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HOME >> OPINIONS

Short Takes: June 1, 2010

By SD Times Editorial Board

June 1, 2010 — (Page 1 of 3)
ATMs may not be safe ATM
It seems as though there are conferences on just about anything, which means there are speakers with expertise in just about everything as well. Topics such as agile practices, Twitter’s annotations and cloud computing are spoken about frequently, but how about ways to hack into an ATM machine?

At this July’s Black Hat Las Vegas, a computer security conference, security researcher Barnaby Jack plans to deliver a speech entitled “Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines.” He is also set to disclose a new multi-platform ATM rootkit, which according to Wikipedia is “software that is designed to gain administrative-level control over a computer system without being detected.” ATMs now are typically compromised in roundabout ways (i.e. secret cameras to tape someone’s PIN), but Jack’s talk will focus on a more direct way: bugs in an ATM’s software. — Katie Serignese

Hashing out Hadoop
A friend of mine, over burritos, mentioned that he thought the Apache Hadoop project was a piece of junk. He then went on to trash a number of other Apache projects, including the Cassandra NoSQL distributed database.

“So what's better?” I asked.

“The NoSQL I'm writing,” he replied. This was the expected answer, of course. This particular friend is a super programmer who thinks he can do better than most other developers. He may even be right.

But there's an awful lot to be said for software that has already been written. Sure, my friend can spend his days working on a from-scratch solution, but people who live in the real world and have to work there don't have time to write everything from scratch. And frankly, while I agree that some aspects of Hadoop need work, such as the Hadoop File System, the most important thing about the project is not how provably optimum all its functions are, but the fact that it exists at all.

These technologies are still in their infancy and are a vast improvement over the previous situation, in which no solutions existed at all for these new-fangled big data problems. So while my friend works slowly on his NoSQL side project, I'll take his assessments with a grain of salt. And I'll be sure to find someone who thinks his work stinks, too, if and when he's completed it. — Alex Handy

Related Search Term(s): Hadoop, jQuery, Microsoft, security

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