Newsflash. Heartland was not breached again today. Ok, I am being faecetious but there also is a very important point of truth to this post.

The CIO of Heartland, Steven Elefant, called me about my blog post the other day called “Heartland Breached Again?”. He wanted to clarify the incident and how it was handled. We spoke briefly and I am happy to admit I was wrong in my assumptions. I would like to follow the Heartland CEO playbook and say I actually was misled (just kidding) but I will take the heat for this one.

According to Mr. Elefant the real story is that Austin Police were misquoted and the press has not (yet) done a retraction.

My take on the responsibility for Heartland — the opportunity for them to step in with better end-to-end solutions — was inspired by the statement from police quoted in the news. Changing this statement does not affect my position on responsibility. On this point I was really surprised and pleased to hear that Heartland actually agrees with my post. Although their press releases did not reflect it they had offered the retailer a secure terminal to replace the system believed to be at fault. Set aside the question of who pays for such an upgrade the retailer received a secure option that goes far beyond just moving from Internet to POTS. I had assumed that nothing like this had been done. My bad. Good job Heartland.

The lesson in the breach may boil down to just much greater urgency in replacing insecure payment applications in the Austin retail area. I think that is a message Heartland can agree with.

Many thanks to Heartland for taking the time to reach out and explain in more detail. I hope that helps clarify.

Denise Dubie quotes a Gartner VP webinar in her story “Technologies that won’t be ignored”. I found some analysis did not settle well.

“We cannot consolidate desktops. PCs by definition have a one-to-one ratio,” Paquet explained. “The return on investment model is fundamentally different even though the technology is fundamentally the same and therefore will not have nearly as high the potential ROI.”

I see what he is trying to say. Every user must have a PC — sit at the keyboard and look at the screen — so there is no way to share or consolidate…wait a minute. Of course you can consolidate the PC. The system board and all its fixings can be one-to-many.

That would be old-school, in fact, and has many popular applications. It would be just like servers where IT takes a plethora of hardware and consolidates. They do not remove ALL hardware, of course, just reduce. Reducing PC technology through consolidation makes sense but Gartner says it is not possible.

Why can’t we consolidate desktops? My guess is that this might end up an argument of definition where each time I point out how PCs can and do serve in a one-to-many model Gartner might just relabel this a server model.

Another odd bit. They give facts without attribution or citation in the webinar found here. One good example:

Did You Know? Percent Power Used: Typical x86 Server 65% Doing Nothing

Who says this? Their interpretation of a “nothing” could actually include running antivirus scans or a patch management. Background processes are too easily overlooked and underestimated. Turn this around and IT could easily miscalculate performance requirements — be surprised by big charges for “nothing” services in a pay-as-you-go model. CFOs will get cranky very quickly when they are forced to pay a premium for “nothing” loads not included in the 35% estimate by Gartner.

One more example quote without attribution or citation:

Did You Know? At current pricing the operating expense (energy) to support an x86 server will exceed the cost of that server….within 3 years!

Sounds like energy prices are rising. Or do they mean to say server prices are falling? Or is the point that energy consumption of servers is increasing while price of energy and equipment is constant? No data and no citation in the slide; form your own conclusions. I say 2011 is woefully late for noticing and working on energy costs of servers, but better late than never.

Finally, to the point of this post’s title, Gartner lists Cloud at the very bottom of their trends to watch, number 10. They say resource constriction (sizing down after load) is still a problem being figured out. This takes me back to the earlier “doing nothing” slide. If there is a problem figuring out when and how a server is “doing nothing” then why would we believe the earlier 65% statistic that tells us cloud/consolidation makes sense?

I enjoyed reading a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald called New victim in India-Pakistan ‘cyberwar’.

The title does not really fit the body of the text. Here is a complete smack-down of the threat of cyberwar, for example:

“They hack through any number of sites every year. It’s just a bunch of kids who have got nothing better to do,” said Sahni, the executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi.

“The more serious threat is not this kind of childish prank but Pakistan’s use of net-based communication for actual terrorist operations,” he told AFP.

There is no juicy anecdote or data given at this point, just a reference to an old incident with India’s Oil and Natural Gas website. Actual terrorist operations sound serious but evidence of any such threat is missing.This is important to keep in mind when the article next turns to a self-described “evangelist” that dismisses the threat entirely:

Indians place little or no value on the kind of data individuals and organisations in many countries prefer to keep confidential, like passport and bank account details or work contracts, he said.

“Privacy is a concept not rooted in India culture. I don’t think we can change that and I don’t think it’s going to change in my lifetime,” said Mukhi.

“The government doesn’t care” about protecting information online, he said. “Corporates for some reason just don’t want to spend the money. They don’t think it happens often…. Web security is a low priority.

Thus the story boils down to a group in Pakistan issuing threats and warning how intent they are on starting a cyberwar with India by defacing websites, while India does not seem to put a high value on protecting their sites from defacement. It comes across like a fairy-tale wolf saying “I’ll huff and I’ll puff” as the pigs say “nothing like a good breeze to stay cool”.

I think it safe to say these results from Austin Texas’ new red light traffic cameras are not what anyone expected:

At seven of those intersections, the number of accidents has dropped. But at two intersections, authorities have actually seen a significant increase in crashes.

The intersection of MLK and I-35 has seen a 33 percent jump in the last year. The intersection of 15th Street and I-35 has had a 64 percent increase in crashes in nearly two years.

It does not give details on the kind of crashes.

Then again, maybe someone saw this coming. A 2005 report in Virginia says a risk trade-off comes into consideration because cameras cause new types of accidents.

Further the data show that the cameras are correlated with…an increase in total injury crashes. More time is needed to determine whether the severity of the eliminated red light running crashes was greater than that of the induced rear-end crashes.

That being said, the cameras are not the only control factor. Some might say they are for detection as much or more than prevention. A 2004 Texas study argued that increasing the yellow-light interval by a second is what will reduce overall crash numbers.