Wonder if Snowden gets a job looking at Sochi Surveillance Data

Snowden is in Russia.  Wouldn’t it be ironic if he got access to the surveillance data from Sochi?  

Here is a post on the spying at the Sochi Olympics.

But as is often the case, the bigger threat to visitors may be the one they can’t see. As athletes, journalists, and spectators arrive in Sochi, their every electonic move is being watched. All information transmitted in the country via phone and Internet, including text messages and e-mails, is flowing through the Russian System for Operational-Investigative Activities, according to the U.S. State Department’s Overseas Security Advisory Council. The council is warning American travelers that the system, known as SORM, has had an upgrade in Sochi just in time for the games, allowing the Federal Security Service (formerly known as the KGB) enhanced access to communications.

VIDEO: Olympic Games Begin Whether Sochi Is Ready or Not

“The system in Sochi is capable of capturing telephone (including mobile phone) communications; intercepting Internet (including wireless/WiFi) traffic; and collecting and storing all user information and data (including actual recordings and locations),” the U.S. council, which operates as a joint venture with the private sector, wrote in an assessment for its members ahead of the Olympics. “Deep packet inspection will allow Russian authorities to track users by filtering data for the use of particular words or phrases mentioned in emails, web chats, and on social media.” Of course, the terrorist threat at the Olympics is a real one, and the Russian system is authorized under local law, the report says.

There are two data centers in Sochi.  

Rostelecom Commission Sochi 2014 Secondary Data Center

23 March 2012 / Partners News

A Secondary Data Center (SDC) has been provided by Rostelecom for the Sochi 2014 Games. Its purpose is to guarantee the absolute reliability of the main information systems used by the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee offices in Moscow and Sochi.

The SDC is one of the key elements of the Unified Information & Telecommunications Infrastructure for the Games and provides the complete backup of email systems, MSDynamix ERP systems, MSOCS systems (Office Communications Server), and DocsVision documentation systems, as well as Organizing Committee catalog services. The equipment included in the SDC is located on platforms at the Rostelecom data processing center in Moscow.

 

Seems like Snowden would have a lot to keep him busy if he got access.

Pssst, M2M is hot, and the smart data center industry guys are at leading edge

I was at Wavefront Wireless Summit and the hot topic is M2M.  

 

NewImage

M2M is machine to machine.

M2M can include the case of industrial instrumentation - comprising a device (such as a sensor or meter) to capture an event (such as temperature, inventory level, etc.) that is relayed through a network(wireless, wired or hybrid) to an application (software program) that translates the captured event into meaningful information (for example, items need to be restocked).[3] Such communication was originally accomplished by having a remote network of machines relay information back to a central hub for analysis, which would then be rerouted into a system like a personal computer.[4]

M2M is hot thanks to companies like NEST that took the disconnected thermostat and connected to your mobile device, browser and the cloud.

Sitting on a panel and listening. It is really hard to surf the web and look at your e-mail when you are on a panel, so you need to listen. :-)  I realized that the data center industry with its focus on performance of the its electrical and mechanical systems for some of the smart data center guys is probably the most connected M2M solutions out there.  Data Centers are some of the youngest industrial plants.  Yes a data center is an industrial plant.  It is an information industrial plant.  And , uhhh it has a lot of connectivity, storage and compute available if the monitoring of the infrastructure was designed in.  Some of the smartest guys have whiz kids who are creating new algorithms to run their mechanical systems more efficiently, saving money in power used and the maintenance.

Listening to people who need to use cellular connections to get telemetry data from farm equipment is really hard. Is there cell coverage in the first place?  If not, you need to deploy cellular infrastructure.  Data Centers if designed for monitoring have plenty of capacity for M2M.

We don’t about M2M, but state-of-the-art data centers are huge machine to machine environments.  Including the servers themselves are sending GB of data machine to machine.  Splunk and others are doing this.

Need to think about this a bit more on how M2M and data centers should be discussed.  I’ll add category for now on “M2M"

A word view of Satya Nadella's e-mail to employees

A friend sent me the WSJ analysis of what is between the lines in Satya Nadella’s email to employees.

Commentary: Decrypting Satya Nadella’s CEO Welcome Letter

I decided to run a different analysis. What is the word count of the e-mail.  I have it below.  The one area that jumped out was the following grouping of words that came up 4 times.

4 great
4 forward
4 devices
4 cloud
4 change
4 better
4 believe

Here is the complete word list.  Make your own conclusions from staring at word count. :-)  i’ll stop after 3 words as the list gets too long.

 

53 and
39 to
38 the
34 we
30 i
23 of
18 that
18 in
18 do
17 it
17 a
15 our
13 world
13 this
12 for
11 will
11 microsoft
11 is
10 more
10 have
9 us
9 things
9 are
8 what
8 new
8 as
7 work
7 with
7 on
7 me
7 can
6 here
6 from
6 company
6 am
5 need
5 my
5 make
5 every
5 all
4 you
4 who
4 very
4 today
4 people
4 not
4 great
4 forward
4 devices
4 cloud
4 change
4 better
4 believe
4 an
3 why
3 was
3 ve
3 value
3 technology
3 software
3 satya
3 s
3 re
3 opportunity
3 only
3 one
3 next
3 must
3 mobile
3 many
3 learning
3 lead
3 know
3 innovation
3 has
3 first
3 family
3 empowers
3 each
3 done
3 core
3 ceo
3 by
3 but
3 bill
3 best
3 been
3 at
3 about

Monitoring a fix to the boiler with a remote camera

I have radiant floor heat from a gas boiler in our beach house.  It is 10 years old and starting to have intermittent problems.  Troubleshooting the right part - the air pressure switch, an adjustment, a leaking hose, the blower fan, the controller has taken me weeks to figure out what the problem is.  I finally got the problem solved.  I think, but need to keep an on the operations.  Easiest thing to do is to move a remote camera to watch the read out.

NewImage

141 degrees and working.  I have my fingers crossed that it is fixed.  At least it is so much easier to look at browser page and see it.  I could turn on the microphone if I wanted to hear the boiler, but the video is good enough.

Everyone has cameras in a data center for security.  How many of you use a remote camera to watch an area for operations?

Google's Urs Hölzle shares its cost for data center space - 15 years ago (Humor)

So many people are curious what Google pays for data center power and network.  Google’s Urs Hoelzle shares its data center cost.  It’s first bill for its data center 15 years ago.  :-)

NewImage

...

Urs Hölzle

Shared publicly  -  Yesterday 12:31 PM
 
 
15 years ago (on Feb 1st, 1999) I first set foot in a Google datacenter. Well, not really -- in the Google cage in the Exodus datacenter in Santa Clara.  Larry had led me there for a tour (I wasn't an employee yet) and it was my first time in any datacenter.  And you couldn't really "set foot" in the first Google cage because it was tiny (7'x4', 2.5 sqm) and filled with about 30 PCs on shelves.  a1 through a24 were the main servers to build and serve the index and c1 through c4 were the crawl machines.

Maybe 15 years from Urs will share what Google’s bills look like now. Can you imagine what Google’s data center infrastructure will look like 15 years from now?