It’s that time of year again – the end of the year, when every technology guru with a keyboard and a blog puts together their top ten lists for the year, or in this case, for the decade.

Rather than duplicating their work, we’ve decided to take it to the next level. Behold:

The Top Ten Tech Top Ten Lists for 2010.

1. Network World: The top underreported tech stories of 2009


2. eWEEK: eWEEK selects its top ten storage stories of 2009


3. Network World: The top ten technology stories of 2009


4. Electricpig.co.uk: Top ten tech personalities of 2009, and ten to watch in 2010


5. Network World: Ten big cloud trends for 2010


6. Computerworld: Top ten IT stories of 2009


7. Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies: Ten emerging technology trends of the next ten years.


8. CNN: #%*@#! The top ten tech ‘fails’ of 2009


9. PC World: Top fifteen tech events of the decade – [Please read only the first two-thirds of this article. – ed.]


10. And finally: Newsweek: The Top Ten Top Ten Lists

Pirate Bay has decided to shut down it’s tracker server, preferring instead to use “trackerless” BitTorrent formats.  Like the move from the centralized Napster to peer-to-peer solutions that didn’t require centralized tracking servers, the Pirate Bay now just becomes a search engine for torrents, not a host for torrent indexes.  It just goes to show you, nothing is more clever than a community of hackers who all missed the previous week’s episode of House.  We may have more on DHT (trackerless torrenting) in a future post, but for now, the basic rundown on how DHT affects network performance can be found at torrentfreak.com

Elsewhere, Mark Cuban has come up with a plan to kill Google.  Literally pay off the top search results for the top keywords to add a robots.txt file to drop out from Google.  Microsoft was willing to pay $45B for Yahoo, and a large number of Web sites with high page rank would opt for, say, a $100M payout to add robots.txt to the file. 

Of course, considering that Google owns a lot of those top sites… YouTube, Blogger.com, it’s a hard road.  The question is: Would most sites risk losing traffic from Google’s results (and their revenue stream) for a quick, one-time payout?  And would people then decide to stick with Google and just not visit those top sites, or move to Yahoo or Bing?  (And what’s stopping Google from retaliating by refusing Yahoo and Bing to index YouTube?) 

Anyway, since it’s a Friday before a 3-day weekend, combined with many of you just getting back from Interop, today’s not likely to be a high traffic day. So I decided it might be a good idea to de-clutter some of the stuff up in my brain.

• Terminator 4 just came out – having not seen Terminator 3, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to follow the plot. Luckily enough, most of it was in the trailer, so I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. But it makes me wonder – at some point in the Terminator series, someone had to think that it was a good idea to create a giant mainframe with no ability to be shut down in case of emergency and give it control of the entire military arsenal. And I’ll bet you that there was a guy working in the IT center of Cyberdyne who thought it was a bad idea.
  
  If only they had some network monitoring, they may have realized that Skynet was becoming self-aware. Surely, that’s going to show up on anomaly detection.
  
  
• Hey, remember that video we did with the oranges? We’ve got a new video coming up soon – but before we put that out, we figured we’d share the storyboard [PDF] with you – which is pretty funny in and of itself.
  
  
• Those following the Pirate Bay Trial saga will find this amusing – the judge assigned to review whether the trial judge in the Pirate Bay trial should be removed because was biased has been removed from the case for bias. Interestingly enough, the reason the reviewing judge was removed was because he was a member of the same groups that the trial judge was a member of. Either the Pirate Bay will get a new trial, or Swedish law will establish a precident that being a member of copyright interest groups is enough to prevent you for ruling on copyright case rulings, but not ruling on copyright cases.
  
  I heard the reviewing judge was so pissed off, he let out a vulgar stream of recursive words. (Rimshot.) Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week, don’t forget to tip your waitress.

When Slashdot posts about Google’s Mountain View Headquarters mowing their lawns with goats, (preceded by “The Manga Guide to Databases.” it’s a relatively slow news day in the tech world; still, here are some short links you may have missed between fighting off Bacon Lung.

Steve Brown over at Network Instruments alerted me that they’ve put out a press release regarding their annual “State of the Network” global study; here’s a direct link, and here’s the juicy bits. 

