Abner Stories

Monitor Everything

If you monitor a huge ecosystem over time, I believe your ability to identify anomalous behavior in real time decreases as the size of the ecosystem grows - especially if you can store more data than you can process. The data that you can not process, you can not monitor. Correct? Someone tell me if I'm nuts.

The NY Times reported today that the Bush administration wants to monitor the Internet. Perhaps they should just go buy Counterpane and then force every major service provider to provide hooks into Counterpane's monitoring devices - or perhaps provide some sort of standard data feed to Counterpane.

Aside from all the privacy noise on this one - I expect we will need to see some serious research into detecting anomalous behavior. Stay tuned, this one might get interesting.