Google Apps For Business Gets ISO 27001 Certification

Google Apps For Business Gets ISO 27001 Certification:
Google just announced that its Google Apps for Business service has earned ISO 27001 certification. This certifies that Google is following the standard ISO information security management protocols and best practices “for the systems, technology, processes and data centers serving Google Apps for Business.”
If you’re a startup or individual user, chances are you don’t care too much about whether a company you are working with is following any of the ISO’s over 19,000 standards. This certification, however, will likely give larger and more highly regulated businesses (and the executives who sign off on these deals) the necessary reassurances that moving to Google’s cloud solutions is safe.
This ISO 27001 certification, which was certified by Ernst & Young CertifyPoint, an ISO certification body accredited by the Dutch Accreditation Council, follows Google’s previous FISMA certification for its Google Apps for Government product. Google also regularly submits itself to third-party audits according to the SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402 standard, which is quite comparable to the ISO 27001 standard.
It’s important to note, though, that this certification is not a security “seal of approval,” as security consultant Alec Muffett told Computer World UK’s Anh Nguyen, and does not “guarantee that the applications are 100% secure.” Instead, says Muffett, companies that apply for ISO 27001 certification get ” to design their own high-jump bar, document how tall it is and what it is made of, how they intend to jump over it and then they jump over it.”
Google’s Eran Feigenbaum, the company’s director of security for its Google Enterprise group, believes that “businesses are beginning to realize that companies like Google can invest in security at a scale that’s difficult for many businesses to achieve on their own.” While most of Google’s competitors focus on getting their data centers certified, it’s worth noting that Google also argues that its certification is broader and also includes its networking infrastructure and applications.
Given that all of this isn’t the most exciting news in the world – especially not on a national holiday in the U.S. – here is a video of Feigenbaum, who is also a mentalist – playing Russian Roulette with a nail gun:

The Supernovae That Burn at the Center and the Edges of Everything [Space Porn]

The Supernovae That Burn at the Center and the Edges of Everything [Space Porn]:

From Earth, the Pinwheel Galaxy looks to us like just a pinprick of light in the Big Dipper. But it's an enormous galaxy that's twice the size of our own. And in this new image of the galaxy from NASA, you can see that the Pinwheel is bursting with supernovae — the purple regions in this image highlight areas of extreme heat, where stars are exploding. What's interesting is that these gigantic explosions are happening both in the center and at the extreme edges of the galaxy's arms.

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If you are elderly and poor, prison is better than a retirement home [Video]

If you are elderly and poor, prison is better than a retirement home [Video]:

If you are in old age, with no family and little money, your options are slim if you need living assistance. More »

Revisiting why incompetents think they're awesome

Revisiting why incompetents think they're awesome:

Aurich Lawson

In 1999 a pair of researchers published a paper called "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (PDF)." David Dunning and Justin Kruger (both at Cornell University's Department of Psychology at the time) conducted a series of four studies showing that, in certain cases, people who are very bad at something think they are actually pretty good. They showed that to assess your own expertise at something, you need to have a certain amount of expertise already.
Remember the 2008 election campaign? The financial markets were going crazy, and banks that were "too big to fail" were bailed out by the government. Smug EU officials proclaimed that all was well within the EU—even while they were bailing out a number of financial institutions. Fast forward to 2012, and the EU is looking at hard times. Greece can't pay its debt. Italy can, but the markets don't trust it to be able to. Spain and Portugal are teetering around like toddlers just waiting for the market to give them one good push. Members of the public are behaving like teenagers, screaming "F**k you," while flipping the bird. The markets are reacting like drunk parents, and the resulting bruises are going to take a while to heal.
In all of this, uninformed idiots blame the Greeks for being lazy, the Germans for being too strict, and everyone but themselves. Newspapers, blogs, and television are filled with wise commentary hailing the return of the gold standard, the breakup of the Euro, or any number of sensible and not-so-sensible ideas. How are we to parse all this information? Do any of these people know what they are talking about? And if anyone does, how can we know which ones to listen to? The research of Dunning and Kruger may well tell us there is no way to figure out the answers to any of these questions. That is kind of scary.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook's Stock Rises With Choice to Turn Down $75 Million Dividend

Apple CEO Tim Cook's Stock Rises With Choice to Turn Down $75 Million Dividend:
Apple CEO Tim Cook is proving himself as much a master of employee and investor relations as he is of operational efficiency. His decisions to create a charitable matching program for Apple employees and to grant a long-pined-for dividend to company shareholders have won him a lot of favor among both groups, while putting his own stamp on Apple. And now Cook has made another move for which he’s likely to win accolades.
Cook is forgoing $75 million in dividends to which he’s entitled.
In a Thursday SEC filing, Apple announced plans to award a $2.65-a-share quarterly dividend on restricted stock units held by its employees. It’s a nice — and unusual — perk to offer (and one certain to cement employee loyalty in a very competitive talent arena), but Cook is passing it up.
From Apple’s 8-K:

At Mr. Cook’s request, none of his restricted stock units will participate in dividend equivalents. Assuming a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share over the vesting periods of his 1.125 million outstanding restricted stock units, Mr. Cook will forego approximately $75 million in dividend equivalent value.

