The tug-of-war between governments and those agitating for change has been profound this year, and global. A case could be made that in 2011, those working for change have scored more points than their opponents. It's important to remember, though, that the political struggle between those who wish to speak freely and those who wish to shut them up is like professional gambling. The overall chip count is what matters, not who's up at any given point. The count overall remains dead even.

Arab Spring

Tunisia

On January 12, we wrote:

"Since a young Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire on December 17 to protest conditions in his North African country, and the country went up in flames, most Western, and all American media, has been unearthly silent."

Social media, especially Twitter, rushed in to fill the void. More than ever previously I, and many others, were getting their news on what was happening in the country, by consulting our Twitter accounts - and a lot was happening. This inspired a massive crackdown against social media by the government.

But it didn't work. In fact, a grand total of two days later, ReadWriteWeb former France editor Fabrice Epelboin stated:

"This last week was one of the most intense moments for the French and Arabic social media sphere since the arrival of Web 2.0. The Tunisian revolution, which has been growing both on the ground and online since Dec. 17, came to a double climax. Yesterday, dictator Zine al Abidine Ben Ali announced the immediate end of all Net censorship and then released the last bloggers still in jail. Among them was Slim Amamou, a writer for ReadWriteWeb France and a national hero."

A week later, the transitional government made Slim the nation's minister of sports and youth.

Since then, the country has quietly transformed. Censorship still exists, though much less of it, and Islamists have made some gains, though not enough to have changed the nature of the country alarmingly.

Egypt

As the most populous, and arguably the most important, country in the Arab world, Egypt's convulsions seemed to be the headliner to Tunisia's opening act. Egypt's young people had been using social media for some time. Facebook featured prominently in the April 6 Movement against a precipitous gain in bread prices. The country has a huge cadre of bloggers, some of whom have been blogging for nearly a decade. So when the Arab Spring raced into the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor and other cities in the ancient country, it went critical immediately.

The response by Hosni Mubarak's governement was equally nuclear. They shut down their whole Internet. The exception to the shut down was a sub-branch that served banks and the military, but even that was eventually turned off, to the profound detriment of the economy. (This was not the first time a country had shut down its whole Internet. Burma did that in 2007.)

Nerds worldwide came to the rescue of on-the-ground Egyptian social media users. Not only did Egyptians and their friends and family outside the country pass information back and forth, the expatriates frequently serving as conduits for information to the outside world, but they also innovated work-arounds. Jacob Appelbaum, a hacktivist associated with Wikileaks, put together Internet dial up numbers for Egyptians to use. Brian of Conley of AliveIn and Small World Media set up a service via Google's speak2tweet service to collaboratively translate phoned-in tweets from Egypt.

Egypt has fared less well than Tunisia in its new incarnation. Thousands of social media users and activists have been arrested by the reigning post-Mubarak military council. Recent elections have also seen a significant gain for both moderate and conservative Islamist parties.

The Arab Spring is far from over. But it's going to be a stormier season than many had hoped early on, as, in addition to Tunisia and Egypt, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen and Morocco continue to prove.

Next page: #occupy

#occupy

News, especially tech news, that occurs in the United States, always gets more attention than news elsewhere. The Occupy movement may have gotten more news than the Arab Spring, despite the profound difference in the stakes involved. (Before you throw a rod, read about Mona Eltahawy. She was one of the "lucky" ones.) That's not to say #occupy is not important. Far from it. It indicates a groundswell, a powerful change not just in the U.S. but other countries. The Arab Spring might in the end be a global spring. (But don't forget that Prague had one of those once.)

Given the fact that #occupy is a U.S.-born movement, hitting the planet near the nation's financial font of Wall Street, and the U.S. is by some standards the most wired, most socially webbed country on the planet, the use of social media was profound.

A majority of the participants used smartphones and other devices to cover their own news at Occupy events across the country. The hashtags #ows and #occupy quickly came to the fore. Videos, audio, photos and other media provided a tide of impressions and data points to observe.

In fact, a number of representatives of U.S. law enforcement requested that Google remove videos of alleged police brutality from its YouTube service. Google refused.

Social Flow graphed the manner in which the idea of "occupy" moved in time over Twitter in a fascinating, and extensive, graphic.

Although the intensity of repression against the #occupy protesters in the U.S. is only a hint of what it was against Egyptian protesters, both before and after Mubarak was shown the door, it remains a difference in quantity, not quality. The New York Police Department was tasked with shutting down press coverage of the protests. And, like Egypt discovered, information is a bitch to stop in a data-saturated environment like the present.

