Monday Aug 20, 2007
It was time for a little mini-vacation. For a few days last week, my family and I traveled to Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. We had an excellent trip and with views such as
these, you can easily see why! What a beautiful place to take in a wonder of nature.
Not only that, but it was a great excuse to try out my new camera.
*grin* I have a few other pictures that I will upload soon that were taken closer to home.
Gotta get back to work!
Take care,
Glenn
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Niagara Falls
Ontario
Tuesday Feb 21, 2006
Previously, I wrote about Sun's
speaking presence at the RSA security conference this year. Well,
now that this year's conference is in the books, and I wanted to share some pictures of the event with you.
The RSA Security Conference was at the Convention Center in San Jose, CA this year.
Sun installed a number of Sun Ray 170 Ultra-Thin Clients
around the conference center allowing people free access to the Internet. The Sun Rays were also featured
through the Sun booth on the show flow. One small note: if you are using publically available kiosks
such as these - please be sure to log yourself our of your sessions and close down the browser!
I can't tell you how many times I came across someone's e-mail or browser session (where they had neglected
to log themselves out). You would think privacy and security would be more of a concern for attendees at
a conference like RSA, but then again...
Here we have Mark Thacker (Product Line Manager, Solaris Security and Solaris Trusted Extensions) working
on the show floor setting up a demonstration of Solaris 10 based on his recently published
HOWTO: Eliminating Web Page
Hijacking Using Solaris 10 Security.
Sun Security Illuminati - Gilles Gravier (Chief Security
Strategist) [left] and Jim Hughes (Sun Fellow) [right] pose for
a picture on the show floor. Jim hosted a BoF session on day 1 of the show titled "Storage Security - Use
of Encryption to Protect Data at Rest".
A quick screen shot of Solaris
Trusted Extensions. "TX" (as it is affectionally known) is the successor to
Trusted Solaris 8. Instead of being a
separate product, however, Trusted Extensions will be offered as a piece of software that is layered on
top of Solaris 10. TX was announced at RSA and will
be available to customers (in beta form) in April.
Another area of the Sun Booth focused on Secure Service Oriented Architectures
(or Secure SOA) for short. Rafat Alvi gave an excellent talk on Secure SOA
to a standing room only crowd on day 1 of the conference. It was obvious that this is an area of intense interest
judging by the way Rafat was also mobbed as he manned the the Secure SOA area of the Sun booth.
The Sun booth also featured a variety of other offerings including Sun's new SCA-6000 cryptographic accelerator,
Sun's identity management and
compliance offerings, Sun's encrypting tape drive, and much more!
Back on stage, the man who needs no introduction... Whit Diffie was a speaker at the RSA Crytographers Panel.
Whit shared the stage with crypto luminaries: Ronald Rivest,
Adi Shamir, and
Martin Hellman. The panel was moderated
by Burt Kaliski.
Scott McNealy was one of the keynote
speakers at RSA this year. Scott's talk was titled "Embracing Risk and Opportunity Through Security". The
main thrust of the talk focused on the security and management challenges created by "best of breed" product
selection leading to a virtual "Frankenstein" of non-standard, non-interoperable and non-integrated silos in
the Data Center. Scott also talked about the security risks of monoculture on the desktop. One of the key
themes throughout Scott's talk was Sun(SM)
Systemic Security.
While talking about how Sun builds security into our porfolio of products and services, Scott was joined by
James Gosling (Sun Fellow, the Father of Java) who talked about security
design issues and challenges considered when designing the Java language.
Scott was also joined by Dr. Sheueling Chang (Sun Distinguished Engineer) who talked about her work on
Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Sun's
contributions to the open-source
and standards efforts in that area.
There was so much happening at RSA, there is just not enough time to write about it all. I hope
however that this can shed a little light into some of what Sun was doing at the conference!
Take care,
Glenn
Thursday Jul 15, 2004
On Monday, July 12th, what seemed like any typical summer
thunderstorm turned nasty. Apparently the storm front
stalled over the Burlington County, NJ area (including
Medford, Medford Lakes, Lumberton, Vincentown, and Southamton)
and the rain did not stop... Nearly twelve inches of rain
later...
Not only did we suffer from severe flood conditions as a
sheer result of the rainfall, but several of the dams and
bridges in the area gave way to the volume of water. In
fact, there was a cascading dam failure resulting in the
drainage of several lakes into the Rancocas Creek.
This last picture (above) shows a huge sinkhole at the top
center where once Medford Lake's primary beach ("Beach 1")
existed. To the left of the sinkhole is one of the dams that
was breached. The bike path and park to the left of the picture
were flooded leaving canoes wrapped (literally) around trees.
In fact, I saw a canoe wrapped around a tree as high as six
feet off the ground.
While we lost bridges, lakes and dams, we were very lucky.
Downstream, towns like Lumberton and Pemberton were completely
flooded and are still underwater today.
For more information on this flood, you can see:
Lakes Drained In Medford After Dams Burst
Hundreds Homeless In Wake Of New Jersey Flooding
Pemberton Residents Evacuated During Storm
