft’s new resilience architecture, the metadata that describes the identity and location of actual segments of the file – the parts containing the real bits – is never overwritten on top of itself. Or to use the company’s terminology, metadata is never written “in place.”
“To maximize reliability and eliminate torn writes, we chose an allocate-on-write approach that never updates metadata in-place, but rather writes it to a different location in an atomic fashion,” Verma writes. “In some ways this borrows from a very old notion of ‘shadow paging’ that is used to reliably update structures on the disk. Transactions are built on top of this allocate-on-write approach. Since the upper layer of ReFS is derived from NTFS, the new transaction model seamlessly leverages failure recovery logic already present, which has been tested and stabilized over many releases.”
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SEO Training SW Launches Free Video Training System Called the SEO Roadmap – DigitalJournal.com (press release)
Jan 9th
 PR Web |
SEO Training SW Launches Free Video Training System Called the SEO Roadmap
DigitalJournal.com (press release) Website owners who want to improve their organic rankings in Google and Bing, and individuals who want to begin a new career as an Internet marketing consultant, now have a powerful way to learn about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in their own homes … Quick SEO Results Show Impressive Site Jumps In 30 Days |
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Control: China Launches National GPS System
Dec 28th
The urge for control is powerful, made exponentially more so whenever two or more representatives of a government get together. Among the more prominent, and ridiculous, examples of this trend are Iran’s attempt to create a “halal” Internet (ostensibly to safeguard Muslim sensibilities, in reality to control the political thought of Iranian citizens) and the American former intelligence chief’s proposal for a “.secure” Internet in which users would voluntarily give up their Fourth Amendment rights.
Add to this China’s “national” global positioning system. This Chinese satellite navigation network will obviate the need to use the Pentagon-created and U.S.-run GPS system, which dominates location technology worldwide.
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This strictly Chinese system, according to a defense tech expert in today’s Wall Street Journal, “could help the Chinese military to identify, track and strike U.S. ships in the region in the event of armed conflict.” It has already been used to coordinate the movement of Chinese troops.
The network, called the Beidou Navigation Satellite System (BNSS), began transmitting yesterday, after 11 years of development. It consists of 10 satellites, with another six slated for deployment in the coming year. The BNSS is run by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, a state contractor serving the nation’s space program and run by the Chinese military.
Since 2009, China has been very busy launching satellites, and learning from the successes and failures of those deployments. The BNSS is not believed to be as accurate as the GPS system, but it may, in time, get there. Bedou, which means Big Dipper in Mandarin, is only the first step toward a global system, called Compass, which is slated to have 35 functioning satellites around the world by 2020.
Like the GPS system, the BNSS would also make its data available for developers. Now, if you’re uneasy with the notion of high-tech governmental scrutiny in an occasionally transparent, more-or-less representational democracy, imagine the kind of fun the government of China could have not just with a high-resolution, wide-coverage satellite network, but with that scifi scrutiny wired into a suite of ubiquitous consumer goods.
The only other GPS alternative is Russia’s Glonass. The European Union is building its own, called Galileo, also scheduled to go live by 2020.
Sputnik graphic via Bruce Irving
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Google Struggling to Create System to Comply with UK ePrivacy Directive
Dec 7th
Google has admitted that it is struggling to create a system of processes that will allow the firm to abide by new cookie laws owing to the sheer number of its products that are affected by the rules.
The cookie law is an amendment to the ePriva…
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Water Utility Control System Hacked Last Week
Nov 21st
Last week the news blogs were filled with information about a second attack on a computer-based supervisory control system (SCADA) at the Curran-Gardner Township Public Water District based near Springfield Ill. The first was the Stuxnet malware targeted at an Iranian nuclear facility that was extensively covered. We wrote about how the Symantec anti-virus researchers decompiled the malware and demonstrated it to us here earlier this summer, and how variants on Stuxnet called Duqu were also found last month floating around European networks.
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A second attack was reported by Computerworld last week based in a Houston utility.
The Illinois attack was revealed by SCADA cybersecurity expert Joe Weiss. Writing on his ControlGlobal blog he mentions the specifics. First off, the attacker’s IP address originated in Russia, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. There were various “minor glitches” in remote access sessions to the SCADA system that were observed for several months prior to last week’s attack. “The attackers are thought to have obtained the usernames and passwords to the system by first breaking into a computer belonging to the utility’s SCADA software vendor, according to Weiss and subsequent reports.
The ultimate damage inflicted on the utility was a burned out water pump. If these reports were accurate, it would be the first time someone has targeted an industrial facility in the US in this manner. That is a big “if” indeed.
A friend of mine who works as an engineer for another water company told me that they “have very secure systems with firewalls between our SCADA and office net and finance systems. The guys that have access to our SCADA system are set up in 5 layers of rights. Those with access to actually change things have digital keys that reset password codes every few minutes. I suppose that the system in Springfield could be penetrated as they say and running the pump on and off could cause damage. It’ll be interesting to see if that was the case or if someone named Homer Simpson was just eating donuts in Springfield instead of responding to the pump alarms.”
Whether the Springfield utility followed best practices in how it connected its SCADA controllers remains to be seen. While these units use their own firmware and operating systems, typically they are connected via USB to Windows PCs that can be infected with malware. That is indeed how the original Stuxnet attacks started.
Weiss points out that there is a lot of misinformation at this point. There are various agencies that are set up to share reports about these kinds of events, and that few of them have posted anything authoritative yet. And in the Illinois case, there are a variety of state and federal agencies that have to coordinate their activities to handle this kind of attack, and they are still working out the details.
Photo c/o CleanWaterWaste.com.
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SEO Consult® Develop Internal Wiki System – DigitalJournal.com (press release)
Nov 13th
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SEO Consult® Develop Internal Wiki System
DigitalJournal.com (press release) SEO Consult®, a market leading search engine optimisation agency, have recently developed a new internal wiki system that has been designed to improve industry knowledge of staff members. Based in Cheshire, SEO Consult® currently employ over 85 SEO … |
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