That’s a lot of money to turn down. True, Cook is very well compensated — deservedly so, considering Apple’s performance — so he can obviously afford to forgo it. But, as best I can tell, he didn’t have to.
So Cook truly did just walk away from $75 million. Which is remarkable for an executive of his standing in an era when entitlement, greed and arrogance are so often part of the job description. Which is not to say that he’s not reaping some benefits here. There’s a lot of mileage for Apple in a symbolic gesture like this, and Cook profits when Apple’s overall value increases.
Say what you will, but this was a classy gesture up and down. When was the last time you saw headlines about a successful CEO of a wildly successful company walking away from millions of dollars that he could have just as easily pocketed?
Clearly, Cook is focused on more important and interesting things than having the biggest yacht in the harbor.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing:

This foamy snake demonstrates why blood bubbles under disinfectant [Video]

This foamy snake demonstrates why blood bubbles under disinfectant [Video]:

Ever cut yourself, have someone put a dab of hydrogen peroxide on the cut, watch the entire area fizz like something that would turn you into the Joker, and wonder, "How is this good for me?" A simple chemistry demonstration that you can do at home explains it all. Take a look at foam snakes. More »

100 Most Valuable Brands: Apple Tops Again; Nokia Disappears

100 Most Valuable Brands: Apple Tops Again; Nokia Disappears:
WPP’s Millward Brown published its annual BrandZ study, ranking the world’s leading brands, which are increasingly technology companies. According to the research house, four of the top five global brands and seven of the Top 10 are tech firms.
At $183 billion, Apple is the world’s most valuable brand, a title it claimed last year as well, though at that time the brand was worth $153.3 billion. In the ensuing year, it has grown another 19 percent. IBM ranked second with $116 billion in value. Google, which ranked second last year, this year swapped places with IBM, after its brand value slipped 3 percent year over year. With a $76.7 billion brand, Microsoft claimed fifth place, ranking below McDonalds — the only non-tech company in the top five.
The biggest year-over-year gain also went to a tech company: Facebook, which rose from No. 35 in 2011 to No. 19 in 2012. A meteoric rise, and one that spiked the company’s brand value 74 percent to $33.2 billion.
Nokia, which ranked 81st in brand value in Millward Brown’s 2011 study after a 28 percent year-over-year decline in value, fell even further in 2012. So far, in fact, that it seems to have fallen right off the chart. Not a surprise, really, given the company’s current situation. But worth noting just the same; as recently as 2008, Nokia was the world’s ninth most valuable brand.

VMware CEO: We want to make you technologically hip

VMware CEO: We want to make you technologically hip:
NEWS FLASH: Your company’s IT practices are archaic, and young, talented employees want nothing to do with you! While VMware CEO Paul Maritz didn’t come out and say exactly that, his keynote Tuesday morning at EMC World did certainly did try to drive home that point.
The “Facebook generation,” as Martiz called it, is post-PC and post-paper, and they want to experience information within the context in which they’re consuming it. And like it or not, they’re the future. They need applications that appeal to them and tools to help them develop applications how they want to.
As he has explained before, the infrastructure software that pads VMware’s bottom line is critical to this vision, but it’s just an enabling technology for new applications. It needs to become “invisible.” That means automation like many enterprises have never experienced it — even VMware.
Maritz shared a story (one he also shared at Structure last year while discussing some of the same topics) of asking some new employees who came from Google its ratio of administrators to physical servers. They ultimately came back with an answer of about 1 admin for every 1,000 physical servers. “That is the best metric of what has to happen in the data center,” Maritz said during his presentation. VMware’s ratio at the time was “about an order of magnitude off that number.”
He also beat the drum for big data, especially as it relates to monitoring these large, cloud-like infrastructures in real time. VMware has one customer, he explained, whose cloud environment generates 500 million events an hour — a volume no human could ingest much less make sense of. Much of that might be coming from the mobile devices from which employees are accessing applications, or the potentially millions of devices otherwise feeding data into a system.
If you’re going to be efficient like Google is, if you want to “be able to afford these new experiences that have to be delivered,” automation and analytics are critical.
Further up the stack, Maritz said, “you have to bake the automation into the application.” He called for policy-based management versus script-based management, and policies that follow applications as they move across resources. That means routers, switches, load balancers and other gear need to adhere to logical constructs rather than physical constructs so applications aren’t tied to a single rack or even a single data center.
The young developers building these new types of applications want new platforms and new frameworks, too, Maritz said. He highlighted VMware’s Cloud Foundry service and open source project as an example of how to enable them. Not only does it support the languages, frameworks and components that today’s programmers prefer, but it also plays well with open source ethos — even VMware commits to the open source project go through the same vetting process as external commits, Maritz said. (An interesting sidenote: Maritz said VMware’s commercial Cloud Foundry service, which is housed in the SuperNAP, is running between 5,000 and 10,000 apps at any given time.)
You can expect to hear a lot more about VMware’s vision when I speak with CTO Steve Herrod at our Structure conference next month, but the vision really expands beyond VMware. At Structure, we’ll also talk about everything from cloud computing to software-defined networks to Facebook’s Open Compute Project. It’s all part of a bigger picture around automating what can be automated and making hardware a true commodity that just serves as the home for intelligent software.
In the end, it’s the applications that matter and everything below needs to serve their needs as effectively and as efficiently as possible.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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SpaceX Finally Takes Off [Video]

SpaceX Finally Takes Off [Video]:

First it was on, then it was off. Then on, then off. Then it had a little wobble. Now, SpaceX has finally launched, making its NASA's first successful involvement with the world of private space flight. This is a momentous day for science, engineering and space travel. More »

Supreme Court Lets Student's $675,000 File-Sharing Fine Stand [File Sharing]

Supreme Court Lets Student's $675,000 File-Sharing Fine Stand [File Sharing]:

The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a $675,000 file-sharing damages award that a jury levied against a college student for making 30 music tracks available on a peer-to-peer network. More »