Although mainstream media reporters were frequently blocked, it was impractical to stop all the social media flowing out of Zucotti Park in November. Those outside the park began to utilize the curating tool called Storify to aggregate, filter, cohere and communicate that flow of information. In the end, at the beck and call of the city's bosses, the NYPD was able to register a bone-rattling blow against their own credibility but not against news.

Conclusion

The top trend at the intersection of the social web and political unrest is the eternal tug-of-war between those who would register their voices and those who would deny them. I am aware of how simplistic this sounds, but would also insist that 2011 was one of those years in which the simple was true.

You don't have to like the protesters of the Arab Spring. You might fear their actions will lead to an increasingly Islamacised Middle East, one whose future is yoked to an ideology where the very free speech that gives birth to it is mercilessly muzzled. You might think the youth of the protesters will put them in a position of international weakness if when and if they do take power. There are indications that both of those fears are not without some validity.

You might find the vagueness of the #occupy protesters useless and their antics conducive to nothing more than self-aggrandizement and chaos. You might find their claims to being the "99 percent" laughable or their anti-corporate stance (logged on devices made or powered by some of the world's largest corporations) laughable.

You may believe that the relationship of both these groups toward the technology they use to border on idolatry

It doesn't matter. Because in the end, you believe the world is better off when ideas are audible (visible, readable) than when they are hidden, the province of a priesthood. If you believe the former, you celebrate the technology that allows the amplification of those voices. If you don't, you discount it, or believe it vile. There's a whole lot more to it, but it starts with this:

Speak, or don't speak. I say speak. And so, this past year, has the world.

Megaphone photo by Andrew Alio

And yes, there are log files, but again, looking through them is like finding that proverbial needle. The effort is tedious and if your attention wavers for just a moment, you could miss that one key entry that will provide your explanation, if you even know what to look for.

Wouldn't it be nice if vendors could add in this "Cher" feature to their products to turn back time to the past? Here are two that have done so, for very different purposes, but still get the idea.

Reflex Systems' Virtual Management Center has the ability to track changes to your virtual infrastructure using its built-in timeline. You can turn back the clock and look at what has happened to your network to do further troubleshooting, to find out when the user in distress messed up some configuration parameter a few days ago, for example. The software brings the same kind of of network infrastructure controls that are seen in the physical world such as firewalls and intrusion detection. Plus, they have some cool network maps as you can see here.

The second product is from Meru, who sells a variety of wireless access points and management tools, including some that use virtualization in some clever ways. New for them is the Service Assurance Manager v1.2, which provides proactive diagnostic abilities including rewind and review. This capability allows network managers to pinpoint network connectivity issues that occurred in the past and proactively make adjustments to avoid them in the future.

The third product is from CiRBA, which sells its Data Center Intelligence subscription service. This week they announced v7, which includes an improved UI, better automation tools and the ability to book future capacity for anticipated workloads. Their software is used for physical to virtual conversions and in data center consolidation and workload provisioning.

The UI in particular is quite stunning, as you can see in the screenshot below. At a glance I can see the entire lay of my data center landscape, and the little dots represent whether you have the right level of infrastructure or not for the loads that are running on these services. You can drill down to get more specifics. They aren't just looking at CPU or RAM usage, but measuring how the servers measure up to a such VM-specific metrics such as high availability and VM security zone usage. And you can both see what happened in the past as well as model what will be predicted to happen in the future.

The service will be released at the end of the year and is subscription based on the number of servers and the length of time it is being used.

Now, obviously, you aren't going to rush out and buy any of these products just so that you can visit the past. And while I don't think the engineers at either company were thinking of Cher when they designed their products, I do believe that both are strong enough and all I really want to do is have my network beat go on here when I use them. Babe.

For example, during President Obama's inauguration, content delivery network Akamai delivered 7 million simultaneous streams of video, with traffic surpassing two terabytes per second (Tbps), which broke records. The next year, Akamai's network traffic peaked at about 3.45 Tbps.

This growth is not guaranteed to be smooth, either.

"Because of the limited capacity at the Internet's various bottlenecks, even an extremely well-provisioned and well-connected data center can only expect to have no more than a few hundred Gbps of real throughput to end users," the report reads. "This means that a CDN or other network with even 50 well-provisioned, highly connected data centers still falls well short of achieving the 100 Tbps needed to support video's near-term growth."

