On January 15, the New York Times ran a story headlined, "Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay."

The story said: "Though American and Israeli officials refuse to talk publicly about what goes on at Dimona, the operations there, as well as related efforts in the United States, are among the newest and strongest clues suggesting that the virus was designed as an American-Israeli project to sabotage the Iranian program."

(Dimona is the ultra-secret site where the Israelis develop nuclear weapons they never quite admit they have.)

Bruce Schneier wrote this about the Stuxnet back in October: "As the story goes, the Stuxnet worm was designed and released by a government -- the U.S. and Israel are the most common suspects -- specifically to attack the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran. How could anyone not report that? It combines computer attacks, nuclear power, spy agencies and a country that's a pariah to much of the world. The only problem with the story is that it's almost entirely speculation."

And here on DevX, we had a bit to say about Stuxnet back in October,
too: "Who Wrote the Nefarious Stuxnet Worm? And Why?"

What started as speculation is now close enough to being confirmed that not only the New York Times, but an increasing number of media and even governments are now treating the idea that Stuxnet is an Israeli-developer Cyberwar weapon as fact, not fiction.

Possibly the most interesting take on Stuxnet may have come from ABC in a January 28 article titled, "Beware the Cyber War Boomerang?" that says:

"The leak prone governments of the United States and Israel seem to be competing to claim credit for a cyber war attack on Iran's nuclear weapons program, while officially refusing to confirm or deny their role in the 'Stuxnet' computer worm."

ABC's Richard Clarke went on to warn, "The problem lies in the fact that the worm ran freely through cyberspace and lots of people caught a copy. One can be sure that highly skilled hackers in several countries are even now taking it apart, modifying it, and getting it ready to destroy some other target. They are benefiting from free access to the most sophisticated computer attack weapon ever created. That would not be such a problem except for the fact that the thousands of computer networks that run our economy are essentially defenseless against sophisticated computer attacks."

In other words, a software weapon we -- the U.S. -- may have helped develop what can now be used against us, so we'd better get on the stick and start protecting our many computer-based industrial control networks against Stuxnet-type attacks.

tech.state.gov (http://tech.state.gov/) is an Internet-based community set up by the U.S. State Department to help government people and others concerned with international development hook up with smart technologists like you.

The next Tech@State event -- called Tech@State: Open Source (http://tech.state.gov/events/techstate-open-source) -- is scheduled for February 11 and 12. There is space for 200 in-person attendees.

Registration is free. It's "first come, first served," so if you can be in Washington, D.C., on those dates and want to attend, you'd better hustle to sign up. The event will also be streamed live on the Web, and you can easily join the online tech@state community (http://tech.state.gov/main/authorization/signUp?target=http%3A%2F%2Ftech.state.gov%2Fprofiles%2Fmembers%2F), which currently has slightly over 400 members. The connections you make can easily turn into business contacts not only within the State Department but also with NGOs (non-government organizations), foreign governments, and companies -- both in the U.S and abroad.

The first tech@state event, about a year ago, was about technology to help Haiti after that poor country suffered a distastrous earthquake.

The topic for the one after February's Open Source discussion has not yet been selected. Do you have any ideas? If so, please share them, says Tiffany Smith, the State Department person who coordinates this effort.

This is all part of the government's 21st Century Statecraft and eDiplomacy initiatives, both of which are impressive when you consider the State Department's reputation for stodginess and rejecting outide ideas.

In any case, this is an excellent opportunity to help the U.S. government create an up-to-date, technology-based foreign policy, while at the same time making contacts that might help you find consulting gigs or a new job.

Scheduled speakers for the conference include Susan Swart, U.S. Department of State CIO, Vivek Kundra, CIO of the United States, and Chris DiBona, open source and public sector programs manager at Google.

The reason Red Hat set up Fedora as a separate entity is that Red Hat was overwhelmed by tech support calls from people who had gotten free Red Hat CDs in magazines or from friends or from any one of 1000 other sources.

I remember one person who not only demanded free tech support from Red Hat, but called everyone involved with Linux whose phone number he could find, including me, since I ran the Linux.com website at the time.

"Linux is free," he said, "so I want you to send a tech support person to my house. For free."

Yeah, right.

By making Red Hat a commercial product company that distributed Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and sending Fedora off on its own, Red Hat became profitable. There was a little community flak at first, but it soon died down and now everybody is happy.

Also: Snort and Sourcefire. Snort is an open source, community-based project. Sourcefire is a company whose products are based on Snort. They were separate entities from day one, even though they were both started and were both originally headed by the same
person: Marty Roesch.

Even if a company plans to exploit its open source properties through support subscriptions, a la Red Hat, if it has another group of products that are 100% proprietary, it is best to keep the two brands separate, if only to keep open source community zealots from screaming about the open source software's ties to the proprietary product(s).

