14 febbraio 2011

London Stock Exchange in historic Linux go-live

UPDATED The London Stock Exchange has successfully set into live trading a new matching engine based on Novell SUSE Linux technology, following successful last-step setup procedures on Saturday.

The move has been billed as one of the LSE's most significant technological developments since the increasing prevalence of electronic trading led to the closure of the traditional exchange floor in 1986. LSE chief executive Xavier Rolet has insisted that the exchange, once a monopoly, will deliver record speed and stable trading in order to fight back against the fast erosion of its dominant marketshare by specialist electronic rivals.

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"The London Stock Exchange Group is pleased to confirm that Millennium Exchange is now operational," the LSE said in a statement to clients ahead of the main market trading opening on Monday. "We would like to thank all clients for their support during this migration."

At 8am today, the exchange’s main venue went into live trading with the Millennium IT matching engine, which is based in a C++ environment. Weekend work included setting live all gateways from clients to its network and data centres.

The switchover is being closely watched as the new system will replace the existing TradElect platform, based around .Net architecture and upgraded by Accenture in 2007 at a cost of £40 million. The decision to scrap TradElect was made in 2009, after several high profile outages and as rivals beat the LSE on messaging latency.

While the LSE's alternative venue, Turquoise, has already been running Millennium Exchange for four months, the rollout on the main exchange has been delayed several times. The delays came after problems occurred on Turquoise and following testing by main venue clients. 

Initially, capacity concerns were raised: even though Millennium Exchange was processing messages at a round trip latency of only 126 microseconds, clients were apparently unsure of its ability to handle the scale of messages on the main market.

After this, in November last year a major incident occurred on Turquoise, forcing the LSE to take the market offline for two hours and bringing a grinding halt to the main venue migration. The exchange said the problem occurred in "suspicious circumstances", and while it later attributed human error as the cause, newspaper reports claimed the LSE was in close discussions with the Cabinet Office over major ongoing attempted attacks on its network.

Observers watching today's Linux-based launch will likely note that such a large change could bring about some teething problems, as with any technology overhaul. But for the LSE and its customers, a system that is stable and can handle the millions of simultaneous messages on its network while running faster than its growing competitors' technology, will be seen as the barometer of success. 

The one-day TradElect outage in 2007, which angered clients, is a scenario the LSE will strive to avoid. And as it mulls the idea of placing all major systems onto Linux in a merger with Toronto exchange parent TMX, the success of its data centres and networks is of the utmost importance.

Now read: London Stock Exchange SUSE Linux choice based on HFT capacity

04 febbraio 2011

Agenda digitale: L'Italia riparte da Internet e dalla... - Eventbrite

Dopo il lancio dell'iniziativa Agenda Digitale, sottoscritto da oltre 10 mila persone,  prima occasione di incontro tra alcuni personaggi che hanno sottoscritto l'appello e politici che intendono rispondere con proposte concrete.

Programma:

10:30 – welcome – “Cos’è e come nasce Agenda Digitale”

11:00 – “L'Italia riparta da Internet e dalla tecnologia?”

Layla Pavone, Oscar Giannino, Vittorio Zambardino, Francesco Sacco, Juan Carlos De Martin

12:00 – “E’ l’ora di una politica per lo sviluppo digitale”

Paolo Gentiloni, Luca Barbareschi, Mario Valducci, Linda Lanzillotta modera Peter Kruger

13:00 chiusura evento

Investigation into black market prices for stolen online banking data - The H Security: News and Features

Credit Card Icon The returns are clearly enormous – criminals are charged $700 for access details for one bank account with a guaranteed balance of $82,000. According to a reportPDF from anti-virus vendor Panda Security, less creditworthy accounts can be picked up for just $80.

Panda reports that it infiltrated a criminal network for trading stolen data and hawking services. The vendor explored a total of 50 such online forums and shops, discovering many interesting prices. Costs for credit card details, for example, range from $2 to $90, depending on the card's credit limit.

Criminals interested in a bit more than just online shopping can also get physical credit cards made up. The cost? About $30 for a single colour card or a less suspicious full colour card for $90, plus the cost of the credit card details.

Users who are too timid to use their stolen data to do their online shopping themselves can use a transaction service for between $30 and $300. According to Panda, to purchase a television from a stooge using stolen data and get it sent to your own address will set you back $100.

The shops also offer accessories for card skimmers – card cloners for attaching to Diebold and NCR ATMs cost around €3,000. A complete fake ATM, for erection in a popular shopping centre for example, can be yours for just $35,000.

