Sun Set?

Well, it's Monday. The parking garage was nearly full, the new screen saver my employers installed on my PC over the weekend locked it up so badly I had to do a hard reboot (ouch!) and Sun is in merger talks again, this time with Oracle. To paraphrase a lyric from Li'l Abner, it's a typical day in IT USA.

Unless you're part of the propeller beanie crowd (or a stockholder), you probably haven't paid much attention to Sun Microsystems' ongoing attempts to stay afloat in the current roiling economic waters, so here's a little background.

For what seemed like years, Sun had been in increasingly troubled merger talks with IBM, much to the alarm of many in the IT community, who saw it as a threat to both Sun's Solaris operating system and its Sparc hardware line. The deal would also have given IBM control of a majority (65%) of the world's UNIX servers - also a cause of unease.

The new deal with database giant Oracle would appear to set some of those fears at rest while raising others - mostly regarding the popular open-source database MySQL, which Sun acquired just last January. As Computerworld columnist Sharon Michlis mused in her April 20th column:

As MySQL becomes more successful in pushing into the enterprise, can Oracle executives resist seeing the open-source database as a threat to its own high-performing, capable but more costly offering?

All of this may seem pretty abstract to anyone who isn't involved in corporate IT or database development and I suppose it is, if viewed in isolation. As yet another example of the trend towards corporate mergers, however, it's disturbing. Competition is what makes capitalism work. The fewer companies there are competing for business, the less concerned they have to be with offering a quality product at a fair price and the more likely they are to come to Capitol Hill, platinum cup in hand, begging for bailouts.

We've already seen what happens when companies become “too big to fail”. Isn't it about time Federal regulators started enforcing anti-trust laws that were created to keep our capitalist system healthy in the first place? The merged Oracle/Sun entity might look healthy now, but then so did AIG and Citicorp.

Mad Tea Party

Well, tax time has come and gone, so one hopes that we've heard that last of this Astroturf “tea party” movement - unless Faux News decides to continue sponsoring it as aggressively as they have to date.

I won't bore you with the details or why it's all so stunningly hypocritical to see a bunch of middle-class white folks whining about paying the taxes that make their comfortable middle-class life possible. Besides, the picture accompanying this rant neatly labels some of the things taxes pay for and without which the protestors would have been, as they say, SOL. As they say in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

What does this have to do with technology? Quite a bit, actually.

To begin with, the Internet - that world-wide network of networks that makes it possible for you to read this and for the tax protesters to organize and distribute their grievance lists - exists only because tax dollars were spent to create its foundation.

Yes, kids, the Internet - that Holy of Holies for the libertarian, “all government stinks” movement - began life as a government-funded project called ARPANet in the 1960s. Initially built by BBN with Defense Department funds, the nascent network had only four nodes, three of which were at public (as in “taxpayer funded”) universities. It would be decades before it grew robust enough to stand on its own and attract tons of venture capital.

There's nothing surprising about this. Basic research - the intellectual heavy lifting that must precede any big technological advance - is always expensive and rarely yields a short-term payoff. It's the sort of thing that governments do well and that business, with its myopic focus on the short-term bottom line, no longer does at all.

If the Tea Party crowd had its way, none of this would happen and we'd all be worse off for it. Heck, according to some analysts, we're already pretty far down that increasingly ill-paved road already thanks to eight years reckless spending on unnecessary foreign adventures coupled with a steady decrease in funding for research.

In his Principles of Economics Gregory Mankiw (former chairman, ironically, of Boy George's Council of Economic Advisors) notes: "To get one thing that we like, we usually have to give up another thing that we like. Making decisions requires trading off one goal against another."

You like having police and fire protection, roads, bridges, water and sewer service, a functioning court system, an ever-expanding prison system, disaster recovery assistance, a standing army, public education, libraries, and an entire regulatory infrastructure to discourage fraud and enforce contracts? Well, you can't have all that without giving up something else you also like (money) at tax time - especially when you combine all those things with multiple wars of invasion and occupation.

So the next time you get an email whining about taxes, remind the sender that taxes are what made it possible for the email to be sent in the first place. There's no free lunch. Deal with it.

Son of Chinese Rock

He's baaack!

Yes, dear friends, the Technology Curmudgeon has returned from a long hiatus (largely due to activities centered in the other half of his brain) to once again remind you that inside of every InfoTech silver lining (or Silverlight, for that matter) is a big, dark cloud.

This time it's a cloud I warned you all about two years ago. Then it was an ominous thunderhead. Now it's starting to look more like Hurricane Katrina. And we're just about as well prepared for it.

I refer, of course, to the ongoing cyberwar between the USA and China.

No, you probably haven't read about it in the corporate media. Sure, you might have noticed, down around the third or fourth paragraph, a mention of the fact the recent conficker worm likely originated in China. But for the most part it's only infosec professionals who are aware of the fact that China-based attacks against domestic targets, public and private, have been going on for quite some time now.

That may be about to change. As reported in the April 8th Wall Street Journal and Computerworld: “[c]yperspies from China, Russia and elsewhere have gained access to the U.S. electrical grid and installed malware tools that could be used to shut down service”.

As the WSJ article states:

The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

"The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid," said a senior intelligence official. "So have the Russians."

The espionage appeared pervasive across the U.S. and doesn't target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official. "There are intrusions, and they are growing," the former official said, referring to electrical systems. "There were a lot last year."

Many of the intrusions were detected not by the companies in charge of the infrastructure but by U.S. intelligence agencies, [emphasis added] officials said. Intelligence officials worry about cyber attackers taking control of electrical facilities, a nuclear power plant or financial networks via the Internet.

Authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components, the senior intelligence official said. He added, "If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on."

Officials said water, sewage and other infrastructure systems also were at risk.

Oh, frabjous day.

Let's see where we stand now. Pretty much all of our manufacturing is now done in Chinese sweatshops. China has been keeping our spendthrift economy afloat by buying dollars. US firms are shipping IT jobs and infrastructure to China as quickly as possible with, ironically, enthusiastic support from the likes of the WSJ. And now they might have a stranglehold on our power grid, thanks in part to lack of attention to security by power companies.

Or, as the WSJ puts it: “The growing reliance of utilities on Internet-based communication has increased the vulnerability of control systems to spies and hackers, according to government reports.”

This is madness. Anyone who knows anything about the Internet understands that it is an inherently insecure system. Why would utilities rely on something like that? Could it be because, in the aftermath of the deregulation mania of the last decade, power companies (like other corporations) don't want to spend money on anything that doesn't promise a quick profit?

Security costs money. Sure, not securing your cyber-assets could cost you the entire business but, as we have seen recently, companies that are “too big to fail” don't have to worry about that.

So - where will you be when the lights go out?