Since version 1 of the Glossary of event processing terminology was published nearly two years ago there has been a demand to add additional commonly used terms.  This draft of version 2  includes about 20 additional terms, a modest extension of version 1.

The draft of the proposed Glossary version 2 in pdf format is now available here for comments by the event processing community.  Your comments will be very helpful in making final decisions about what to include or not to include. Please add your comments to the EPTS forum discussion (see the EPTS link on the right). There is a simple process to join the forum if you’re not already a member.

EPTS Glossary v.2 draft full 2 February 2010 to post for comment

Companies Fight Endless War Against Computer Attacks

by STEVE LOHR, New York Times

The recent computer attacks on the mighty Google left every corporate network in the world looking a little less safe.

Google’s confrontation with China — over government censorship in general and specific attacks on its systems — is an exceptional case, of course, extending to human rights and international politics as well as high-tech spying. But the intrusion into Google’s computers and related attacks from within China on some 30 other companies point to the rising sophistication of such assaults and the vulnerability of even the best defenses, security experts say.  …

Computer security is an ever-escalating competition between so-called black-hat attackers and white-hat defenders. One of the attackers’ main tools is malicious software, known as malware, which has steadily evolved in recent years. Malware was once mainly viruses and worms, digital pests that gummed up and sometimes damaged personal computers and networks.

Malware today, however, is likely to be more subtle and selective, nesting inside corporate networks. And it can be a tool for industrial espionage, transmitting digital copies of trade secrets, customer lists, future plans and contracts. ……

Security experts say employee awareness and training are a crucial defense. Often, malware infections are a result of high-tech twists on old-fashioned cons. One scam, for example, involves small U.S.B. flash drives, left in a company parking lot, adorned with the company logo. Curious employees pick them up, put them in their computers and open what looks like an innocuous document. In fact, once run, it is software that collects passwords and other confidential information on a user’s computer and sends it to the attackers. More advanced malware can allow an outsider to completely take over the PC and, from there, explore a company’s network. … Article

See also  “Fearing Hackers Who Leave No Trace”

The Federal Communications Commission is considering aggressive moves to stake out its authority to oversee consumer access to the Internet, as a recent court hearing and industry opposition have cast doubt on its power over Web service providers.  The FCC, which regulates public access to telephone and television services, has been working to claim the same role for the Internet. The stakes are high, as the Obama administration pushes an agenda of open broadband access for all and big corporations work to protect their enormous investments in a new and powerful medium.

“This is a pivotal moment,” said Ben Scott, director of policy at the public interest group Free Press. The government wants to treat broadband Internet as a national infrastructure, he said, like phone lines or the broadcast spectrum. But federal regulators are grappling with older policies that do not clearly protect consumers’ access to the Web, their privacy or prices of service.

The issue may have reached a turning point last week when a federal appeals court questioned the limits of the FCC’s authority in a 2008 case involving Comcast. Article

by Galen Moore MHT, Mass High Tech

This morning, World Wide Web Consortium Director Tim Berners-Lee laid out his vision for how linked data will change the web, before a roomful of about 100 MIT students. Berners-Lee’s slide presentation kicked off a week-long lab in which participants are challenged to “build the next killer app” using data available through the web.

“(In the future), people browsing the web won’t just be sitting there browsing it,” said Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web as a medium for data exchange via the Internet in 1989. Instead, if databases are made open and available, they’ll run programs that will automatically seek out and find useful information, he predicted.

Data has already become more openly available in categories like mapping, government and scientific research, Berners-Lee said. He pointed to OpenStreetMap, a free, wiki world map online that, unlike proprietary services such as Google Maps or Mapquest, does not claim ownership of edits or overlays generated by users and developers.

Life sciences researchers, in particular, have made strides toward standardization of data so that it can be used outside traditional research boundaries, he said.  Report

by Carolyn Duffy Marsan, Network World

As they imagine the Internet of 2020, computer scientists across the country are starting from scratch and re-thinking everything: from IP addresses to DNS to routing tables to Internet security in general. They’re envisioning how the Internet might work without some of the most fundamental features of today’s ISP and enterprise networks.

Their goal is audacious: To create an Internet without so many security breaches, with better trust and built-in identity management. Researchers are trying to build an Internet that’s more reliable, higher performing and better able to manage exabytes of content. And they’re hoping to build an Internet that extends connectivity to the most remote regions of the world, perhaps to other planets. Read more…

In these energy conscious times, the old idea of home automation is being revived to give the householder finer control over the many devices in the home. Most proposals envisage devices (embedded systems) – such as the heating, lighting and ventilation systems – being able to communicate with each other in a wireless network. Read more…

by James Kobielus, Forrrester Research

Crafting a truly comprehensive analytics environment is a bit like staring deeply into the night sky. When you try to absorb the billions of celestial objects out there—all of them at different ages and stages in their respective life cycles–you risk driving yourself insane. Your complex field of view contains the deep past, present, and future in one glorious, glowing glimpse.

Increasingly, the complex event processing (CEP) market, as a segment of the analytics arena, suffers from this “all too much” problem. This is not a slap against the technology itself, which is mature, or the growing list of CEP vendors, who offer many sophisticated solutions. Indeed, many CEP vendors now offer tools for viewing the deep present, consisting of myriad streams of real-time events, and the deep past, in the form of access to historical information pulled from many data warehouses, marts, and other repositories. And some—most notably, IBM with its InfoSphere Streams technology–now support visualization of the deep future, through its ability to apply predictive models to real-time event streams.

The core problem with today’s CEP offerings is that many of them are power tools, not solutions suitable for the mass business market. Read on

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By Sadagopan, Enterprise Irregulars

The web is abuzz with analyses on Google’s real time search effectiveness assessed in the context of the death of an Hollywood actress today. The question there is how real time is realtime? Google has demonstrated through algorithmic means(without human intervention), the capability to report results in a search query in less than 3 mts(Read Google’s Matt Cutt’s comments therein!) after the reporting of the event! What an amazing progress shown by Google here!

Recently, Morgan Stanley brought out the fact that the mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and believes more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years – this is pushing things hard for service providers. Massive mobile data growth is driving transitions for carriers and equipment providers. This is slated to increase over time with emerging markets embracing mobile technologies much faster and pushes the material potential for mobile Internet user growth. Low penetration of fixed-line telephone and already vibrant mobile value-added services mean that for many EM users and SMEs, the Internet will be mobile. Read more…

Search giant compresses the time frame of its results from minutes to seconds.

by David Talbot, MIT Technology Review

Gradually, over the past decade, Google has compressed the gap between fresh indexing of the Web from months to mere minutes. On Monday the search giant upped the ante in time-sensitive search, saying that within a few days it will offer search results–including headlines, blogs, tweets, and feeds from Facebook and MySpace–that are just seconds old.

At the same press event, the company unveiled new search features for mobile devices. These include a prototype visual search technology, which allows snapshots of real objects, like signs and buildings, to be used as search “terms.” It also tweaked its geographic search–your GPS-derived position now causes Google to offer different search results based on location. For example: if you start a search with the letters “R” and “E” in Boston, the service will suggest various “Red Sox” search results, while the same two letters typed in San Francisco suggest the retailer REI.

However, Google clearly sees up-to-the-second search results as its most important new offering. The search giant has recently come under unfamiliar pressure from Microsoft’s revamped search engine, Bing, which also provides some “real-time” search results.

“This is the first time, ever, that any search engine has integrated the real-time Web into the results page,” Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, said yesterday in making the announcement. Report