The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published two new documents on cloud computing: the first edition of a cloud computing standards roadmap and a cloud computing reference architecture and taxonomy.

Together, the documents provide guidance to help understand cloud computing standards and categories of cloud services that can be used government-wide.

These documents, along with others from NIST and NIST working groups, will be incorporated into the NIST U.S. Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap, expected to be published in November, 2011.

Via: Infosec Island

Members of the European Parliament have demanded to know what lawmakers intend to do about the conflict between the European Union’s Data Protection Directive and the U.S. Patriot Act.

The issue has been raised following Microsoft’s admission last week that it may have to hand over European customers’ data on a new cloud service to U.S. authorities. The company may also be compelled by the Patriot Act to keep details of any such data transfer secret. This is directly contrary to the European directive, which states that organizations must inform users when they disclose personal information.

Via: PCWorld

Facebook has released specifications for their data center infrastructure as an open hardware project. They specifications include detailed electrical and mechanical data for everything from the server motherboards to the data center power distribution system. The specifications are licensed under a the Open Web Foundation Agreement.

Via: Slashdot

Sun Microsystems’ product plans are up in the air pending its acquisition by Oracle, but the company’s chip engineers continue to present new designs in the hope they’ll see the light of day. At the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University on Tuesday, Sun presented plans for a security accelerator chip that it said would reduce encryption costs for applications such as VoIP calls and online banking Web sites. The chip, known as a coprocessor, will be included on the same silicon as Rainbow Falls, the code name for the follow-on to Sun’s multithreaded Ultrasparc T2 processor.

Via: OSNews

The trojan configures and runs a rogue DHCP daemon on the infected host. Other devices on the same LAN are misled into using name servers settings provided by the trojan DHCP daemon for DNS lookups instead of using the origional configured name servers.

Devices on the network are then sent to fraudulent websites that can be more difficult to identify as imposters since the DNS lookups appear correct.

This is a more advanced attack of a well known vector of attacking a systems hosts file, but by being system agnostic and using the familiar DNS protocol, it is much more effective.

More details can be found at SANS

“InfoWorld reports on an experiment in air economization, aka ‘free cooling,’ conducted by Intel. For 10 months, the chipmaker had 500 production servers, working at 90 percent utilization, cooled almost exclusively by outside air at a facility in New Mexico. Only when the temperature exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit did they crank on some artificial air conditioning. Intel did very little to address air-born contaminants and dust, and nothing at all to deal with fluctuating humidity. The result: a slightly higher failure rate — around around 0.6 percent more — among the air-cooled servers compared to those in the company’s main datacenter — and a potential savings of $2.87 million per year in a 10MW datacenter using free cooling over traditional cooling.”

From the article:

“SendMail 1998 – Sendmail was key to the e-mail revolution because it was how everyone got up and running with e-mail communications over the Internet. Eric Allman wrote the original version of this open source mail-transfer agent while he was at the University of California at Berkeley in 1979. He stopped development on it in 1982, however, and didn’t revisit it until 1990. In 1998 he founded SendMail to sell the software’s first commercial version, the SendMail switch.”

Great mentions of Apache, Netscape Navigator and the iconic Motorola Startac series phones.