Thursday, October 26, 2006

Problem solved!

A while ago I mentioned the problem I have with my family car: a Honda Prelude 2.2i VTEC. Nice car, but not very practical for the family. I love the 'lude, but something had to give: I didn't want to lose the car, but most places are too far for the rest of my family work walk to! Well I can now announce that I solved the problem: we bought a second car! A nice Subaru Impreza. :-)

Good or bad?

There's been a lot of postings concerning Oracle's Unbreakable Linux announcement. Is this good news or bad news for Linux? Is this good news or bad new for Redhat? No comment, I'm afraid. However, read the official response from Redhat.

Trying to be objective for a moment, I tend to agree with these sentiments and particularly with the report from CIOInsight that shows Redhat is the number one vendor for value as rated by CIO’s in 2004 and 2005. Oracle ranked 39 out of 41 (lower is worse!). Makes you wonder. In the UK (and elsewhere I suspect), anyone can sell support for Ford, Honda or Toyota cars (as examples), often undercutting the official franchises. Speaking from personal experience, you do get what you pay for though. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. It may cost a little more, but I'm happy to pay for the peace of mind a franchise gives me where my car is concerned.

I've quite a few good friends at Oracle and I definitely wouldn't consider them monkeys, but I do wonder: WTF does Oracle know about supporting RHEL?

Monday, October 09, 2006

The 2nd International Workshop "Dependability and Security in e-Government" (DeSeGov 2007)

I'm on the PC. You know what to do ...

Conference

The Second International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (“ARES 2007 – The International Security and Dependability Conference”) will bring together researchers and practitioners in the area of IT-Security and Dependability. ARES 2007 will highlight the various aspects of security – with special focus on secure internet solutions, trusted computing, digital forensics, privacy and organizational security issues.
ARES 2007 aims at a full and detailed discussion of the research issues of security as an
integrative concept that covers amongst others availability, safety, confidentiality, integrity,
maintainability and security in the different fields of applications.



Important Dates

Workshop Proposal: September, 10th 2006
Submission Deadline: November, 19th 2006
Author Notification: January, 7th 2007
Author Registration: January, 21st 2007
Proceedings Version: January, 21st 2007
Conference: April, 10th to April 13th, 2007


Workshop Proposal

In conjunction with the ARES 2007 conference, a number of workshops will be organized. Workshop proposals should include the call for papers, the number of papers to be accepted, the contact person, etc. They are to be sent to the Workshop Organizing Committee Dr. Nguyen Manh Tho ( tho@ifs.tuwien.ac.at) by September 10th 2006. Proceedings of the ARES 2007 workshops will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press.



Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Process based Security Models andMethods
Authorization and Authentication
Availability and Reliability
Common Criteria Protocol
Cost/Benefit Analysis
Cryptographic protocols
Dependability Aspects for Special Applications (e.g. ERP-Systems, Logistics)
Dependability Aspects of Electronic Government (e-Government)
Dependability administration
Dependability in Open Source Software
Designing Business Models with security requirements
Digital Forensics
E-Commerce Dependability
Failure Prevention
IPR of Security Technology
Incident Response and Prevention
Information Flow Control
Internet Dependability
Interoperability aspects
Intrusion Detection and Fraud Detection
Legal issues
Mobile Security
Network Security
Privacy-enhancing technologies
RFID Security and Privacy
Risk planning, analysis & awareness
Safety Critical Systems
Secure Enterprise Architectures
Security Issues for Ubiquitous Systems
Security and Privacy in E-Health
Security and Trust Management in P2P and Grid applications
Security and privacy issues for sensor networks, wireless/mobile devices and applications
Security as Quality of Service
Security in Distributed Systems / Distributed Databases
Security in Electronic Payments
Security in Electronic Voting
Software Engineering of Dependable Systems
Software Security
Standards, Guidelines and Certification
Survivability of Computing Systems
Temporal Aspects of Dependability
Trusted Computing
Tools for Dependable System Design and Evaluation
Trust Models and Trust Management
VOIP/Wireless Security


Submission Guidelines

Authors are invited to submit research and application papers following the IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Manuscripts style: two columns, single-spaced, including figures and
references, using 10 fonts, and number each page. You can confirm the IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Author Guidelines at the following web page:

http://computer.org/cspress/instruct.htm

Nice interview with Eric.