I wish Oracle would figure this out. Since the Sun acquisition, an awful lot of people have been worried about the future of OpenOffice.org, MySQL, and Java. I personally would be a lot more confortable if Oracle spun these products off into separate companies -- or created non-profit foundations to maintain them, the way Red Hat did so successfully with Fedora.

Like a lot of long-time open source users, I have little trust or love for Oracle.

But at the same time I am a devout user of OpenOffice.org, MySQL, and Java, and moving away from them would be time-consuming and irritating.
Grrr.

Put yourself in a hiring manager's position: you have two well-qualified job candidates. One of them says he's worked on this project and that project, but since all his work has been on proprietary software you can't see any of his actual code without asking him to do a test project for you.

The other candidate, besides his day job, has been working on an open source project, and you can see  his work and judge it for yourself. Not only that, you can look at the project's developer email list and IRC channel logs and see how the candidate interacts with other developers.

Naturally, you are going to give extra cred to the developer whose work is out there in the open for all -- including you -- to judge.

In a recent blog entry, programmer/author John Graham-Cumming mentioned a job interview he went through back when he was still actively developing PopFile. During the interview, he said, "...no one asked about my code."

At the end of the interview he found out why. The interviewer said, "We've read your code."

In a tight job market, any leg up is a good thing. And open source development is more often than not a good thing even if your purpose in doing it isn't to flesh out your resume or help you find a better job.

The one problem with putting all your code out there for everyone to see is that if it isn't up to par, it may hurt your reputation, not help it.

For example, the recent release of the "Facebook alternative" Diaspora code has been greeted with almost universal dismay at the number of security holes it has.

Since Diaspora started as a student project, and this is a pre-Alpha release, no sane person expects it to be bug-free. But at the same time, if you are one of the people involved in producing Diaspora, you might not want to boast about your involvement in it on your resume (or even in Slashdot comments) quite yet.

Don't think smart development managers don't Google you before they call you in for an interview. They do. So you need to make sure that when they do, not only do they find open source code you've written, but that the good code they see associated with your name outweighs the bad -- or better yet, that there is <i>only</i> good code out there for them to see under your name.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle Develop and JavaOne are consuming a huge chunk of the city by the bay this week, spilling out of the cavernous Moscone Convention Center, shutting down a key section of the heavily traveled Howard Street and gobbling up several nearby hotels.

The massive trade shows will feature more than 1,800 sessions, 400 partner exhibits, nearly 400 Oracle demos, keynotes, labs and networking events, and untold thousands of bleary eyed developers, customers, journalists and analysts.

On Sunday night, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison rolled out his firm's ambitious entry into the private cloud computing battle, increasing the stakes between Oracle and rivals like HP and IBM.

Ellison detailed the Exalogic Elastic Cloud, which the company is calling the world's first integrated middleware machine. It's a system featuring 30 servers, each loaded with two six-core processors for a grand total of 360 processor cores. They are linked to each other, and to storage, through Infiniband connections. Ellison said the cloud systems support both Solaris and Linux OSes and include the middleware companies need to run apps.

Oracle said the software has been tuned to exploit the I/O fabric in the Exalogic Elastic Cloud machine to deliver performance results 10 times better than a standard application server configuration. 

Mark Hurd, the new Oracle co-president and famous (infamous?) former CEO of HP, introduced the keynotes Monday morning, amplifying what his new boss said the day before.
What's the likelihood that Oracle will be the cloud leader, Hurd said, with a huge range of powerful hardware and software tools and features? "Very high," he said.

Unfortunately, Hurd's short opening remarks Monday morning were followed by one of the dullest keynotes on record, from Fujitsu exec Noriyuki Toyoki. Meanwhile, most of us in the increasingly restless press corps had to deal with a familiar trade-show problem while Toyoki  droned on:  Shoddy (or non-existent) Internet connection, due to system overload.
(Note to Larry: Intel had a separate press and analyst wireless network at the recent Intel Developer Forum.)

Ellison also detailed the first release of his company's long-awaited, next-generation business applications, Fusion Applications, which will be available in Q1 of 2011.

Fusion Applications promises to be a serious player in the business application space, combining application architecture, design and deployment, through which customers will be able to extend the value of their apps environment by using Fusions Applications components side by side with their existing applications portfolio.

It will be a huge rollout, Ellison said, with 100 different products available simultaneously, in seven different product families.

"Oracle Fusion Applications bring a new era of application software and technology investments going forward," said Steve Miranda, SVP of Oracle Application Development.  "To set a new standard, we listened and gathered the best practices from thousands of customers to deliver the first 100 percent open and standards-based business applications. Beginning today, Oracle Fusion Applications define how organizations innovate, work and adopt technology."

John Fowler's keynote emphasized Oracle's key differentiator: its ability to support the largest of enterprise customers who have high performance needs within their mission critical deployments.

"We have $4 billion of R&D dedicated to enterprise application development," said Fowler, executive vice president of Oracle's Customer Services. He boasted that Oracle's massive resources will help build his company's underlying technology, including Java, legacy software/hardware products and microprocessors. "We'll continually iterate under these technologies to build different properties in runtime environment around performance, availability, security and management."

