I don't 
think I slept a wink last night and it wasn't, for once, it wasn't my guilty conscious propping open my eyelids. Yesterday I listened to the heroic Richard Clarke interviewed by Ms. Terry Gross on Fresh Air.
You've been following the headlines since December of last year, right? Citi having to deny on the front page of the Wall Street Journal that they hadn't been hacked.
Another Wall Street Journal front pager about how our drone weapons have been hacked, probably by the folks in Iran a $29.00 software package.
Then there was all the hoo-haw about Google and China and if you still read the dead-tree edition of the NYTimes the way I do, today you saw Mr. John Markoff's name above the fold and over a story about Google being deeply hacked.
And the sound that you just heard wasn't the low-spark of high-heeled boys, it was the whole business model of cloud computing raining down on us in bits and pieces, for now.
For the past five years I would have advised anyone who might take my advice seriously (an ever-shrinking number of souls I assure you) that we should move everything we can up into the Google or Amazon cloud and let them do the driving while we pay attention to filling the till. Today, Mr. Markoff holds our attention, with his Deeply Sourced story about where, exactly, the hackers from China Penetrated Google's vault of Crown Jewels and what they brought back with them.
But it was Mr. Clarke who held us spellbound by telling us what we already know but don't face up to, the IT industry's own little Inconvenient Truth. You can listen to it here:
Clarke lays it out there pretty plain. We're all using a Dell computer or some equivalent that's been source from hundreds of countries and boots some sort of MS OS. How many people are involved in the food chain? How many "backdoors" are have been deliberately or unintentionally built into our hardware, firmware, OS and software. We've applied all the lessons we learned from discrete and process manufacturing to our IT infrastructure. And that includes the inevitability of a re-call when the gas pedal sticks or when rat poison ends up in the over-the-counter medication. --Except for this one thing: We're all driving the same model of Toyota and we all took a Tylenol from the same bottle before we got behind the wheel.
Personally and professionally, I try to maintain a fairly rich diversity of tech-culture with a strong leaning towards open source stuff, especially from the Ubuntu / Mozilla regions. And I try to take Clifford Stoll's advice to heart about changing all my passwords every three months, but I'm not a fanatic about it.
Some company (Oracle?) is going to differentiate itself by offering cloud computing that is unusually safe. That's just the way the market works. And many of us will still back up our computers to the cloud because of the economics and effectiveness. --But it's clear that a hard rain is going to fall and a lot of people and institutions will be caught outside.