• Virtualization rollouts surging: Over half of applications will run on virtual machines by 2011
  
• Strong embrace of video: Companies deploying video conferencing to double by 2010
  
• IT largely unaffected by layoffs: 65 percent of network teams haven't or do not expect to experience layoffs
  
• Virtually in the dark: More than half lacked appropriate tools or visibility into virtual environments
  
• Largest troubleshooting headache: 80 percent indicated their chief troubleshooting challenge as identifying the problem source
  
• Emerging technology challenges: 45 percent saw virtualization as the greatest emerging monitoring challenge, followed by unified communications, cloud computing, and IPv6

Obviously not vendor neutral, but perhaps worth thinking about. 

Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers also weighed in with an opinion about cloud computing security problems; specifically, that cloud computing has security problems. 

Speaking during a keynote address at the annual RSA security conference, Chambers said cloud computing was inevitable, but that it would shake up the way that networks are secured.

"You'll have no idea what's in the corporate data center," he said. "That is exciting to me as a network player. Boy, am I going to sell a lot of stuff to tie that together."

However, he added, "It is a security nightmare and it can't be handled in traditional ways."…

"I'm not seeing a huge benefit in the cloud for us," said Bruce Jones, chief information security officer at Kodak, speaking in an interview.

One of the main problems is that Jones doesn't want to give up control of sensitive data to a nebulous cloud-based computing architecture. For long-term computing projects, it's probably cheaper to simply buy the hardware, he said, although cloud computing could work on a small scale at Kodak.

"It's a pilot or an R&D project where they want to do something and they need some kind of on-demand scalability; it's good for that as long as you don't care about the confidentiality of the data," Jones said.

Here’s one of the main problems with Cloud apps – all an attacker has to do is spoof the cloud computing app login page, and he’s got your own passwords, so he can go in and do whatever he wants with the data.  Malicious hackers have been doing this for years with Ebay, which is one of the first “cloud computing apps” if you really think about it. 

In the meantime it is May the 4^th.  May the 4^th be with you.

Before we begin with the standard blog post for today, we recently covered, for six days straight, the move by Time Warner to begin charging customers based on the amount of data transferred rather than the amount of bandwidth allocated.

Well, it turns out this move is so unpopular for so many of the “test markets” that Time Warner has decided to abandon the plan entirely, at what looks like the urging of Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Eric Massa, both Democrats from New York.   That’s good news for enterprise network performance, as people will continue to watch funny YouTube videos at home, most of the time. 

A quick note – last Sunday, there was some sort of football game. And everyone watched it. So people paid a lot of money to run commercials. Which a lot of people watched.

For example, Denny’s offered a free Grand Slam breakfast in their SuperBowl commercial. Which would have been great. Except that the traffic load resulting from the ad overwhelmed the servers hosting Dennys.com.

The moral of the story: When inviting 100 million people to your party, prepare for the possibility that they might actually show up.

Just some quick notes on the inauguration – Cellphone providers are rolling out portable cells to handle the traffic of phone calls, photos and 3G/Edge data.  Major bottlenecks expected in DC area WiFi networks.

Took a sneak peek at MSNBC’s streaming coverage (though I really aughn’t).  Already – 90 minutes before showtime, the video plays, but is jerky and low-framerate.  Don’t think the bottleneck is on our end – if it’s not, it implies either people  rushing into MSNBC site for video, or MSNBC is lowering the bitrate of the livestream to compensate.  Do not remember having these problems on election night.  Then again, election night was at night, when people were home from work, watching TV – not at work, watching the computers.

Just a reminder: Not too late to set up a TV in the breakroom. Or if it’s too late to get a TV, set up ONE computer in the breakroom and let everyone watch that one. 

Update: Texas PI Law

Benjamin Wright, (an advisor to an electronic-discovery firm Messaging Architects) posted a comment to our coverage of the Texas law that requires companies which “investigate” computers (which could possibly mean PC repairmen, although that wasn’t the original intent of the law) to have investigative licenses – the “Texas PI law” for short.

