"Shaped like a Blogg! or a Garden hose!"

Currently on the twittrsphere there is was a debate on the value and benifits of CloudCamp:

This was quickly followed by a number of points of view, rants, and seemingly irrelevant comments.

When you look at the the “mission” of CloudCamp,

CloudCamp was formed to provide a common ground for the introduction and advancement of cloud computing

Or look at the opening statement on the homepage:

CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

Ruv (Ruven Cohen) responds with:

Whilst these are all well and good what seems to happen, from my own experience, is that a number of the louder attendees take over the sessions they are involved in either to push their product or get an answer to a specific problem (the last one in Sydney was a perfect example of that).

I think that the education part is a little tired now and there are more than a few resources online that can sufficiently educate the masses. As for furthering Cloud Computing… at this early stage, I don’t see any of it happening.

The standard format of CloudCamp is:

1. Lightening talks – Sponsor presentations that go for ~5 minutes
2. Unpanel – an impromptu panel of “experts” who get to respond to questions from the audience.
3. Unconference Breakout Session planning – attendees get to put up options for discussion and the ones with the most votes get discussed in breakouts
4. Breakout Session 1 – Topics get discussed  (groups formed and scattered around the conference facilities)
5. Breakout Session 2 – second round of topics discussed
6. Social event – normally drinks somewhere

The biggest issue is actually being able to measure the effectiveness or the value of the current CloudCamp model. As by definition it is an unconference, therefore it’s pretty hard to get a solid handle on any measurement criteria ahead of time.

With all that said, I think that they are still useful, especially outside of the U.S. where there isn’t really another Cloud Computing related conference to attend as a single place to go to see what is happening in your local market.

A couple of points where I think improvements can be made:

• Pick a theme for the event:
  • This way attendees can have a clear understanding of what they will learn.
  • It will also curb the tendancy for “Lightening Talks” to be vendor pitches
  • hopefully this will also stop irrelevant talks.
• Supply some form of online feedback ability – You can’t make it better/more relevant if there isn’t the ability to have an open dialogue with the actual community (locally that is).

</rant>

I’m slowly getting time to digest  the goodies that came out of the recent BlackHat 2010 event.

There were a number of really interesting topics covered by awesome people like Jeremiah Grossman, Robert (RSNAKE) Hansen and of course the Hoff!

One of these was Sammy K – of MySpace worm fame -  who did a presentation called “How I met your Girlfriend” demonstrating a XSS exploit to work out where someone actually is using Google’s Location services.

If you don’t know what XSS (Cross Site Scripting) is:

From Wikipedia: Cross-site scripting holes are web application vulnerabilities that allow attackers to bypass client-side security mechanisms normally imposed on web content by modern browsers. By finding ways of injecting malicious scripts into web pages, an attacker can gain elevated access privileges to sensitive page content, session cookies, and a variety of other information maintained by the browser on behalf of the user. Cross-site scripting attacks are therefore a special case of code injection.

The exploit is fairly simple. It runs an AJAX script, using an XSS exploit, to obtain the router’s MAC address and then funnels it off to Google’s Location service and gets back a set of coordinates. Once you have these you can see exactly where said person is.

He has a pretty decent, overview that is available on his site here, with functioning proof of concept code available here.

Whilst the exploit was only “tested” on a Verizon FiOS router, other routers susceptible to XSS attacks, like D-Link, Linksys, Belkin and of course CISCO, could also be exploited with a modified version.

Now if only this could be used for good and not evil. The number of times that some of my bigger customers had moved whole sites and not told people is verging on silly.

Other Links & Sources:
Sammy’s site: http://sammy.pl
XSS Cheatsheet: http://ha.ckers.org/xss.html
Definition of XSS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting

In my rush to play silly buggers with WordPress 3.0 I was silly enough to automatically upgrade all my themes, including the one I customised I’ll be trying to get it back up and running as soon as I can. In the interim, please enjoy the plain old iNove Theme.

UPDATE: most of site and customised theme is back. I want to add editing css stylesheets is not fun.

It’s official, after an eight (8) month stint in the back of house looking after new business for the delivery arm of the big T I’m moving back into a technical role.

Whilst I’ve learnt many things and worked with some great people, I really am looking forward to getting back into the thick of it, rather than watching from the sidelines. So this time next month I’ll have taken over the reigns of the Lead Security Architect for Telstra Enterprise and Government.

I have some pretty HUGE shoes to fill but I’m really looking forward to the challenge.

I got a question late last night about the applicability of Baby Giants and Jumbo frames in an environment; the use of Ethernet frames above 1600 bytes and up to 9000 bytes. This had me reaching into the deep dark corners of my memory to respond. So I thought that I’d put it up here for posterity.

What are they:

Lets start with the basic Ethernet Frame. In short, and Ethernet frame is made up of a source address, a destination address, a type field, some data (the payload) and a checksum.

As you can see in the diagram below, you have 18 bytes of header and checksum with a variable payload component that can range from 46-1500 bytes; giving you a total frame size of 1518 bytes.

Ethernet has had this frame format and payload size from about 1980 (please check the history if you want exact details) .

With the creation of Gigabit Ethernet came the ability to have bigger frames (well not really that simple, see previous link). A Baby Giant frame is any frame greater than 1600 bytes and a Jumbo frame is any Ethernet frame up to 9216 (plus header and checksum).

So why are we limited to ~9000 bytes? Part of the issue is that Ethernet uses a 32 bit CRC that loses its effectiveness above about 12000 bytes, see “32-Bit Cyclic Redundancy Codes for Internet Applications and 9000 is large enough to carry an 8 KB application datagram (e.g. NFS) plus frame header and CRC overhead.

Read more…