Nearly missed this interview with Eric.

Sunday, October 08, 2006

WWW2007

Last year I was chair of the XML and Web Services track of WWW2006. This year I'm back to being a referee and my friends Paul and Jim take the helm of a pure Web Services track (about time for the track split). I'm sure they'll do a great job.

Here's the call for papers. If you've think you've got anything relevant that the community would be interested in then I encourage you to submit. The WWW conferences have always been a great place to present and meet people.


CALL FOR PAPERS
Sixteenth International World Wide Web Conference
Web Services Track
Banff, Alberta, Canada
http://www2007.org
May 8-12, 2007

The Web Services track of WWW2007 seeks original papers describing research in all areas of Web Services. Topics include, but are not limited to:

* Service contract and metadata
* Orchestration, choreography and composition of services
* Large scale XML data integration
* Dependability
* Security and privacy
* Tools and technologies for Web Services development, deployment and management
* Software methodologies for Service-Oriented Systems
* The impact of Web Services on enterprise systems
* Web Services performance
* Architectural styles for Web Services computing
* Application of Web Services technologies in areas including e-commerce, e-science and grid computing
* Impact of formal methods on Web Services

IMPORTANT DATES

Refereed Paper submissions due: November 20, 2006 (HARD deadline; no extensions)
Acceptance Notification: January 29, 2007
Conference dates: Tuesday-Saturday, May 8-12, 2007

Submissions should present original reports of substantive new work and can be up to 10 pages in length. Papers should properly place the work within the field, cite related work, and clearly indicate the innovative aspects of the work and its contribution to the field. We will not accept any paper which, at the time of submission, is under review for or has already been published or accepted for publication in a journal or another conference. In addition to regular papers, we also solicit submissions of position papers articulating high-level architectural visions, describing challenging future directions, or critiquing current design wisdom. Queries regarding WWW2007 Web Services track submissions can be sent to Paul.Watson@ncl.ac.uk or Jim@Webber.name.

All papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three reviewers from an International Program Committee. Accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and will also be accessible to the general public via the conference Web site. Authors will be required to sign a copyright transfer form. Detailed formatting and submission requirements are available at http://www2007.org/.

Authors of top-ranked papers from the overall conference will be invited to submit enhanced versions of their papers for publication in a special issue of the ACM Transactions on the Web.

TRACK CHAIRS

* Paul Watson, Newcastle University (UK)
* Jim Webber, Thoughtworks (Australia)

PROGRAM CHAIRS

* Peter Patel-Schneider, Bell Labs Research (USA)
* Prashant Shenoy, University of Massachusetts (USA)

TRACK PC

* Boualem Benatallah, University NSW, Australia
* Sanjay Chaudhary, DA-IICT, India
* Thomas Erl, SOA Systems, Canada
* Alan Fekete, University of Sydney, Australia
* Jinpeng Huai, Beihang University, China
* Hiro Kishimoto, Fujitsu, Japan
* Frank Leymann, University of Stuttgart, Germany
* Mark Little, RedHat, UK
* Jimmy Nilson, JNSK, Sweden
* Dare Obasanjo, Microsoft, USA
* Savas Parastatidis, Microsoft, USA
* Greg Pavlik, Oracle Corporation, USA
* Denis Sosnoski, Sosnoski Software Solutions, New Zealand
* Tony Storey, IBM, UK
* Japjit Tulsi, Google, USA
* William Vambenepe, Hewlett-Packard, USA
* Steve Vinoski, IONA Technologies, USA
* Stuart Wheater, Arjuna Technologies, UK
* Michal Zaremba, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Ireland