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Last year, I was slated to attend the first O'Reilly Strata Conference, but the 2011 Snowpocalypse intervened and said "no flights for you, St. Louis." Not only did I miss the inaugural Strata Conference, but it seems like I missed out on all the hype and irrational exuberance for big data as well.

The first day of the 2012 conference was dedicated to half-day tutorials and the all-day Strata Jumpstart. The Jumpstart sessions were geared for business leaders looking to see "how information can transform the enterprise."

Are you seemingly stuck with trying to suss out what to do with Twitter? Don't know how to get started? Does 140 characters seem daunting? Then you might want to take a look at a new O'Reilly book called Tweetsmart. There are lots and lots of Twitter-related books out there (Amazon lists more than 1600 books, including more than 500 of them available digitally as Kindle editions), this is the first one that is short and sweet and to the point. It is written by JS McDougall, the co-owner of a Web design firm who has written eight other tech books.

It's not the "Big Data" we usually talk about, which refers more to the size of the data than of the company behind the management tool. It's the term Bruce Schneier uses to refer to the industry that has evolved around data as a commodity, the way the energy industry was once considered "Big Oil." Schneier - the celebrated cryptographer-turned-technologist and easily the RSA Security Conference's biggest draw, and a CTO at BT - believes "Big Data, Inc." poses as great a threat to personal security and privacy as malicious actors.

"I mean Big Data as an industry force, like we might talk of Big Tobacco or Big Oil or Big Pharma," Schneier told an overflow crowd of attendees. "I think the rise of Big Data is as important a threat in the coming years, one we should really look at and start taking seriously."

Service packs for enterprise Linux distributions are typically pretty conservative affairs that are only noteworthy for the bugs that they fix. SUSE is bucking that trend with the second service pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11, by adding new features and providing customers with the 3.0 Linux kernel released last year.

SLES 11 SP2 comes with a few new tricks besides the new kernel. Customers will get a new version of Samba, for example. Most notable is the supported inclusion of the Btrfs filesystem and tools to manage snapshots. Snapper, a GUI or CLI tool to manage the snapshots, integrates with SUSE's Zypper and YaST management tools to allow roll back system updates.

"You can't always get what you want" is literally the theme of this year's RSA Security conference in San Francisco. "With increased speed and cunning, hackers are taking advantage of the openness of today's infrastructures," said EMC's executive vice president Art Coviello, Jr. And exacerbating the problem, he said, is the fact that despite openness and open architectures, people aren't banding together for solutions.

This at a conference that officially opened Tuesday morning to a gospel choir prophesying the coming of the age of Getting What You Need. Hopefully Aretha Franklin received a cut of the royalties when one soloist, breaking from script, sang her original lyrics instead of the ones inscribed on the big-screen closed caption: "I-N-F-O-S-E-C, find out what it means to me."

In the middle of last year, the hacking group Anonymous tried but failed to attack various Vatican Internet servers. A report that was just released by Imperva shows the extent of their prowess, and is a blueprint for other corporate security managers who want to try to protect their own networks in the future from miscreants. While the report itself doesn't divulge the destination of the attack, it has been widely reported by the New York Times and other news outlets that it was the Vatican.

Of course, it helps that the Vatican used the Imperva Web applications firewall to protect itself and that the logs could be analyzed to see the sequence of events. They state, and we also believe, that this is the first end-to-end attack analysis of this magnitude.

The cloud is huge. Client access devices are small, and they're everywhere. Personal computers are virtual. Access to all of these resources is continual. Control over the world's single most precious information resource - identity - has become a jump ball.

Next week, ReadWriteWeb will be covering the annual RSA security conference in San Francisco. I never attend a conference without an agenda, and no, I'm not talking about the pamphlet and the floor plan. There's an agenda all my own, and it's based on the subject matter that I've discovered you want to know more about.

If there truly is no privacy on the Web, then how can we be shocked by reports of a privacy breach?

If that's not the case, and we truly do expect privacy on the Web, then when 15 years go by before major browser makers pledge to implement Do Not Track buttons, and then only at the urging of the President of the United States, whom do we hold at fault for those buttons having been absent all this time? And if those buttons probably won't work anyway, which is what some experts believe, then just who is it being fooled by whom?

"I think, at the end of the day, privacy has never been a priority for the developers of Web browsers," states Dr. Lorrie Faith Cranor. She's an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, but more importantly for this discussion, she's a contributing architect and former W3C working group chair for the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). It may or may not be at the center of the latest privacy controversy surrounding Google's alleged thwarting of Web browser privacy policies, depending on whether you see things from Microsoft's perspective.

Privacy may indeed be a priority for certain people within browser companies, Dr. Cranor continues. "But there is a disconnect between what's important to the browser development team, versus what's important to the privacy officer and the lawyers and other people within their companies."

Remember in 2003, when the CAN SPAM Act was signed into law, how spam just stopped overnight? Yeah, me neither. Just as CAN SPAM did little to curb spam, having Google and Microsoft sign on to Do Not Track (DNT) still leaves a lot to be desired.

Google and others signing up for DNT support aren't even promising not to track users, they're just agreeing "not to use data from consumers who don't want to be tracked to customize ads or to use the data for certain purposes such as employment, health care or insurance."