Intel and AMD Think Outside the Box

Everyone in Washington DC is indoors today because of the season’s first snow, or venturing only within an easy snow-shovel’s carry from the front door. DC always comes to a near-halt with even a dusting of snow, so with a foot or more last night and today, folks are immobile.  Here are my photos of our snow fun today, and below to entertain the snowbound I have three separate videos of innovation from Intel, Microsoft, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

IPsec, IPv6, and Security at Your House

Just had a great meeting in Redmond introducing some government friends to Steve Riley, one of Microsoft’s “technical evangelists” on security – network, app, data security and most of all, IP security.  He’s great at the big-picture integrated view of security, including physical security right up through the IP stack – here’s a video of a recent talk he gave at Microsoft’s TechNet called “The Fortified Data Center in Your Future.”

Check out his blog and you’ll see the kind of topics he works on; just one example of obvious value is a recent post full of real-world down-to-earth security advice for securing your environment at home (home networking, email use, internet browsing, etc for family and friends).

Oh, he’s also been on Twitter for almost a month now, where he mixes interesting finds on security news with offbeat political commentary 🙂  Yet another example of some of the bright people I meet back at the mothership in Redmond….

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A Roadmap for Innovation – from Center or the Edge?

Fact:   In marking its five-year anniversary earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security released a fact sheet touting the department’s accomplishments in that time, including “establish[ing] the Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) to provide a 24-hour watch, warning, and response operations center, which in 2007 issued over 200 actionable alerts on cyber security vulnerabilities or incidents. US-CERT developed the EINSTEIN intrusion detection program, which collects, analyzes, and shares computer security information across the federal civilian government. EINSTEIN is currently deployed at 15 federal agencies, including DHS, and plans are in place to expand the program to all federal departments and agencies.”

Analysis:  I’m not going to write, in this post at least, about US-CERT and EINSTEIN in particular. I will point out that some writers have been skeptical of “Big DHS” progress on cyber security up to now, and the anniversary was an occasion for much cynical commentary. 

Charles Cooper in his popular Coop’s Corner blog on CNet wrote that “when it comes to network security, DHS appears to be more of a wet noodle than even its sharpest critics assumed… Talk with security consultants and former government officials involved with DHS and you come away wondering what these folks do all day.”