Check DevX.com and InternetNews.com for more show coverage. 

DevX provides you a lot of great articles. In addition to the great articles there are a number of portals including the Visual Studio 2010 Showcase, the PHP for Windows Showcase, and the IBM Cloud Computing Development Center.

While all of these are likely to interest you in one way or another, the MSDN Spotlight is worth noting for a variety of reasons. This spotlight not only includes articles, but also a few downloads. For example, you can download a 60-Day trial of Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010. You can also download the SharePoint SDK, which includes conceptual overviews, porgrammign tasks, samples, and a reference guide for SharePoint 2010 product and technologies.

If you aren't interested in downloads, then there are a variety of articles on topics ranging from Microsoft Azure to Microsoft Visual Studio, with lots of topics in between. The following are just a couple of highlights. For the complete list, go to the MSDN Spotlight landing page.

• Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio
• Deploying Applications on Windows Azure
• Introducing the Azure Services Platform
• SQL Server 2008 R2 Update for Developers Training Kit
• Silverlight Toolkit
• Windows PowerShell : A Brief Introduction to using WPF Containers in WPK
• Video: Real World Azure
• Video: Cloud Computing with Software + Services (1 of 3)
• Article: Special Report: The Definitive Guide to Windows Phone 7
• How Do I: Create Sequential Workflows for SharePoint 2010 in Visual Studio 2010?

We had privacy for three generations. Maybe four. Now, what with Facebook and Google and data mining, it's going away again. But that's OK. We humans did fine for thousands of generations without privacy, and doing without it for another few thousand generations probably won't hurt us, either.

Groups like EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) and the EFF
(Electronic Frontier Foundation) spend a lot of time worrying about our online privacy. But privacy -- and lack of privacy -- isn't necessarily an online thing. Just today my wife heard, from Karen, who heard it from someone else, that our former neighbor Jackie is going to lose her house to foreclosure. This information was passed in a quaint manner called "face to face," which is how information about friends, family and neighbors (often called "gossip") was passed in pre-Internet and even pre-telephone days.

My friend Norm's grandparents came to Florida from Sicily. There, he says, "They all lived on farms or in small villages. They didn't need Facebook. They had old Italian grandmothers who knew everything about everybody. Gossip was their primary form of recreation."

My forebears, who mostly came from small villages in Russia, had old Jewish grandmothers who kept an eye on everyone and everything. And my wife was raised by Black women who knew everything that was going on in their Baltimore neighborhood.

So some of us never had any privacy at all, while some only had it for a few generations if we happened to live in urban or suburban environments where we barely knew our neighbors.

Basic rules for safeguarding your privacy

If you don't want people to know your business, don't tell them about it. This is the most basic privacy dictum possible. In an online world, it means you should never assume anything you post, anywhere, is private. If you're married, and you somehow manage to get married again without benefit of a divorce, you should not post pictures of your second wedding -- at Disney World, no less -- on Facebook.

You shouldn't post pictures of you smoking a huge joint or pouring beer over yourself, either. Back in the old days, would you have done that stuff in front of the old ladies in your village or neighborhood? No way! So why are you doing it on Facebook? Or MySpace? Or YouTube? You think there are no old people (like your mom and dad) checking your Facebook wall?

Trust me: We parents and grandparents know what you post on Facebook.
Even if you think it's all private, it really isn't. Your most embarrassing photo was reposted by someone else. We can see it even if you changed your privacy settings. And so can potential bosses, not only today but future ones who may be considering you for responsible management positions, not for work as a part-time cocktail waitress.

Your financial trail

I bought a fifth of bourbon and a fifth of Marsala cooking wine today at a local liquor store. I don't care who knows this, which is a good thing since I paid with my debit card. If I didn't want anyone to know I was buying booze, I would have paid cash.

And if I want to hide my online purchases, I'll use a "no tell" Visa card, and I'll pay cash for it at the drugstore or another anonymous, high-volume retailer. I will not use my normal credit union Visa debit card that has my name on it.

Same rules as the old days, really

Back when grandmothers sitting on rowhouse stoops or meeting at the village water pump were the main community information source, it made sense to do your fooling around out of town, quietly, without telling anyone there your real name or where you came from.

Back in the old days, a song made the rounds called "What Was Your Name in the States" about the assumption that many people who showed up in San Francisco and Tucson and other wild and wooly western towns had criminal backgrounds back east from which they were fleeing.

Today, someone who wants to build a new identity might need to go as far as Thailand or Kenya (two places where people I know personally have started new lives), but it can be done.

But if you go to this level of extreme identity-hiding, whatever else you do, DO NOT post your new name and address on your old Facebook account.

I don't care what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg or anyone else says about online privacy: as far as I'm concerned, anything you post on any Web site or send to any email
group is public information no matter what their privacy policy says.