Not surprisingly, the paper's touts Akamai's technology as a potential solution to any issues this may present. The report, a PDF of which can be viewed here, is rich in technical detail about how Akamai, content delivery and the Internet in general work and makes for a pretty interesting read over all.

via New TeeVee. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Design By Zouny

The Influences Driving Virtualization is the latest white paper from ReadWriteWeb. In the white paper, writer Philip Morgan looks at the influences that are shaping virtualization with particular emphasis on standardization, simplification and automation. Through that lens the white paper examines the factors that influence companies and how the cloud plays a defining role.

• Examine your risk to benefit ratio.
• Consider security implications.
• Learn best practices through enterprise case studies.
• Reduce your data center footprint.
• Outline standardized administration for better disaster recovery.
• Recommend strategic reallocation of resources.

We think you'll find our report about the influences driving virtualization will be essential reading for the new enterprise.

Schools struggle to keep up with continually changing technology. They simply cannot afford to replace hardware at the rate with which upgrades are released. And as such, the technology infrastructure of most schools is severely lacking.

Jonathan Hefter has built something that could solve that.

Virtualized desktops aren't new. There are several prominent companies that are addressing this for enterprise customers. But even though some liken school districts' technology implementations to ones in corporations, there are some substantial differences - budgets being the most obvious.

Neverware is designed lean. In fact, Hefter is currently bootstrapping the endeavor (although he is starting to look for funding). But the emphasis on efficiency isn't so much about Hefter's resources, as the resources of the schools he's aiming to support with Neverware.

Neverware's flagship product is the JuiceBox, a single server appliance that when connected to a LAN will power up to one hundred old machines with Windows 7. In case you haven't checked the system requirements for Windows 7 lately, here they are: 1 GHz or faster 32-bit or 64-bit processor, 1 GB RAM, 16 GB hard disk space, and a DirectX 9 graphics device. So how old can those "old machines" be? Hefter says he "hasn't found a desktop yet" that he can't make run.

The Juicebox generates a private, local cloud, something that addresses many of schools' concerns about privacy, security, and reliability. Hefter uses the analogy of electrical versus gas-powered cars to compare the energy and environmental waste of the PC industry with the efficiency of the Neverware project. It's a "single repository of computing power," and with it, schools need only focus on updating one machine, not many.

Currently Neverware is running in two pilot programs in schools in New Jersey, but Hefter says there are plans to go to market with JuiceBox in the next few months.

The announcement is part of a larger upgrade for Parallels which now supports enhanced speed, performance and graphics, including Direct X 9. Mac users - as well as iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users - can now access Windows applications, file formats and even games from their various devices.

"With the popularity of mobile devices skyrocketing, our customers overwhelmingly desire the ability to do more from anywhere without the restrictions that usually come from working remotely," said Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov.

As long as an instance of Parallels is open on your Mac, just fire up the app on your mobile device and your windows environment is instantly synced in real-time to your iPad, iPod or iPhone. This could be great for the iPad owner who wants to use the device to show a PowerPoint presentation without having to first convert it to an iPad-friendly format.

Part of making the mobile experience smooth for Parallels included boosting speed of the app to make it launch and run apps faster. Parallels says it can now boot up into a Windows application 41% faster than the previous version.

The application can now fully virtualize and leverage 64-bit apps and can reproduce 5.1 digital surround sound. Enhanced 3D capabilities mean gamers can better enjoy PC games on their Mac, though virtualizing games on the iPad probably won't work too well with the touch-screen interface (unless Monkey Island is your kind of game!)

So if you've always wanted to run Internet Explorer (or Firefox, for that matter) on your iOS device, Parallels Desktop 6 is probably the app for you. Check out a free trial at the Parallels homepage and give the free iOS app a whirl.

HP is now the primary supplier of hardware for Microsoft's private-cloud initiative. The $250 million partnership calls for the two companies to align on sales, engineering and professional services.

Microsoft is pushing a strategy that looks similar to the approach that made it the multi-billion dollar company it is today.

Now comes the age of the cloud. Microsoft is focusing on making its software the core technology, integrated tightly with HP hardware. It's conceivable that the approach may work, especially in a virtualized environment.

HP's role is to provide the data center hosting services, networking gear and servers for the Azure platform. Applications will be optimized for HP's Converged Infrastructure. Companies may choose to deploy the platform in HP's container environment.

You can imagine the capital expenditures for these deployments. But it's also one of the realities of today's market. There is a class of the enterprise that wants this type of controlled environment. And then there are the hosting providers that serve a wide variety of customers who also want a contained environment.

But open source in the enterprise continues to gain acceptance as does it in the cloud. This week's news that Rackspace is open-sourcing its cloud infrastructure means there is the potential for a new network of open cloud offerings. Its promise is a level of interoperability that can not be attained in a virtualized network.

