Social responsibility and privacy erosion

My colleagues and I had a discussion on why academic medical centers would never adopt Gmail this morning. I then missed an appointment and had a chance to catch up on Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram from April 15, 2010. I would like to quote Bruce Schneier:

"With all this privacy erosion, those CEOs may actually be right -- but only because they're working to kill privacy. On the Internet, our privacy options are limited to the options those companies give us and how easy they are to find. We have Gmail and Facebook accounts because that's where we socialize these days, and it's hard -- especially for the younger generation -- to opt out. As long as privacy isn't salient, and as long as these companies are allowed to forcibly change social norms by limiting options, people will increasingly get used to less and less privacy. There's no malice on anyone's part here; it's just market forces in action. If we believe privacy is a social good, something necessary for democracy, liberty and human dignity, then we can't rely on market forces to maintain it. Broad legislation protecting personal privacy by giving people control over their personal data is the only solution."

Bruce concluded that only legislation will work. I think that's only partially true. People can waive their rights and give away or sell their privacy and that will always be legal. Social Responsibility exists in the corporate world and exists alongside market forces. I think about this from the perspective of the 'corporate' world and the 'consumer' world. In the corporate world we have lot's of privacy (at least between the corporation and outside, not necessarily with each other) and most corporations and public entities are strongly in the camp of "We can't loose control of our data, thus we can't use GMail", etc. What this does, is leave the GMails and Facebooks of the world with no powerful rudder to counteract their tendencies to make money through erosion of privacy. By large public institutions and powerful private organizations 'opting' out of the 'social internet' of GMail and Facebook, we leave the consumers to deal with those entities on a one by one basis. That's why Bruce thinks we need legislation - individuals are relatively powerless and he believes that public/private organizations will not act on their own with profits at stake. I think that large public and private entities must directly engage with the consumer social networks by using them and demand privacy and pay real dollars for it to be delivered, thus providing a counter incentive for profit from erosion. That would be social responsibility and 'good will' for these organizations. It might even lower their IT costs. And our tax supported public institutions should not even need an incentive to do this, they should be acting in our interests.

I think that large organizations not engaging with the social internet by using it internally is counter-productive and will make the public/private security cocoon more porous. Privacy erosion will get worse and public and private institutions more prone to data loss from inside. Since consumer internet technology is in daily use by employee's (by definition, the consumer) and we already know how powerless corporate IT has been in stopping these technologies from getting used at work, A growing gulf between privacy expectations and behavior is developing between the organization and it's people. Corporate technology can and will continue to 'divorce itself' from the social internet technologies, by delivering the firewalled, vpn'd, streamed and virtualized application container on top of consumer technology. This direction will consume lot's of corporate IT energy and dollars. It will not stop the erosion of privacy and it will not stop the release of 'confidential' data. Enforcement of data privacy regulation, in the face of massive corporate profits to be made from loss of privacy will be an order of magnitude harder than enforcing the drug laws. I think we all know where drug enforcement has led us. Right now, the University of Michigan has banned all sponsored travel to Northern Mexico because of drug violence.....what a great outcome....Image similar outcomes with data privacy....

I am speechless

I can't even muster up a response to this from the house side of S. Dakota:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the House of Representatives of the Eighty-fifth Legislature of the State of South Dakota, the Senate concurring therein, that the South Dakota Legislature urges that instruction in the public schools relating to global warming include the following:

(1) That global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact;
(2) That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect [sic] world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative; and
(3) That the debate on global warming has subsumed political and philosophical viewpoints which have complicated and prejudiced the scientific investigation of global warming phenomena; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Legislature urges that all instruction on the theory of global warming be appropriate to the age and academic development of the student and to the prevailing classroom circumstances.

High CO2 reduces roundup effectiveness http://goo.gl/652N

I encourage everyone to download and read the climate change report put out by the US Global Change Research Consortium.

http://goo.gl/652N

Here is an excerpt:

"Controlling weeds currently costs the United States

more than $11 billion a year, with the majority

spent on herbicides;241 so both herbicide use and

costs are likely to increase as temperatures and

carbon dioxide levels rise. At the same time, the

most widely used herbicide in the United States,

glyphosate (RoundUp®), loses its efficacy on weeds

grown at carbon dioxide levels that are projected

to occur in the coming decades (see photos below).

Higher concentrations of the chemical and more

frequent spraying thus will be needed, increasing

economic and environmental costs associated with

chemical use."

Too little time is the reality

Or not enough time....So how do things end up taking so much time.......

First, understand that what I am talking about is a complex system with 100's of components and 1000's of technical details, i.e. a medium size IT operation.....

The system is complex because there are dependencies among the components. The Network infrastructure is really a lot appliance computers dedicated to networking, with often remote services from outsource providers. Storage is often handled centrally by a SAN or a NAS and there are usually multiples of them at various stages of life cycle. Then there are other shared resources, authentication servers, time servers, database servers......some can be outsourced as well.

Each of these groups have multiple parts or future possibilities: speed, size, expandability, power consumption, space consumption, robustness, life cycle (depreciation) and technical compatibility with other components.

Here is an example of what I mean.

