Jeff Jonas

Van Halen, Risk Management and Breaking the Law (Allegedly)

One of the freedoms we have is the freedom (ability) to knowingly bend or break a law.

While in New York this week, I discovered that Van Halen was playing Madison Square Garden Tuesday, November 13th! Back in the day when I used to play guitar, Eddie Van Halen was like a super hero to me. Unfortunately, the concert was sold out.

Sold out or not – I decided I was going, one way or another. After checking Craigslist without luck and checking with the hotel concierge who found a pair for $1400.00, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

9:02pm - Madison Square Gardens

I arrived at the curbside with a load of cash on hand looking for a scalper. The police were everywhere. I stumble immediately into an interesting character who claims to have one ticket. When I ask him how much, he says $350. I say "deal!" And with great disregard for scalper laws and the countless police all about, I pulled out my wad of $20 bills and counted them off … all in plain sight.

Allegedly, of course.

I inspect the ticket for signs of being a forgery and accept it. He pockets the cash, and then pulls out his wallet while saying "I have something else for you." I briefly wondered if I had lucked into an undercover policeman! Nope, handing me his card he says "Call me anytime you want a ticket here." Then he says, "Heck for the price you just paid, I'll walk you to the front door."

9:15pm – I'm in the concert!

Allegedly.

Found: An Immutable Audit Log

An immutable audit log is a tamper-resistant recording of how a system has been used – everything from when data arrives, changes, departs, to how users interacted with the system. Each event is recorded in an indelible manner - even the database administrator with the highest level of system privileges cannot alter the past … kinda like the paper tape on an adding machine tape, etched in stone … only more high-tech.

I think (and hope) tamper-resistant audits will become common place in settings ranging from health care patient records to government surveillance systems. The primary value being twofold:

a) Accountability. Enable policy folks charged with oversight and accountability to validate that a computer system has been used within policy and law: and,

b) Deterrence. The "chilling effect" caused by the knowledge that a tamper resistant audit log is in place – deterring a corrupt person or two from bad behavior.

Well, good news. I stumbled onto a software company in Spain called Kinamik which has been dedicating its technical resources towards the creation of … a tamper-resistant audit log!

Now what? What if no one wants to pay for one? Will tamper resistant audit logs need to be built-in to commercial off-the-shelf systems to reach the market? If so, will organizations actually pay for the additional disk space and processing requirements to turn such a log on? Or, will they simply turn the feature off?

This is important technology and one that really needs to see the light of day, especially in conjunction with non-transparent government systems.

If any of my readers have thoughts as to what kind of incentives or levers will be needed to make such audit logs a reality, I would love to hear from you. As well, if you discover any other companies selling tamper-resistant logs, please let me know. I would like to compile a list.

RELATED POSTS:

Yesterday’s Technology Review Story: Blinding Big Brother, Sort of

Immutable Audit Logs (IAL’s)

The Triadic Continuum

I spend a bit of time blogging about the importance of Persistent Context – this being a data store that contains up-to-the-second contextualized information. Each new observation is Semantically Reconciled, and its relationship is evaluated against all previous observations. What is learned incrementally builds on the historical context and if a contextualized observation warrants action, this insight is published. Persistent context is absolutely essential to delivering real-time situational awareness – something I have been calling Perpetual Analytics. This is not window-based Stream Processing.

Introducing the Triadic Continuum.

Ever heard of the Triadic Continuum? Probably not. Me either, until a few days ago that is … when this article in DMReview: "The Best New BI Invention You’ve Never Heard Of" made its way into my inbox.

This article describes what appears to be a pretty similar concept to persistent context … and thus I got somewhat excited. While reading this article, I tried to imagine what Jane Mazzagatti and her team are doing. It is great news that work of this type has received some attention.

Here are some excerpts of interest to me and related thoughts:

[… instead of data and information being "found," "analyzed" or "discovered," it is already there waiting to be "realized."] [… discover more complex, less easy-to-find relationships in vast amounts of real-time data … answers to queries may change as more and more data are introduced into the structure - similar to how we are able to change our perceptions and decisions based on … new facts.]

I wonder if they have started thinking beyond assembling data for future recall … but also performing data finding data and relevance finding the user processing at ingestion. The principle being: at the exact moment new observations (data) are ingested into a persistent context data store … also happens to be the cheapest moment computationally to detect relevance (insight). [More here: Sensing Importance: Now or Never]

[… theoretically, each individual particle of data occurs only once within the structure …]

I wonder if they have been playing with the concept of also making disambiguation assertions during the ingestion process. [More here: Entity Resolution Systems vs. Match Merge/Merge Purge/List De-duplication Systems]

[… a computer data structure that is self organizing - in other words, a data structure that naturally organizes new data by either building on the existing data sequences or adding to the structure as new data are introduced.]

This makes me wonder if they have been working on the ripple effect that can happen when a new observation invalidates an earlier disambiguation or relationship assertions.  [More here: Sequence Neutrality in information Systems]

[… the format and organization of the Triadic Continuum not only hold the representation of the data, but also the associations and relations between the data and the methods to obtain information and knowledge.]

First, it appears they are thinking of context in the same light as I do. [More here: Context: A Must-Have and Thoughts on Getting Some …]

Maybe I am reading too much into this, but I also wonder if the words "relations between the data and the methods to obtain information" have anything to do with commingling new observations and user queries into the same data space. [More here: What Came First, the Data or the Query?]

[… has developed and patented a new data structure …]

Having thought a lot about how data structures govern function, I do sometimes think about persisting the data in something other than an SQL database engine to get even higher throughput rates. Although, then I ponder how to make up for the freebies that come with industry standard SQL engines like transaction consistency, restartability, and a large community of trained DBA’s. So I wonder what thoughts this team has in this area. [More here: Big Breakthrough in Performance: Tuning Tips for Incremental Learning Systems]

No matter where these folks are in their evolution – first or tenth generation – I am real excited to hear about their work.

Hopefully, one day, I will have the chance to chat with these folks. Kindred spirits I suspect.

RELATED POSTS:

Accumulating Context: Now or Never

The Phone Call is Coming From Your House! Context is King

Enterprise Intelligence – My Presentation at the third Annual Web 2.0 Summit

It’s All About the Librarian! New Paradigms in Enterprise Discovery and Awareness

How to Use a Glue Gun to Catch a Liar

Intelligent Organizations – Assembling Context and The Proof is in the Chimp!

It Turns Out Both Bad Data and a Teaspoon of Dirt May Be Good For You

There Is No Such Thing As A Single Version of Truth

More Data is Better, Proceed With Caution