Panda Security, a well known security  software company based in Madrid, has recently begun beta testing a new Windows anti-virus solution based on cloud computing.  We’re big on cloud computing and thin clients here at digitalmissive, so this warrants a few words…

Perhaps due to their Madrid location and the warm/fuzzy Panda-themed user interface, the company has had more of a US presence in the consumer space than in the enterprise - where Mcafee, Symantec, and Trend Micro rule.   However, I’ve used Panda anti-virus solutions in the past and been happy with the software - in fact, with the amount of malware coming out of Russia and Eastern Europe, I viewed their European location as an advantage.
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You have the operating system.  You have your web browser - maybe it’s Firefox or some other extensible browser running half a dozen or more add-ons.  Maybe (like me) you have the Thunderbird email client, also with several add-ons installed.  Then there’s iTunes, Acrobat, Flash, Office - not to mention all the apps you’ve installed on your iPhone.  All in, you could easily have a dozen or more pieces of software, all regularly ‘phoning home’ for updates and alerting you to install them  - it all gets to be a little much at times, doesn’t it?
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Historically, administration of the internet (that same internet that now supports billions of dollars of e-commerce) has been a remarkably communal, non-commercial endeavor, depending on a loose collection of several multinational government research agencies and non-profit corporations.  That such a non-centralized and flat coalition of groups and interested individuals could successfully manage the astronomical scaling up of the internet we’ve witnessed over the last few decades is truly amazing, yet largely taken for granted.

These days, though, one of the primary long-term trends we’re seeing is the emergence of the Content Delivery Network - in essence, a privatized internet.  The growth of these additional proprietary layers is primarily driven by technological considerations - both internet video and cloud computing are placing demands on the internet Vint Cerf could not have imagined.

However, the end result could well be the marginalization of today’s egalitarian public internet (we’ve already touched on the growing presence of proprietary content delivery networks and Google’s pursuit of transcontinental fiber here, and on the resulting implications for Net Neutrality here).

CDNs and proprietary backbone links both represent workarounds of the public internet routing structure, but there’s another part of the internet undergoing similar changes: the Domain Naming System (DNS).   While routing is all about numeric IP addresses, DNS is about mapping these unfriendly numeric addresses (such as “216.239.113.101” or “2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334” in the case of IPv6) to more human-appropriate names such as “digitalmissive.com”.  In other words, DNS is essentially a massively distributed database - yet one the fulfills an absolutely crucial function, if you think about it.

However, as impressive as DNS is, it’s also a key point of vulnerability - if you want to see what a jungle it is out there on the internet, just try maintaining your own publicly exposed  DNS server and watch the attacks launched against it (trust me on that one).  Furthermore, it’s not a very transparent system, and any changes made to a DNS record can take over a day to fully propagate across the entire system.  It only follows then, that as with routing, proprietary DNS systems would emerge, representing the next step in the ongoing privatization of the internet.  And so we have Dynamic DNS and firms such Dynect.  Dynect offers enterprises using distributed cloud computing applications a highly optimized private dynamic DNS system - including additional features such as load balancing, traffic management, and failover.  As with CDNs, all this functionality is localized to the end user via Dynect’s geographically diverse network of data centers, to help minimize exposure to the increasingly strained and messy public internet cloud.

Clearly, there are sound technological reasons for the emergence of these additional privatized layers of the internet.  As for what it means in terms of the nature of the internet itself going forward, I’m less sure.

Any thoughts?

Use Firefox?

Ever close a tab by mistake?

Ever wish you could go back to the site on the tab you closed 15 minutes ago?

Then this is for you: command-shift-T (Apple OS) or control-shift-T (Windows). Not only will this reopen the last closed tab, there appear to be an unlimited levels of undo within a given cached session (at least up to a dozen or so tabs, which is as far as I’ve cared to test). This is something I use every day, and I’m always surprised how many people don’t know about it.

Convenient? Youbetcha. I know there’s a lot of people out there tricking out Firefox with <a href=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ “>add-ons</a>, but I’m one of the vast majority for whom Firefox is fine pretty much right out the box (although I do use the OPML plug-in for getting certain RSS feeds into Google Reader).

But then again, maybe this handy little shortcut is too convenient: the other day I noticed that (unless or until a server-side inactivity timeout occurs) cmd-shift-T takes you right back into your authenticated SSL sessions, too… (!) And since it will also take you to pages you’ve deleted from the browsing history, deleting just that isn’t enough (actually, the browsing history is less dangerous than the cache, because since it’s just a URL string, any SSL sessions would have to be reauthenticated).

So let this be just another warning to delete that cache on public or semi-public machines! (I can just picture someone up to no good hitting repeatedly using this shortcut on any running instance of Firefox they come across …)

And backup your local data.

And eat your vegetables.