Microsoft Adds ‘Big Boobs’ to Linux Kernel

Microsoft has contributed thousands of lines of code to the Linux kernel, the open source software at the heart of the widely used Linux operating system. And now, the software giant has contributed some controversy too.

Sometime over the past few years, as Microsoft beefed up the Linux kernel with code related to its Hyper-V virtualization software, one unidentified developer needed a name for a piece of code used by the software, and for some unknown reason, he went with this: 0xB16B00B5.

That’s leetspeak for “Big Boobs.”

Red Hat kernel developer Matthew Garrett is not impressed. “At the most basic level, it’s just straightforward childish humour,” he wrote on his blog. “But it’s also specifically male childish humour. Puerile sniggering at breasts contributes to the continuing impression that software development is a boys club where girls aren’t welcome.”

Microsoft apologized for the “offensive string” on Friday. “We have submitted a patch to fix this issue and the change will be published in a future release of the kernel,” the company said in an e-mailed statement.

That patch could cause trouble for developers who use Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, which is based on Hyper-V, Garrett said in his blog post. “It’s especially irritating in this case because Azure may depend on this constant, so changing it will break things,” he wrote. “So, full marks, Microsoft. You’ve managed to make the kernel more offensive to half the population and you’ve made it awkward for us to rectify it.”

Microsoft has become a big-time contributor to Linux as it tries to make its VMware-alternative, Hyper-V, a legitimate platform for Linux applications. Hyper-V is a way of running many virtual servers — machines that exist only as software — on a single physical server.

In April, the Linux Foundation said that after adding all that Hyper-V code to the kernel, Microsoft was one of the top 20 contributors to Linux. Developers there contributed 1 percent of the new Linux kernel code between October 2011 and January of this year, the Foundation said.

Microsoft developer K. Y. Srinivasan has contributed much of this Hyper-V code, though it’s not clear who came up with Big Boobs. He didn’t respond to messages Friday.

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NoSQL Rebels Aim Missile at Larry Ellison’s Yacht

Larry Ellison’s yacht was built on good-old-fashioned relational databases. But the NoSQL movement wants to rock it. Image: Flickr/PlanetStar

In Silicon Valley and beyond, a new kind of database is rising. Dubbed “NoSQL” by its proponents, it sprang out of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other web giants, who used it to run their massive online operations. But now it’s moving into the rest the world, backed by a growing number of startups.

Unlike traditional relational databases from the likes of Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM, NoSQL databases are specifically designed to store massive amounts of data across an enormous number of servers. They don’t give you quite as much control over the data as a relational database, but because they don’t follow fixed schema, they can also provide an added degree of flexibility — and they can get you around the hefty licensing fees charged by the Oracles and Microsofts.

Eyes Wide Open

Matt Asay

According to analyst firm The 451 Group, the market for NoSQL databases is growing at a torrid 82 percent compound annual growth rate, with a startup called 10gen pushing the open source MongoDB database, the Texas-based DataStax putting its weight behind the Cassandra database developed at Facebook, and others backing software such as CouchDB and Hbase. Increasingly, traditional enterprises are learning that NoSQL databases can actually handle the majority of even traditional database workloads.

The big guys are doing their best to suppress this uprising, but they’re vulnerable — none more so than Oracle.

It’s not time for Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to sell his yacht. At least not yet. Though leading NoSQL database MongoDB is the second most in-demand technology skill on Indeed.com, it and every other NoSQL technology is a comparative pygmy when stacked against the demand for Oracle relational database management system (RDBMS) and Microsoft SQL Server skills.

But if you look at relative growth in demand, Oracle and SQL Server are rounding errors, as is yesterday’s heir apparent to the SQL throne, MySQL.

Ellison isn’t one to get rattled easily. After all, this is the same guy that pooh-poohed cloud computing for years and has deprecated threats from infrastructure partners like Red Hat. When you’ve got billions to spend, you can buy relevance even when you can’t build it.

That’s the hope, anyway, as Oracle certainly seems incapable of building a winning NoSQL strategy. Though you’ve probably never heard of it, Oracle does, in fact, have its own NoSQL database, which it says is great for online display advertising and mobile social gaming. Unfortunately, Oracle apparently can’t point to a single customer in either segment for its NoSQL product. This might be because Oracle presents (PDF) its NoSQL technology as inextricably linked to its more expensive RDBMS: “Complementing the Oracle NoSQL architecture is the Oracle RDBMS that is critical to the overall solution.”

How comforting.

So perhaps Oracle will eventually buy a leading NoSQL vendor and hope to corral its community, the way the company has done with MySQL, with largely positive results. In the meantime, however, Oracle more than most is essentially locked out of the NoSQL game in ways that IBM and Microsoft aren’t, with long-term negative effects for its core RDBMS business.

