Author Archive: Alex Dunne
Alex Dunne is the Executive Producer for Techweb's event web sites, responsible for making sure that these conference sites look great, work as intended, and serve the incredible community that attends Techweb events! He craves feedback and suggestions, so drop him a note at adunne@techweb.com with your thoughts.
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Jul 13th, 2009 | Alex Dunne
Back in March I announced the NOC Yearbook, which features profiles for of the volunteers who helped construct the InteropNet at Interop Las Vegas 2009. It was a big hit – almost 60 people were profiled in the yearbook for the event.
We’ve added some new functionality that will let us create yearbooks for for our events going forward, and just as importantly, for events that happened years ago.
If you attended Interop Las Vegas and didn’t get a chance to see all of the conference sessions you intended to, we just launched a new site that lets you view them. The site, video.interop.com, presents the speaker’s Powerpoint as they appeared in the breakout sessions, accompanied by audio from the speaker(s).
The site is currently only available to people who had a conference pass (sorry expo pass holders!) at Interop Las Vegas. The same login and password you were provided to access the speaker presentations will get you into the Interop Video site. (That info was distributed to conference pass holders in their tote bag and shown on slides inside conference rooms.)
We plan to continue the capture of conference sessions at future US-based Interop events — next up is Interop New York in November. In fact, our tentative plan for Interop New York is to capture video of the speakers as well, and display the speaker using a picture-in-picture format.
If you’re curious what the format of synchronized Powerpoint and audio looks like, here’s a sample session from Interop Las Vegas, titled “The Hows and Whys of Intrusion Detection Event Correlation”, delivered by Gene Schultz, CTO, Emagined Security.
We’d love to get feedback about this new format - contact me at adunne@techweb.com if you have any ideas, constructive critiques, etc.
If you are looking for keynote videos from Interop Las Vegas 2009, we have finished archiving them and present them here for your viewing pleasure. (These were already available in our LiveStream player, but not easily findable in the video-on-demand portion of the player.)
We’re also in the process of posting videos from all conference presentations — a video feed of the Powerpoint deck sync’d to the speaker’s audio. Conference attendees will get free access to these videos, and we’ll be selling access to these videos as well. They’ll be ready by the end of June.
Here are the keynotes:
Here’s an interview with Dr. Michelle Blank, Radware’s Chief Marketing Officer. Blank talks about her company’s new application acceleration and carrier-grade perimeter security products that Radware is launching here at Interop this week. Blank explains how the products help network administrators optimize their network traffic and enhance security.
Here’s the podcast…
During yesterday’s keynote intro, Interop General Manager, Lenny Heymann, mentioned an attendee survey that Interop conducts each year. The results of the Interop attendee survey are very interesting, and are must-read information for attendees and exhibitors — the data provides an excellent snapshot of what technologies are important to businesses today, and shows how far into deployment these technologies are. I just got the Powerpoint deck from Lenny and posted it to this site - Interop New York 2005 Attendee Survey. (Requires Powerpoint, or Powerpoint viewer.)
As the opening act for day two of Interop New York, Ed Amoroso, the Chief Security Officer of AT&T, took the keynote stage and addressed opportunities presented within “the cloud” — the carrier world. Amoroso began his keynote with a quote from Marcus Ranum, who said that the “…tragedy of modern computing is that we’ve turned every man, woman and child into a Windows system administrator.” This set the theme for Amoroso’s address, which was a call for carriers to do more policing of the cloud.
Amoroso rattled off a number of famous distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, like SQL Slammer and Blaster. He said carriers like AT&T are typically the first to see signs of a coming attack, and should offer more help in terms of communicating suspicious activity to the outside world (at the very least) and helping prepare the world for coming DDoS attacks.
But they can do even more, he said. The current defense against DDoS attacks lies at company’s network edge, but stopping an attack there, Amoroso said, is like trying to stop a tsunami from the beach. An effective defense should go out into the carrier cloud, using filtering, border gateway protocols, and other tools at the carriers’ disposal.
But wait, there’s still more they can do! Amoroso reasoned that carriers could feasibly block outbound traffic from, say, a home PC that’s suspicously sending out telnet packets at 2am. Of course that communication might be legitimate, so carriers don’t take the initiative. But these are the types of services that carriers might start considering, perhaps as part of a subscription or enhanced service feature. Amoroso admitted that carriers missed the boat years ago when companies like Symantec began offering personal firewalls, and this idea does seem like it might be closing the barn door after the horses have left. But we all know that virus definitions on a consumer machine are often out of date…perhaps there is a case to be made for letting your carrier do some of this work.
The point Amoroso was driving towards was that carriers can make a case for being guardians of the cloud, rather than simply the maintenance crew of dumb pipes. If companies like AT&T put some “smarts” into the cloud, it might prevent DDoS attacks and similar threats in the future.
The speech wound up with a plug for a new security webcast channel that AT&T is launching for subscribers of the company’s Internet Protect service, called Internet Security News Network (ISNN). Amoroso likened it to C-SPAN for system administrators and security professionals.
