Why I am doing this MSC

Why I am doing this MSC

At its most basic I am doing this course in order to up-skill my computing skills and knowledge.

The reality is I received a BSc in Computing 10 years ago. I didn’t focus sufficiently on the course and therefore I didn’t do as well as I would have liked to. I haven’t really utilised this degree since college. This entire scenario is something I am not particularly enamoured with. I see doing this MSc in Computing as a means of rectifying this entire situation.

I have every intention of finding an area of interest within the sphere of computer science and becoming expert in it. I would greatly love if this particular topic would be an area that would satisfy my need to succeed but would also be of societal benefit.

I intend building on what I learn during this course, combined with the outside learning and knowledge attainment which has always been a keen interest of mine. Who knows what may follow.

I am doing this course with the anticipation that it will open doors that I mightn’t have necessarily planned upon, but which hopefully make life a more interesting and fulfilling place. I believe it is a means of creating opportunities that I want and need.

This is a lot less circumspect or candid than I would generally be.

Education is easily carried and at worst is an end and a reward in itself, but it can lead to much more.

The Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing

The Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing

Ruairí Ó Murchú

Computer Science Department

Griffith College Dublin

Introduction:

2 research papers related to cloud computing were reviewed; one detailing a case for it and the other describing possible security problems affecting cloud computing:

1. The Case for Cloud Computing by Robert L. Grossman (2009) – Professor of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and managing partner at Open Data Group.

Published by the IEEE Computer Society / IT Professional magazine.

1. Cloud Computing – Overview of Information Assurance Concerns and Opportunities

Produced and published by the US National Security Agency’s Systems and Network Analysis Center            (Version 1.02 18 December 2009)

An evidence based case was then made detailing the pros or the cons. In this instance the weaknesses of cloud computing are relayed.

Literature Review:

1. The Case for Cloud Computing explains the basics of cloud computing [1]. It distinguishes between clouds “that provide computing instances on demand” [1]; e.g. Amazon’s EC2 services [3] and “those that provide computing capacity on demand” [1] e.g. Google’s MapReduce [4].

It then details the pros and some cons of cloud computing, but the direction of the paper is largely in support of what cloud computing offers us:

Cloud computing offers to the user computing scaled from the use of a single PC to the computing power of a data centre, having it made it a lot simpler to access and utilise the entire resources of the data centre[1].

“Elastic, usage-based pricing models”[1] means that the end user must only pay for the use of cloud computing resources, when they require and use them.[1]  This can lead to serious monetary savings for a cloud computing client / user. There is no need to maintain a computing capacity that you might only require occasionally. “this is [truly] revolutionary”[1].

1. Cloud Computing – Overview of Information Assurance Concerns and Opportunities opens with a detailed introduction into cloud computing, explaining the “Cloud Service Delivery Models” [2] and detailing a number of examples.

The main thrust of the paper is to give an outline of information assurance issues affecting cloud computing. This principally concentrates on security weakness and issues exclusive to cloud computing or heightened through the use of the technology [2]. The aim of the paper is to educate possible users, or those considering the technology, as to the security weaknesses and therefore problems with cloud computing [2].  This is by no means a document attacking cloud computing, but it does pose a number of serious weaknesses that cloud computing presents.

Conclusion:

The arguments made for cloud computing, though dealt with sparsely in part 1 of the Literature Review are nonetheless quite sturdy.

I believe it is necessary to be fully aware of the present weaknesses or threats that cloud computing technology faces so I will detail some of the pitfalls as detailed in the 2^nd research paper, but also making reference to other sources:

All issues relate to Information / Data Assurance and the present levels of trust in the cloud computing technology.

· Integrity and confidentiality of data, in the case of many organisations is vital. A recent study has shown many CEOs and IT managers across the world do not yet trust the cloud computing paradigm over their own internal systems [5]. They fear both security threats and losing control of the data to systems they have no control over [5]. The greatest danger is from the access of a privileged user / administrator of the cloud provider would have. Cloud computing providers are presently making attempts to secure their systems from internal attack by restricting access to hardware services, ensuring rigorous accountability and auditing measures, reducing the members of staff who can gain access to data via the systems’ infrastructure [6]. Despite all this it is still a fact that those who administer these systems have the technical ability and opportunity to access customers’ Virtual Machines and therefore their data [6].