He pointed out that already there is one unintended consequence – and that is that those caught in red-light traffic cameras are suing the manufacturers because even though the red light footage is “evidence of a crime,” some (most?) traffic-cam organizations are not licensed to act as a private investigator, and therefore it is illegal for them to present that computerized evidence in court.

When the Texas PI law first came out, we were concerned about “unintended consequences,” and those consequences striking computer repairmen, network engineers, sysadmins, and others. This, on the other hand, seems to be the intended consequence; the red-light camera company was doing forensic work to be used in court dealing with computers. (Let’s ignore the merits and drawbacks of red-light cameras for right now.)

It is, however interesting to note that the company named in one fine appeal, American Traffic Solutions, is based in Arizona, which explains, partially, why they may have not gotten a PI license in Texas.

The American Bar Association has weighed in on this issue [PDF], arguing that computer forensics experts should not need PI licenses for forensic work.

Update: Respecting the Network Engineer

Yesterday, we published Chandra Hosek’s column on how Network Engineers often get less respect than they deserve. Thomas Nolle at Network World has published a column suggesting some of the reasons why.

Nolle notes that since the first Tech bubble burst in 2000, computer systems and software have gotten larger than average shares of investment, while networks have gone down since then. From the article:

The question we might ask is why networking couldn't capitalize on the attention it received. The answer, I think, lies in the stuff that binds networks to applications. The pivotal point in that critical issue came in the early 1990s, when IBM's Systems Network Architecture was supplanted by TCP/IP. SNA network equipment was just too expensive, and enterprises went to the lower cost of TCP/IP instead. The critical thing was that SNA was an application architecture as well as a network architecture, and TCP/IP vendors didn't present application tools… Networking won hearts and minds in the '90s, then lost them again because it didn't offer the whole solution. The application connection to the network was never made by the network vendors, and so IBM and other system and software players continued to control that critical linkage -- and still do today.

This brings new perspective on the idea that, as Jim Metzler put it, in IT you either develop applications or deliver applications.

Update: Australian Internet Fliters

Computerworld reports that the Australian-based Electronic Freedom Project is organizing protests on the 13^th of December to protest Internet content filters mandated by the government. At the same time, the Minister for Broadband, Communications, and the Digital Economy, Sen. Stephen Conroy, has given his explanation of the ISP filtering plan; but ultimately, “Teh Moges” at Slashdot pretty much sums it up with: “Any efficient filter won’t be effective, and any effective filter won’t be efficient.”

Sen. Conroy earlier tried to place pressure on Mark Newton’s employer to keep the Australian network engineer’s criticism quiet.

Update: Groups push for Net Neutrality legislation in Obama’s administration

During the 2008 presidential campaign, then candidate Barack Obama pledged support for Network Neutrality principles and regulations. Now that he’s President-Elect, the Open Internet Coalition is calling on Obama to follow through, according to Network World.

Contributed by Patrick Ancipink

While our regular blogger, Brian Boyko, is away for a little bit, I trolled through the non-election news today to find some interesting tidbits for Network Performance Daily readers.

It’s a topsy-turvy world: ITIL more popular in US than Europe?

As reported by Denise Dubie in Network World, a recent IDC research study generates some interesting finds regarding ITIL. Not only can following ITIL save you money, but there may be a reversal in the geographic adoption:

"ITIL adoption may be stronger in the Americans and Asia/Pacific than in Europe because IT managers feel that without the strong tires forced by ITIL between the business unit and IT, IT becomes less relevant and therefore easier to eliminate through layoffs," the research report reads.

For years, the knock on ITIL in the US is that, well, it seemed a little foreign and academic. (I remember taking a certification exam back in the late 90’s that seemed like it was written by a Dutch or German-speaking engineer and then hastily translated into British English. It took some rereading for my American brain to parse effectively. The V3 exam last year was better, but still a little thickly worded in the places. It could just be me—typical American.)

Anyway, ITIL or other process adoption is generally a good thing and can help break grid lock in IT organizations that still struggle with silos. We’re pushing for a dedicated Performance Management discipline in a future version, but until then it’s important to remember that performance measurements, baselines and SLAs are littered throughout ITIL.

