Why We Should Build Software Like We Build Houses

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Architects draw detailed plans before a brick is laid or a nail is hammered. Programmers and software engineers don’t. Can this be why houses seldom collapse and programs often crash?

via Why We Should Build Software Like We Build Houses | Wired Opinion | Wired.com.

This analogy made me laugh because software doesn’t have to fight gravity or -20F temperatures or whatever else planet Earth has in store for a physical structure.  The gist of this article however seems to be that every software project should start with and needs a solid foundation of requirements.  Shout out to system engineering!

Update:  Here’s an interesting comment from slashdot and a shout out to awk.

If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
Gerald Weinberg

Trivia: Gerald Weinberg is the “w” in awk. Sadly, things haven’t changed much since back when.

Cheers,
Dave

Steam Box’s biggest threat isn’t consoles, it’s Apple

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That’s Valve’s goal for the Steam Box, its own Linux-based gaming hardware which will bring Steam’s Big Picture mode to living room televisions at an affordable price point. Valve is also teaming up with several hardware manufacturers, who are also trying to put together the most attractive hardware at the most attractive price, in order to make the PC platform’s jump to the living room as painless as possible.

via Gabe Newell: Steam Box’s biggest threat isn’t consoles, it’s Apple | Polygon.

I’d like to see more numbers.  Having Apple at the high end and Linux at the low end seems like an OK solution and everyone makes money.

How Lytro is Shifting Our Perspective on Photography

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What’s amazing is how quickly the technology is evolving. There’s no second-generation Lytro yet though it’s safe to assume the Mountain View, CA-based company is working on one. But because light field photography is mostly about computation, not optics or electronics, Lytro can make its existing camera more powerful simply by upgrading the software used to process light-field images.

via How Lytro is Shifting Our Perspective on Photography | Xconomy.

Supersized Wind Turbines Head Out to Sea

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The new turbines generate six megawatts of power in good wind. Several companies are designing 10- and even 15-megawatt machines with 100-meter blades. These blades would reach two-thirds of the way to the roof of the Empire State Building. The push to supersize wind turbines is part of an effort to reduce installation and maintenance costs, which can be far higher than the cost of the turbines themselves. The pictures in this slideshow give a sense of just why installation is so costly.

via Supersized Wind Turbines Head Out to Sea | MIT Technology Review.

Got an iPhone? You probably pay over $100 on your monthly bill

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When it comes to monthly bills for various smartphone platforms, iPhone users are paying the most, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. In a recent analysis shared with AllThingsD, 59 percent of iPhone users are paying more than $100 per month for calls, texts, and data.

via Got an iPhone? You probably pay over $100 on your monthly bill | Ars Technica.

RSA, IBM Bet On Big Data Analytics To Boost Security

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“So think of a host beaconing out to a C2 (command-and-control) site on a regularly scheduled basis,” he tells Dark Reading. “If an analyst can isolate the suspect host, they can eyeball a graph to see that they’re reaching out to this host regularly. But with a big data approach, you can create a rule that computes and analyzes the interval between sessions and determines whether we’re talking about normal human activity, or machine-generated — which is innocuous — or scheduled activity like malware might do.”

via RSA, IBM Bet On Big Data Analytics To Boost Security – Dark Reading.

I recently caught a piece of malware on a PC on my open wifi doing something similar.

Telefonica and Big Data

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In addition, he notes there are a number of analytics experiments underway at different operating units, including Vivo in Brazil, which is pushing ahead with projects around location analysis, Web navigation analysis based on deep packet inspection (DPI) data, and call center message analysis.

via . Telefonica Battles Big Data Hype

I found the mention of DPI in their big data strategy rather interesting as well as location analysis.  The kind of location analysis a telecom operator can perform on vast populations is mind boggling.

Amazon.com website briefly offline, hackers claim credit

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The group went on detail how it knocked the front door down (only Amazon.com’s front page was offline), with a large “botnet” or network of thousands of computers working together.

via Amazon.com website briefly offline, hackers claim credit | Fox News.

Interesting.  Looks like a distributed denial of service (DDOS) on the grand daddy of the data center and cloud computing industry.  Amazon was down for only 49 minutes.  It will be interesting to hear the inside baseball techie talk as to how this happened and how Amazon recovered.

Belkin WeMo remote shell and rapid state change exploit

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Published on Jan 29, 2013

Belkin WeMo with latest firmware. Able to gain full root access and send commands including changing the state of connected device via flaw in UPnP implementation. Chose a small desk lamp and simple on/off sequence due to safety concerns. Real world this could be a fan or space heater and rapidly turn on/off without limitation. Updates with PoC soon to come.

via Belkin WeMo remote shell and rapid state change exploit – YouTube.

Stuff like this amaze me.  Again.  Just because you can put an IP stack on something doesn’t mean you should!  Below is a video showing how to break in to this device that simply controls an electric outlet.  He uses Backtrack 5 to break in.   Backtrack is a very useful set of security research tools.  The video inspires me to fire up my copy and break into something.  🙂

50 Million Potentially Vulnerable to UPnP Flaws

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Between June 1 and Nov. 17, 2012, Rapid7 conducted weekly scans that sent simple service discovery protocUPnPol SSDP requests to each routable IPv4 address. In all, 2.2 percent of all public IPv4 addresses responded to the standard UPnP discovery requests. So, 81 million unique IP addresses responded and, upon deeper probing, researchers determined some 17 million further systems exposed the UPnP simple object access protocol SOAP. This level of exposure was far higher than researchers had expected, according to the report.

via 50 Million Potentially Vulnerable to UPnP Flaws | threatpost.