· Cloud Providers may use other providers to offer certain services. This could be termed as further stretching the “Trust Boundary” [2]. A fitting example of this being that Facebook applications employ Amazon Web Services for data storage and other ancillary services [7]. This leads to the user into the quagmire as regards how the laws in those countries where the data is eventually stored affect the security of that data[2]. Facebook discovered this with a finding against it in Canada in 2009 for breach of Canadian privacy laws [8, 9].

· There are questions that have to be taken into account as regards both data purging and data recovery. This is ensuring that data is permanently erased if necessary, or can be recovered in the case of a system fail / crash etc. These questions relate to the power of the user, being facilitated by the provider, to ensure these happen in a timely and proper way, with no loose ends [2]. Obviously a factor that has to be taken into account is whether data / operations are retrievable from a provider and transferable to another, or is it possible that the client / user will be left in the lurch if the company suddenly shuts down for financial reasons, or is under investigation etc. [2].

Cloud computing, is already in operation as Google Docs, Facebook etc and in many industrial guises. It offers simple scalability and computational solutions, which are revolutionary in their out-workings. It has weaknesses that must be addressed and attempts are being made in this direction. There are downsides, only a number of which are dealt with in this paper and maybe there will always be data that people prefer to keep under their control and won’t trust to a cloud. Information and understanding of these weaknesses offers people real decisions and in computing, like life, there are always trade-offs. Users / possible users of cloud computing need to weigh the pros vs. the cons of cloud computing and make determination which suits their situation, as regards themselves, their company or their organisation.

References:

[1] Robert L. Grossman, “The Case for Cloud Computing”, IEEE Computer Society, 2009.

[2] “Cloud Computing – Overview of Information Assurance Concerns and Opportunities” (Version 1.02), US National Security Agency’s Systems and Network Analysis Center, 18 December 2009

[3] “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)”, www.amazon.com/ec2, published by Amazon Web Services

[4] Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, “MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters”, published by Google Inc. (Research Publications) and appeared in OSDI’04: Sixth Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, San Francisco, CA, December, 2004.

[5] “Survey: Cloud Computing ‘No Hype’, But Fear of Security and Control Slowing Adoption”, 2009, http://www.circleid.com/posts/20090226_cloud_computing_hype_security/ – Article details Survey as conducted by Kelton Research

[6] Nuno Santos, Krishna P. Gummadi & Rodrigo Rodrigues, “Towards Trusted Cloud Computing”, The Max Planck Institute for Software Systems

[7] “Facebook and AWS”, http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/featured-partners/facebook/

[8] “Facebook Needs To Improve Privacy Practices, Investigation Finds.” A look at Facebook security as compared to Canadian privacy laws http://www.priv.gc.ca/media/nr-c/2009/nr-c_090716_e.cfm

[9] “Report of Findings into the complaint filed by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) against Facebook Inc. under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act by Elizabeth Denham, Assistant Privacy Commissioner of Canada”, July 16, 2009

Presentation

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Review of Reviews – Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

By Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

The basic tenet of the book is that in the modern digital age (personal) information can last forever and that this leads to many downsides. The onset of cheap mass storage allows for this, both personal and across the web. The author maintains that we must create the situation where forgetting is possible and offers solutions.

Over nearly all of human history we had inadequate means of recording all the information we amassed, so we disregarded what we believed we did not need, but not today. An example would be that today it is infinitely easier to keep 100s of digital photos rather than sort through them and select the few worthwhile pictures. The internet is the dumping ground where nothing is recycled.

People, particularly when they are younger, post pictures and personal information of themselves on social networking sites such as Facebook. When they do so, this data is launched into cyberspace, where it remains forever.                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Employers have begun utilising peoples’ internet / social networking history as a means of profiling them; e.g. as to their suitability to a job. Pictures and information can lack context. They may relate to an embarrassing incident that isn’t representative of the person and therefore provides an imperfect profile. Therefore a person’s web presence, even a deleted one (but still cached by Google), may adversely affect their day to day living.