We want to expand one type of storage. This storage needs to be in a specific location because of networking constraints. That location has space but no power available. There is a set of servers in the space that are being retired and eventually replaced by servers in another location. That's where the power will come from, retiring these servers. To do that we need to schedule downtime with the users. Their next window is three weeks out. In the mean time, we realize that this server we are moving can't move because it's dependency on a local SAN storage is not moving with it. That's not moving because another server is using it that can't move in the same time frame. We now have to schedule a replace storage expansion at another location. That's going to put us beyond the first three week window, and the next window is a month away. So can we get this storage expansion (not the same storage as we started with) done before the next downtime window? And guess what? We are back to the beginning of this process, but with a whole different objective. And on it goes.....

Catch-up

Well, it was bound to happen. I have really slacked off in my postings. Am I just lazy, not inclined to on-line rambling, or something else?

Reason #1 is in the eye of the beholder.
Reason #2 is clearly not true, once I get started I perhaps ramble on too much.
Reason #3 has some legs in it.

I never really made my mind up what I was going to be when I grew up. Here my progression:

Starting off in college I was going to be an academic in abstract math and logic. During the idealistic late 60's I changed that to being an academic in real world changing (ecology and resource planning). My research agenda started with the quite modest goal of understanding how humanity came to be where I perceived us to be, on the precipice of self-destruction. To understand humanity I thought I needed to start with Australopithecus and work forward. Needles to say, I didn't get very far before being embroiled in the hot debates of the day:

Were Proanthropus and Australopithecus different species or just different ends of genetic expression?

Nature versus Nurture

Did language cause evolution or is it a consequence of it?

Gee what fun, now I had to understand just what a species is. Start with Darwin and LaMarck, switch over to paleo-botany and try to understand the Cretaceous angiosperm explosion.

Try to understand humanity from the inwards direction, study religion and psychology.

Go to talks by Noam Chomsky to find out about language but instead find out about another view of the politics of the day.

Okay, Okay, enough already......but you can see the pattern there. Lot's of research, forks in all different directions and pretty soon you run out of patience and time. In today's academic world, you can't be an expert in the big picture, you can spend an entire career on very narrow fork in the road.

So this continues to this day. I have a lot of things I would like to blog about, but I just have to do a little bit more research down this avenue, what I find there just might change everything I want to say.......but the avenues never end and side roads are abundant and the obscure lanes and alleyway's look enticing.

Stay tuned, I think I see some light up ahead.

The Obsolete Blues

After struggling for over a year to get a VMWare solution up and running robustly and then priced out for a recharge service, I find that our central IT group has done the job already and for not much more than we can do it for. Thus, there is really no reason to be in this particular business.

I did see this coming, it is pretty clear that cloud computing is the real next wave. VMWare is what established IT shops do, and will do, to make those 'private' clouds.

The real cloud computing outside of the private world, will be based on higher level abstractions than the Operating System. Since I have been an advocate of abolishing any user interface into an operating system (after all, are we not really trying to perform application logic?) it should come as no surprise that I would also advocate for cloud computing using interfaces or API's well above the operating system.

What people are going to want at the most primitive level is going to be Ruby on Rails servers, PHP servers, Java servers or some other programming abstraction (Hadoop?). Then they are going to want data management, but not file managment, I mean contextually relevant data management. That could be via database systems or it could be via something else. This is the developer level access to clouds.

But what even more people (non-developers) are going to want are applications that just work and do useful things. Contact managment systems, billing systems, mail systems, customer relationship systems, social networking, media sharing and purchasing, etc.....

So, my new career, should I choose to accept it, will most likely be trying to show end users in academic research, how to get what they want out of clouds. I would like to think that I will be part of building a private/public cloud to facilitate the transition, but I don't think that a group of my size can ever effectively be in the infrastructure business. I don't know what I was ever really thinking in trying to do that anyway....vanity maybe.

Everything you know is wrong (again)

More people are finding me on facebook now than twitter. I still don't really know how to effectively use facebook or twitter, so I continue to write this blog since writing lots of words, whether I succeed at communicating or not, is what I seem to be good at.

Yesterday, I signed the petition to encourage my federal representatives to support the use of VISTA as the core of a proposed new bill "Health Information Technology Public Utility Act of 2009"

Many, in the technical communities I travel in, find VISTA's core use of MUMPS as reason enough to ignore it. This is because MUMPS is an 'old' technology and everyone knows that old technology can't be as good as 'new' technology. Or at least we have built a market based on that, with computers 'lasting' just 3 to 5 years before they need to be replaced. That sort of technological imperative thinking is just too simplistic for me anymore.

(Bet you were wondering if I would get back to the title of this post :)

So, what else do we know that's wrong? One thing that really strikes me is the nearly universal notion that 'we have to get this economy back on it's feet'. I take that to mean, at it's simplest, that we need to get back to the way things were! You can see this everywhere: Banks are now making money so those high paid executives who created that innovative engine of growth, financial derivatives (say sub-prime mortgage's), need to be rewarded again. The automotive market simply has to re-structure itself for lower operating costs, as if alternative living, working and transportation arrangements that are demonstrably better along many important dimensions (health, energy consumption) no longer need to be encouraged. Finally, we need to spend a lot more 'stimulus' money to get all those retarded health care practitioners to adopt the latest technology.