Microsoft, after all, has been actively partnering with NoSQL upstarts like 10gen, not to mention talking up the technology with developers. IBM, for its part, not only is doing its own Oracle-esque blocking-and-tackling of NoSQL by incorporating some of its functionality into DB2 in a nod to developers, but has the benefit of being fueled in large part by services dollars, which services can be around its own DB2 technology or third-party NoSQL technology.

Oracle lacks such a services arm, and it has so much invested in SQL through its core database business, along with its acquisitions of BerkeleyDB and MySQL, that it will be difficult for the Redwood Shores giant to truly embrace NoSQL.

Meanwhile, in textbook Innovator’s Dilemma fashion, NoSQL has started off as optimized for web applications but is quickly becoming more than good enough for a wide array of enterprise applications that have traditionally been built with relational databases. NoSQL databases are unlikely to handle complex transactional workloads in the near future, and VMware’s Dave McCrory suggested to me that a traditional RDBMS will always be required in 15 to 20 percent of workloads.

But this still leaves the vast majority of database workloads open to NoSQL cannibalization.

So what happens when an enterprise discovers that open-source and free Cassandra or CouchDB or Riak or MongoDB, brought in to handle an intranet application or an commerce system, is also good enough (and dramatically cheaper than Oracle’s RDBMS) for a few projects slated for Oracle? As 10gen president Max Schireson notes of his company’s MongoDB customers, they’re almost certainly going to buy more MongoDB. Lots more:

“I want to save a customer millions of dollars and charge them a modest fee,” Schireson says. “Why? Because when that happens they’ll be aggressively looking for the next place to use MongoDB. They will tell their friends not just about how great the product is, but how easy 10gen is to deal with and what great value we provide. Short term revenues may be less, but if this makes the business grow faster over time revenues will be much higher.”

Given that roughly 60 percent of the world’s databases are operational in nature, this will happen all the time, even in the traditional, stodgy enterprise. There are many applications currently reliant on relational databases that would be better served by NoSQL databases. Soon they will be.

This will start to accelerate given that developers increasingly drive enterprise technology decisions, and those developers are opting for NoSQL. Oracle may own yesterday’s database administrators, but it’s losing tomorrow’s database developers.

This same trend impacts Microsoft and IBM, but both are hedging much more effectively than Oracle. And while I’m not expecting Oracle’s revenues to drop off a cliff, especially given the long-term maintenance contracts it has in place, NoSQL is cutting Oracle out of the future of enterprise computing. If that isn’t keeping Ellison up at night, it should.

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Darpa Funds Hack Machine You’d Never Notice

PwnieExpress’ all-new Power Pwn. All Images: PwnieExpress

If you saw this bad boy under your desk, would you say anything?

It may look like a surge protector, but it’s really a remote access machine that corporations can use to test security and log into branch offices. Called the Power Pwn, it’s a stealthier version of the little box that can hack your network we wrote about last March.

Hidden inside are Bluetooth and Wi-Fi adapters, along with a number of hacking and remote access tools that let security experts prod and poke the network, and even call home to be remotely controlled via the cellular network.

There’s a “text-to-bash” feature that lets you send commands to the device using SMS messages. Some customers conducting penetration tests of corporate security have been using Apple’s Siri voice-recognition software to send these messages, says Dave Porcello, the CEO of Pwnie Express, the company that makes the Power Pwn. “Basically, they are able to speak pen-testing commands into their phone.”

It’s a device “you can just plug in and do a full-scale penetration test from start to finish,” Porcello says. “The enterprise can use stuff like this to do testing more often and more cheaply than they’re doing it right now.”

Using the Power Pwn via SMS

Companies can buy the $1,295 Power Pwn and mail it out to branch offices to do quick security tests of their remote networks, Porcello says. About 90 percent of Pwnie Express’ customers work for corporations or the federal government.

The device, like its Pwn Plug predecessor, comes with easy-to-use scripts that cause it to boot up and then phone home for instructions. “It’s pretty sturdy. You can send it through U.S. mail and you can send it through FedEx and the setup is easy,” says Jason Malley, who works in alarm-system maker Tyco’s security and compliance group. “This tool really cuts down on time and expenses.”

Malley wasn’t allowed to talk about what Tyco is doing with the devices — he’s been using them for more than a year — but he says that they go over really well when he pulls them out in informal “lunch and learn” demonstration sessions. “It’s actually a really great security awareness tool,” he says, “because we can talk about things in theory. When you pull the thing out and say it’s not theory, it definitely helps and you notice things.”