The FCC vs. Dolly Parton

While there’s a Supreme Court case being heard right now that deals with the more classic media vs. FCC issues over using naughty words, there’s apparently another donnybrook brewing that pits the entertainment and microphone (yes that’s right, microphone) industries against an alliance between technology behemoths and the FCC. Not exactly Yankees vs. Red Sox, but it’s interesting:

Spearheaded by Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), and Motorola (NYSE: MOT), the flexible use of the white-spaces spectrum could pave the way for more widespread use of broadband communications, particularly in rural areas, which traditionally have lagged in broadband access.

So the FCC approved what these tech giants wanted and drew the ire of:

A large group of entertainment, sports, and businesses figures had sounded the alarm that the use of the white spaces could interfere with their events. These ranged from entertainer Dolly Parton and the American Federation of Musicians to the NFL and Nascar.

In a nutshell, a concern from this group is that wireless microphone performance could be compromised by what Google, Microsoft and Motorola want to do with the white space. Not sure this is what they are getting at, but I don’t want my Google searches being broadcast at a Dolly Parton show.

As part of their solution for broadband, perhaps the FCC could look into Boyko’s idea about using VoIP white space for the last-mile.

Get out your valium.

Bloomberg: U.S. Stocks Drop, S&P 500 Sinks Most Since 2001 Terror Attacks

The Dow Jones Industrial Index, simultaneously economic barometer, canary in the coal mine, and metaphor for America’s hopes and dreams, has dropped 500 points in the worst slide since the September 11^th attacks.

Was it the Lehman bankruptcy, (the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history,) that did it? Or the forced sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America? Or was it the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Or AIG needing a federal bailout?

No. It was me.

I removed the tag from my mattress that says “Do not remove,” and, well, it was the straw that broke the back of the American economy, apparently. Sorry about that.

More seriously, I’m sure that among those who still held Lehman Brothers stock Tuesday morning, those who managed to sell first ended up (relatively) happier than those who came after them. It just reinforces the idea that in today’s market, you need to take every step to monitor your network and be proactive about problems. (Because when the market is in a panic, you need to be making bad decisions faster and more reliably than anyone else out there.)

PCWorld: HP Announces 24,600 Layoffs in Wake of EDS Acquisition

When it rains, it pours.

Hewlett-Packard will lay off about 24,600 employees over the next three years in an effort to streamline the company following its US$13.9 billion acquisition of Electronic Data Systems last month, the company announced Monday.

The layoffs will be part of a three-year restructuring program, HP said in a statement. The company will lay off about 7.5 percent of its workers during that time, with nearly half of the reductions coming from HP's U.S. workforce, HP said.

Can things get any worse?

Cnet: Forrester slices 2009 IT spending projection

That was supposed to be a rhetorical question!

IT spending is expected to rise 5.4 percent this year, revised from previous Forrester projections of a 2.8 percent increase.

But next year, growth in IT spending is expected to get whacked down to 6.1 percent from previous projections of a 10 percent increase.

Forrester, which revises its annual projections on a quarterly basis to reflect changes in the economy, attributed the changes to its most recent projections based on the drama that is sweeping across the economy and world markets.

"We think the economy will turn (for the worse) in the third quarter, and if that happens, we'll see a significant slowdown in IT spending in the fourth quarter and then the first and second quarters," said Andrew Bartels, a research analyst with Forrester Research.

It’s enough to make you want to slit your wrists. Does anyone out there have a blade?

Network World: Cisco to enter blade server market?

In a bulletin issued this week as a preview to Cisco’s Sept. 16 analyst conference, investment firm UBS states that Cisco is likely to enter the blade server market within a year. The firm cites “industry checks” as its source but did not say whether the company’s entry would be through acquisition or organic development….

…Cisco last year announced a $150 million stake in server virtualization software vendor VMware; unveiled an appliance to control pooled data center compute resources; and this year rolled out switches with increasing application intelligence and unified transport fabrics to gain more control over the source, destination and flow of data center traffic.

Blade servers are the next most obvious piece when it come to filling out this strategy, observers such as UBS note.

So, I guess it’s not all bad news for today.