Alestic - encrypting ephemeral storage

Encrypting Ephemeral Storage - handy for me since there will be potentially sensitive data being processed by my slave EC2 nodes.
This data is transitory, the slaves delete it as it is processed. Amazon also wipes it when you are finished. Still someone, somewhere could break into Amazon and physically steal the disks / SAN or wherever Amazon puts your data. So to follow the "encryption-at-rest" principle, even this must be encrypted. So I'm very happy to see a very simple how-to from Alestic.

Swarm - Scala distributed processing

Google code project to distribute processing over the grid. Built on scala. Swarm uses Scala's portable delimited continuations to efficiently allows code to migrate across nodes as it accesses the data. This is not a new idea - it was first touted in the AI community as mobile agents.

This kinda seems at odds with current map-reduce style distribution - as popularised with Hadoop and the excellently elegant Gridgain. With these the focus is on problem decomposition - map your problem down into independent computational blocks and transport to the data / access the data at low-cost. The aim is to speed up processing by distributing the computation problem over the grid.

Swarm while an interesting use of Scala technology, seems only really applicable to problems where the data cannot migrate / relative cost of transporting the data is too high. In such problems we simply want to execute some kind of operation on a local system/data set. It also seems to be targetted at computation which is effectively traversing a set of heterogenous data nodes. If there were identical, or there is only one node, we could just use Gridgain today to achieve the same thing.

iPhone and O2 and the abuse of position.

If your spidey senses were tingling uneasily about the exclusive deal O2 had with the iphone here, it turns out that O2 weren't even going to unlock your iphone when your contract had expired. WTF? Over-priced gouging contract expired - give me my phone! Another case of not owning what you pay for. O2 says they will review this now that they no longer have an exclusive.

Amazon ate my homework kid - wins settlement and establishes a kind of precedent

Amazon settles lawsuit over deleted Kindle copy of '1984' - nice - you now own your digital content. But what will it mean for DRM - remember Walmart threatening to shutdown the DRM server and then backpedaling. Or indeed for remote kill switches in general? What happens when what Amazon/Apple/Microsoft wants to remove something from their content delivery network, but the customer disagrees?