The Ghost Net

News is floating around that a network of cyber espionage has compromised computers in 103 countries and mostly in foreighn ministries and embassies. A Canadian think tank has discovered the existence. they are not absolutely sure it has been organized by the Chinese government. Evidence does point to that though. So this too is a tool in the espionage activities.

As in the real world cat and mouse games espionage, counter-espionage activities will keep growing. What botheres me though is whatever infrasructure we have now, the computers, the operating systems in them, the networks;particularly the Internet were never designed against such things. The Internet was designed to be a open forum for collaboration when it started.

I am sure as things eveolve all these will start becoming robust agains such malpractices. The internet probably would take the most time to make it really secure. Hopefully it too will become totally secure someday!

Computing Power On Tap- $1 per CPU Hour!!

Sun (www.sun.com) has announced a grid/utility computing resource. They have named it the network.com (www.network.com). Network.com is backed by a large grid of computers running Solaris10 and has a Network.com Applications catalog.

What happens is one could utilize this huge high power computing and pay for the time of actual use. That makes computing super power available to large community of users without making it necessary to buy and own large resources. Applications available cover the following right now.

• Computational Mathematics: Numerical computing, Linear Programming and Statistical computing and graphics applications.
  
• Computer Aided Engineering: Several Finite Element Analysis packages.
  
• Electronic design Automation: Spice simulation.
  
• Life Sciences:Large selection of Life Science related applications.
  
• General :3D rendering and environmental modeling packages.

The portal also allows software vendors to deploy their applications for "pay per use". They are allowed to charge a fee that they think is appropriate. Users too could upload their application.

Right now it is available to users in US only but should get extended to others soon.