networking-info

Recently I had to go to a consulate to get a visa and the consulate would only accept a USPS money order and a USPS pre-paid envelope. I went to a post office to get those. That particular post office decided to change their business hours that day to open late. I hurriedly drove to a different post office where two out of there clerks didn't know how to issue a pre-paid envelope! At personal level I never look forward to going to a post office. It invariable delays my schedule. I am met with unpleasant customer service and inefficiency everywhere. This is also true with some of the other services that I get but there's one major difference. I cannot opt out of USPS. USPS anticipates to lose about $7 billion during the fiscal year that ends in September. They even have their own conference called PostalVision 2020 where they have invited technology thought leaders such as Vint Cerf and many others to honestly and seriously look at the issues they have. The agenda is to: ...

Netflix Similarity Map In 2006 Netflix offered to pay a million dollar, popularly known as the Netflix Prize , to whoever could help Netflix improve their recommendation system by at least 10%. A year later Korbel team won the Progress Prize by improving Netflix's recommendation system by 8.43%. They also gave the source code to Netflix of their 107 algorithms and 2000 hours of work. Netflix looked at these algorithms and decided to implement two main algorithms out of it to improve their recommendation system. Netflix did face some challenges but they managed to deploy these algorithms into their production system. Two years later Netflix awarded the grand prize of $1 million to the work that involved hundreds of predictive models and algorithms. They evaluated these new methods and decided not to implement them . This is what they had to say: "We evaluated some of the new methods offline but the additional accuracy gains that we measured did not seem to justify the engineer...

Late today the FedRAMP Program Management Office released the first list of certified Third Party Assessment Organizations (3PAOs). These companies are accredited to perform initial and periodic assessment of cloud service provider (CSP) systems per FedRAMP requirements, provide evidence of compliance, and play an on-going role in ensuring CSPs meet requirements.  FedRAMP provisional authorizations must include an assessment by an accredited 3PAO to ensure a consistent assessment process. he initial set of 3PAOs announced today are (see http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/131991 ): Organization POC Name POC Email COACT, Inc. Brian Pleffner bpleffner@coact.com Department of Transportation (DOT) Enterprise Service Center (ESC) Douglas Holland doug.holland@faa.gov Dynamics Research Corporation (DRC) Preston Gale pgale@drc.com J.D. Biggs and Associates, Inc. James Biggs james@jdbiggs.com Knowledge Consulting Group, Inc. Sherrie Nutzman sherrie.nutzman@knowledgecg.com Logyx LLC Robert Du...

Last week the GSA FedRAMP Program Office released the latest version of the cloud computing Security Assessment Plan (SAR) template.  This document is the most recent step toward the Federal governments goal of establishing FedRAMP initial operating Capability by June 2012. The Federal Risk Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for Cloud Service Providers (CSP). Testing security controls is an integral part of the FedRAMP security authorization requirements and enables Federal Agencies to use the findings that result from the tests to make risk-based decisions. Providing a plan for security control ensures that the process runs smoothly. This document has been designed for CSP Third-Party Independent Assessors (3PAOs) to use for planning security testing of CSPs. Once filled out, this document constitutes a plan for testing. Actual findings from the t...