This Power Pwn was developed with money from a new Darpa (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) program called Cyber Fast Track, which is trying to jumpstart a new generation of cyber-defense tools. “It’s kind of taking the tools that the hackers are using and putting them in the hands of the people that need to defend against the hackers,” Porcello says.

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Apple Erects ‘Tactical’ Data Center With Own ‘Man Traps’

Apple is adding a second data center to its 250 acre site in Maiden, North Carolina. Photo: Garrett Fisher/Wired

Apple is building a smaller, ultra-high-security data center alongside the massive computing facility in western North Carolina where it serves up its iCloud services and other online tools, according to a local report.

The Hickory Daily Record reports that the company has filed design plans with the local government in Catawba County, North Carolina, describing a 21,030-square-foot “tactical” data center where it will house clusters of computer servers.

Permits filed with the county, the paper reports, say that the 11-room facility will include “man traps” that require entry through two security doors rather than just one and that it will be surrounded by its own 8-foot-high chain-link fence — even though Apple’s Maiden site already includes its own security protections.

Neither Apple nor Catawba County officials immediately responded to requests for comment.

Opened last year, Apple’s existing Maiden data center covers a whopping 500,000 square feet, and county permits have long indicated that the company planned to erect a second building on its Maiden site. But it was unclear whether this new building would operate as a data center. The company also plans to build a 24- to 200-kilowatt fuel cell plant for powering its NC operation, and many assumed that this would be housed in the new 21,030-square-foot facility — including Wired.

According to The Hickory Daily Record, Apple’s plans put the price of the new “tactical” data center at $1,885,129. Previously, the company has said it will end up spending $1 billion on the site, which will also house a solar farm. When Apple announced the main, 500,000-square-foot Maiden facility last year, the company pegged its investment at $500 million.

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Amazon Flash Drives Put Cloud Into Overdrive

Amazon just flashed its cloud service. Image: mnsc/Flickr

You’ll find it inside the top-secret data centers that run Google. It provides extra speed at Apple, Facebook, Dropbox, and countless other operations across the web. And now, Amazon is offering it up to the rest of the world via its massively popular cloud service, letting you slip it under your own online applications — without actually installing it in your own data center.

What is it? It’s flash — the super-fast storage hardware that’s gradually replacing traditional hard disks across the web and beyond. Flash is by no means a new technology, but it’s just now getting to the point where it’s cheap enough for use across the world’s biggest data centers. And Amazon is in the business of sharing its data-center infrastructure with developers and businesses across the globe.

Amazon’s EC2 service provides instant access to virtual servers where you can run just about whatever software you want, and on Wednesday, with a blog post, the company announced that EC2 now offers virtual machines backed by flash drives, also known as solid-state drives, or SSDs. These virtual machines are intended for use with massive databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB and other software requiring that extra bit of speed.

That’s what the big boys use flash for. Facebook uses flash hardware from a company called Fusion I/O to help drive the databases underpinning its social network, and Urs Hölzle, the man who oversees Google’s data center empire, recently told us that the search giant uses flash drives in much the same way. “We don’t use it exclusively, because it’s still not competitive on a price per gigabyte basis, but it’s good for some things,” he said. “I don’t think the way we use it is that different from the rest of the world.”

But Amazon has taken things a step further by offering SSD-backed virtual servers over EC2. Previously, if you used Amazon EC2 in lieu of your own hardware, you couldn’t benefit from SSDs in the same way. Now you can.

In a blog post of this own, Adrian Cockroft — the director of cloud architecture at Netflix, whose movie streaming services runs in part on Amazon — paints Amazon’s SSD instances as important milestone for the proverbial cloud.

“That extremely I/O intensive applications can be deployed, a commonly cited obstacle to running in the cloud has been removed,” he says, referring to applications that involve the constant input and output of data.

Amazon calls these virtual servers “High I/O Quadruple Extra Large.” That’s not to confused with Double Secret Probation. What it means is that you get a virtual machine backed by eight virtual processors core, 60.5 GB of RAM, a 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection to the network, and 2 terabytes of SSD storage.

Flash is the same stuff that stores software and data on your iPhone, and that’s the biggest reason that the price has come down in recent years, according to Jonathan Goldick, chief technology officer of software at Violin Memory, a Silicon Valley outfit that sells large flash storage devices to businesses for use with databases and other software with the need for extra speed.

As prices have dropped, the technology has not only juiced performance inside Google and Facebook, it has slowly moved into cloud services as well. Amazon was already using flash drives underneath its new DynamoDB service, which provides online access to databases built by Amazon, and Microsoft is using flash drives with its new Windows Azure Storage service, a means of storing massive amounts of files.

But Amazon’s latest offering is a little different. In providing virtual machines backed by flash, you can use flash with more than just DynamoDB or file storage. You can use it for, well, almost anything.

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