A number of examples of the dangers of posting on the internet were included by the author:

1.      Stacy Snyder, a student teacher was refused a teaching degree just days before graduating due to a photo she posted onto MySpace of herself labelled as ‘drunken pirate’, which the awarding authorities believed was in appropriate. If this was, as stated in the book, the reason for her plight, it is frightening. (the picture seemed fairly harmless)

2.      Andrew Feldmar, a Canadian psychotherapist was refused entry to the US to pick up a friend at the Seattle airport in 2006. This was down to a border guard ‘Googling’ Feldmar’s name, which returned a 2001 article written by Feldmar in which he stated his use of LSD in the 1960s.

Personal data on social networking or any other websites, generally finds its way on due to personal choice.               –Now your private details, perhaps even incorrect details can be put on these sites by someone else, but this has always been the danger of the Internet and a slowness of international law to deal with this danger, but this is tangential to the book review.–                                                                                                                                                                                                What is not always understood is the vast amount information on us recorded by the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Youtube etc. as we search and e-buy on the Net. This information is retained by these companies for their own analysis, and use in personally focused advertising etc. but we don’t know where it will end up and to what purpose it will be used. History has shown that information in the wrong hands is dangerous.                                                   Again this data could be taken out of context; i.e. the history student who e-buys Mein Kampf and carries out numerous web searches, in order to carry out research for a particular historical project. A profile could be drawn of this individual of a modern day Nazi rather than a conscientious student.

Mayer-Schönberger argues that information privacy rights and other fixes can’t sort this problem.                              He does not believe in fear being a solution, as people limit themselves on the basis that we post very little so as to avoid future embarrassment. The very idea of the internet is the sharing of information and learning and extreme conservatism flies in the face of this.

His main initiative is for data to have expiration dates or time limits. These could be varied depending on data, but if a date was put on data and it wasn’t extended then it would disappear forever on the set date.  This, he claims, would allow for mistakes to be made, and like earlier in human history for these mistakes to be forgotten.

My View:

I believe people are going to have to adapt to this new technology. I do believe people are going to have to try to be more circumspect in relation to their online dealings. The 2 examples given by Mayer-Schönberger were self inflicted, and if the facts are as stated the rules and application of rules / laws seems to be a problem.

There is also a view that within a short period of time, a considerable amount of people will have a slightly embarrassing social networking history etc. and that we, as a whole, will be more forgiving.                                                        I agree with this up to a point, but people will always draw conclusions or attempt to draw a profile from data or information relating to someone else.

Digital expiration dates, would involve people taking time to enter information (metadata etc.) and methinks laziness and time constraints would nullify this for the most part.                                                                                                                        There are a number of products on the market that offer expiration dates and privacy controls in relation to pictures etc. These may suit professional cameramen etc. disseminating their photos to a small number of clients.                           The reality is that most people engaging with Facebook and the like are trying to share pictures and data with a large amount of people and therefore aren’t trying to severely limit their connectivity. Also there is nothing stopping someone who gains access to data with expiration date to change it. Technological barriers to this will be overcome.

I believe the book is useful in highlighting the dangers of the info we put out there into the world and what is recorded on us as we search, browse and buy on the internet. This is frightening, but not sufficiently so as to hide from cyberspace.

Our Research Methods class – this review being an exercise from it – carried out a class poll in which 18 people (60%) believed that the problems as presented by the author where incredibly serious and 12 people (40%) believed they weren’t that serious (there was a small amount of people who abstained from the poll and they haven’t been taken into account).

The reality is Google etc. will continue to mine and store info on people; it is built into their business model. People will continue to post to social networking sites, but they better be aware of the dangers. Many a Government Department, across this globe use social networking sites to check on their citizens and ensure that, for example, their co-habitation status is as they state in relation to social welfare claims etc. Private industry operates in the same mode.

In my opinion there is a huge amount of work that has to be done in relation to international law and limits need to be set as to what is stored about people’s personal information as derived from internet activity by search engine companies and internet service providers etc . This will always be offset against criminal investigation and intervention needs. Even if this is sorted there will always be well resourced governmental bodies who will store more info and for longer than anybody else.

The trouble always arises when the people who control the data are the problem.

Hello world!

Just started – We’ll see how this goes!