Once a customer commits to Windows Azure Appliance they are pretty much saying that Windows Azure will be its core cloud service. It will mean that they have to rely on the software and hardware development from Microsoft and HP engineers. It's powerful but not open-source by any means.

Cloud computing is a revolution. You get that sense at an event like last night's Cloudcamp here at OSCON. So much is changing.

But revolutions do not happen overnight. In the meantime, the existing power structure in the enterprise will be looking to extend the scope of what they do. And for many, that means a more complex, more virtualized data center. That's good news for Microsoft and HP.

The wild card? How soon the revolution will take to play out.

That's the conclusion of Cisco's annual Visual Networking Index, a report that demonstrates how data will soon become ubiquitous and why the networking race is becoming one to watch.

Layer on top the exponential data that traverses IP networks and the competitive environment only gets more interesting.

Mike Banic, vice president of enterprise marketing for Juniper Networks puts it this way in an interview this week in IT Business Edge:

"Server-to-server traffic over the old network is equivalent to flying from Boston to New York City via Buffalo, Chicago, and Philadelphia and having to go through security again at every stop. The new network must deliver a direct flight with a streamlined security process to improve the experience for users and lower the cost of deploying and operating the data center network."

And that's just with today's amount of data. According to Cisco, the amount of data traveling across IP networks in 2014 will be 10 times the total of all traffic traveling across IP networks in 2008.

On a per month basis, the total amount of data flowing on a monthly basis in 2014 will be nearly 64 exabytes of global IP traffic per month. Just for perspective, one exabyte equals 50,000 years of DVD video.

It's a mind boggling number but is reflective of a number of other trends that we are covering on almost a daily basis at ReadWriteWeb.

Advancement in virtualization are driving the current competition. Cisco is leading the market but it does have its challengers, which until recently were not seen as much of a threat. That's changing as the data center becomes in essence one virtualized computer with the network as the backplane.

Zeus Kerravala of Yankee Group makes the backplane analogy and says this new dynamic is creating more disruption than the market has seen in a long time:

"So what does this all mean? It means that for the first time in a long time, simply buying the status quo may not be the right decision. Much of the decision may depend on whose compute and virtualization technology is used. The ability to solve the virtualization problem will far outweigh brand, the number of certified engineers or market share as this is the computing foundation companies will use for the next decade. Only time will tell whose solution works best but for the first time in a long time, we've got a fair fight on our hands."

What's at stake is represented in the projections that Cisco is presenting in its report. Network innovation will be required to sustain these levels of traffic:

• North America will generate the most IP traffic with 19 exabytes per month.
• The fastest growing region will be Latin America with a 51% compound annual growth rate.
• Video will dominate, exceeding 91% of global traffic.
• In 2014, about 87% of traffic will be generated by consumers.
• From 2009-2014, global mobile data traffic will increase 39 times.

To win, Cisco is betting on its established presence in the market and its unified communications strategy. Juniper is betting on its vision of network fabric. Avaya is in the race, too,

We still have to see how HP emerges but its mantra about openness and simplicity has helped it catch up to Cisco. It may be in the best position of all with its servers, storage and arsenal of computing power, management software and services.

Will the cost benefits of a simpler, open network outweigh the benefits of Cisco's tremendous technology infrastructure? How will the data disruption affect the networking giants?

Those are the big question as we continue to adapt to a world where science fiction seems more like reality every day.

We've hired a couple of experienced practitioners of cloud computing as our daily writers for ReadWriteCloud. Mike Kirkwood is a seasoned Enterprise Architect from Berkeley and has been a Sr. Manager supporting large consumer applications. Tim Hastings is a hands-on Technical Architect of web services, based in England. In addition, ReadWriteEnterprise editor Alex Williams will oversee the site and be a contributing writer.

With our two highly experienced topic experts and the editorial hand of Alex Williams, we're sure that ReadWriteCloud will help you gain new levels of efficiency and control over your web-based infrastructure. Check out ReadWriteCloud here.

The study, which shows primary security and privacy concerns of U.S. government IT leaders, is making the rounds among military and government bloggers. Policy makers are being told that the applications we know and love are dangerous and pose gaping security loopholes for cyberterrorism. Is a Big Brother overprotective meltdown? Or are our advances really causing greater risks for all users?

