Status
Incredibly busy finishing the school thing. Posting will be this light until the 11’th or so.
( Still fleshing out the podcast idea on the back end. )
Emergent Guidance
Jeff Vail spends hundreds of words getting at how to guide emergent thinking. In essence he argues for:
- Platforms to ‘Keystone’ ecosystems.
- Engineering by principle rather than by design (Consult Wiggins’ latest post on complexity.)
- Local systems as critical.
Sounds about right, but you have to be careful not to:
- Confuse guidance for control. In a real decentralized context (marked by an equal distribution of a critical level of empowerment) a multiplicity of goals and actions will emerge. You can call this guidance, but it will actually reflect the grounding of the system – the keystone platform and the system principle.
- Get hung up on terrorism. The test for ‘flatness’ is whether or not you can adapt to all storms – literal or not.
- Think the local community is the end game. It is all moving to one.
Piggybacking On Existing Infrastructure
Strikes me as a bad idea . The implication is that you’re trying to shave off just a few cents to beat your competitors (they’re using the same infrastructure). In terms of resiliency, it’s a bad move, redundancy is critical and won’t be found in a system where all critical services are carried in the same pipe.
WordPress 2.5 = Snazzy
So far: no bugs and a sexy backend to boot. Finally as nice as it should be.
Kraken
DarkReading has the details:
- At 400,000 bots Kraken is twice the size of Storm.
- Found at 50 of the Fortune 500.
- Undetectable in 80% of infected machines.
- Regularly updates its binary.
Kraken’s bots and command and control servers communicate via customized UDP and TCP-based protocols, he says, and the botnet has built-in redundancy features that automatically generate new domain names if a C&C server gets shut down or becomes disabled. “And the actual payload is encrypted,” Royal says.