According to Panda, criminal online shops operate just like normal online shops. As well as a price list, they include special offers, bulk discounts, try and buy offers and individual services for which a quote can be provided. Exchanges and returns are also apparently possible. Where the transactions do differ from the norm is in the payment process, The criminals don't take plastic, instead relying on money transfer services such as Western Union, Liberty Reserve and WebMoney.

The online mafia can be contacted via IM or social media. Germany's carders.cc underground forum, the subject of multiple hacks in the past, has its own Twitter account and even has a fan page on Facebook.

(crve)

Survey: The best privacy advisers of 2010

Survey: The best privacy advisers of 2010

This year's survey finds law firms still tops

Jay Cline

February 3, 2011 (Computerworld)

Who are the best people and firms at providing privacy advice? It's a question I've been asking since 2006, before privacy was cool. Since then, a plethora of new privacy rules and penalties and a tsunami of new technologies and risks have placed privacy among the top handful of corporate concerns. Doing privacy wrong now takes a bigger bite off the bottom line than it did when I first started asking this question. So have the answers changed?

Not when the question is which type of outside privacy practice you prefer. Lawyers are still the top choices, with law firms grabbing six of the top 10 spots in the survey. And for the fourth consecutive time, Hunton & Williams garnered the most votes. This may be a case of success breeding more success: Hunton attracted more than twice as many votes as its nearest challenger.

Second-place Morrison & Foerster still is highly regarded, followed by Foley & Lardner and Privacy & Information Management Services. Hogan Lovells and Covington & Burling round out the law firms ranking in the top 10 of all firms.

What does this say about the corporate privacy agenda? Two things, I think: Regulatory compliance is still the first step to take for many companies, and the firms that were the best at assisting with this first step five years ago are still the go-to destinations for in-house privacy officers.

Other firms gaining ground

Even though law firms took six of the top 10 places, that was down from the last survey, in 2008, when they accounted for eight spots. Indeed, consulting firms now account for half of the top 12.

Which were the top consultancies? As in past years, it was a mix of large audit and accounting firms, such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young, and boutique shops.

The stronger showing of consultancies may reflect the emerging consensus in the privacy profession that doing privacy right is bigger than regulatory compliance. Particularly for industries such as healthcare and technology, which involve an intensive use of personal information, creating privacy-friendly products and services involves meeting customer and social expectations. "Organizations need to 'do' privacy better, faster and cheaper," noted Brian Tretick, managing director for Athena Privacy, a new boutique firm. "That means more formal, repeatable processes, automation and active monitoring."

The survey also showed that firms may be looking for services beyond traditional advice from experts. New entrants to the list of top vote-getters include service providers, a certification firm and a professional association. Among them:

• San Francisco-based Truste is the provider of the popular Web-privacy seal and a number of other privacy-verification products and services.

• Portland, Ore.-based ID Experts and Austin-based Debix provide data-breach response services.

• Toronto-based Nymity provides an information portal for privacy content.

•Seattle-based MediaPro offers computer-based training for privacy and security.

The International Association of Privacy Professionals organizes the best-attended privacy conferences and offers the CIPP certification for the privacy profession.

Table 1: Top firms for privacy advice

In the table below, law firms are marked with a dagger symbol (†), and consulting firms with a double dagger (‡).The firms are ranked in order of the number of votes received, but banded into three tiers to compensate for statistical margin of error. Tier 1 firms garnered more than 10% of total votes, Tier 2 firms received 3% to 10%, and Tier 3 firms achieved 1 to 2% of votes.
In the interest of full disclosure, Minnesota Privacy Consultants, the author's firm, finished behind Foley & Lardner.

02 febbraio 2011

Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Prism is now Chromeless

we now want to Make it possible to build desktop applications with Web technologies. This change emphasizes two things: first we’re interested in ultimately building Chromeless into something that can be used to ship real products. Second, we want it to be possible to build standalone desktop applications in addition to browsers.

RSI Telegiornale - Allarme Powerpoint

 
Firm Voting Tier
† Hunton & Williams 1
† Morrison & Foerster 2
† Foley & Lardner 2
† Privacy & Information Management Services 2
‡ Samet Privacy 2
† Hogan Lovells 2
‡ PricewaterhouseCoopers 2
‡ Ernst & Young 2
† Covington & Burling 2
‡ Corporate Privacy Group 3
‡ Deloitte & Touche 3
‡ Rebecca Herold & Associates 3
† Wiley Rein 3
IAPP 3
† Infolaw Group 3
Ponemon Institute