1. 79% Unstructured data
2. 71% Cyber terrorism
3. 63% Mobility
4. 52% Web 2.0
5. 44% Virtualization

Some of these trends are quite longstanding; however, they still cause a great deal of concern among our friends in infosec. Data breach (40%), cyber crime (40%), cloud computing (39%), outsourcing (34%) and open source applications (18%) also top the study's list of security vulnerabilities as seen through the eyes of government IT pros.

However, Vivek Kundra, a 2.0 champion and federal CIO, said in a recent post, "Our policies lag behind new trends, causing unnecessary restrictions on the use of new technology...

'This technology supports every mission our government performs - from defending our borders to protecting the environment. IT is essential for the government to do its work, and it is essential that we have access to the latest and most innovative technologies."

It's sad and frightening to see mobile tech, social networks, and cloud computing called out alongside cyber crime and cyberterrorism as perceived threats to data security. But how much validity do U.S. leaders' fears carry?

The Ponemon Institute reports, "IT operations and IT security professionals identified cloud computing, outsourcing of sensitive information to third parties, external threat of
organized cyber criminal syndicates, cyber terrorism, and a mobile workforce... We believe the findings from this study provide government organizations with guidance on which threats are more critical than others to address."

What do you think about the assessment of these high-profile and popular trends being identified as threats by IT execs in government? Is this a case of out-of-touch government bigwigs cracking down on the social web when black hat hackers are truly to blame? Or are so-called social media experts remiss in their duties to ensure that any products they roll out are secure enough for across-the-board use?

Or is it a little bit of both?

Most importantly, how do we solve the problem of ensuring that government and corporate sensitive information remains secure while users get to enjoy the benefits of Internet-based applications?

We welcome your comments below.

G.ho.st, which already implements well-known applications such as Google Docs, Meebo, Last.fm, and Pandora, has now announced an open API for developers, allowing them to add any web-based application as an integrated part of the G.ho.st virtual desktop.

The API launches as part of the company's developing GOSPL (G.ho.st web Operating System PLatform) architecture, outlined below:

We should note that for apps not contained in a single, swf file, G.ho.st will not be able to provide hosting. What they do offer is onscreen real estate, user intentification and profile information (based on consent), consent-based access to the user's file system, and communication with the G.ho.st desktop and other third-party apps. In the future, the company also hopes to arrange monetization and billing services for web apps.

VMware, a company known for their virtualization software for the desktop and datacenter, recently announced their plans to bring that software to mobile phones through their new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). The software is built on technology the company acquired from Trango Virtual Processors just last month. With this new technology, you would no longer have to carry both a work phone and a personal phone. Instead, your I.T. department could just deploy the corporate phone's profile to your personal device where it would then run in a virtualized space.

The VMware MVP is software that can be embedded on a mobile phone to provide the platform for running a virtualized mobile OS and its accompanying applications. VMware claims that this software would run efficiently even on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained phones.

For mobile phone users, the benefits of mobile phone virtualization mean they can run multiple profiles on one device. It also means that an entire mobile phone's persona - including applications, photos, videos, music, email, etc. - can be easily ported from one device to the next.

For manufacturers, virtualization means they can deploy their software to a wide variety of phones without having to worry about the underlying hardware. It would also allow handset vendors to run their "trusted services" like DRM, authentication, and billing in tamper-proof virtualized environments.

According to Monica Basso, research vice president at Gartner, virtualization for mobile devices is the next big thing. "We predict that by 2012, more than 50% of new smart phones shipped will be virtualized," she says.

Of course the unanswered question here is the one everyone wants to know: will VMware's MVP run as an iPhone app?

VMware, a company known for their virtualization software for the desktop and datacenter, recently announced their plans to bring that software to mobile phones through their new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). The software is built on technology the company acquired from Trango Virtual Processors just last month. With this new technology, you would no longer have to carry both a work phone and a personal phone. Instead, your I.T. department could just deploy the corporate phone's profile to your personal device where it would then run in a virtualized space.

For mobile phone users, the benefits of mobile phone virtualization mean they can run multiple profiles on one device. It also means that an entire mobile phone's persona - including applications, photos, videos, music, email, etc. - can be easily ported from one device to the next.

For manufacturers, virtualization means they can deploy their software to a wide variety of phones without having to worry about the underlying hardware. It would also allow handset vendors to run their "trusted services" like DRM, authentication, and billing in tamper-proof virtualized environments.

According to Monica Basso, research vice president, at Gartner, virtualization for mobile devices is the next big thing. "We predict that by 2012, more than 50% of new smart phones shipped will be virtualized," she says.

Of course the unanswered question here is the one everyone wants to know: will VMware's MVP run as an iPhone app?