Black Belt Topic: New Technology - Google Wave

Greetings cyber-jutsu practitioners. I trust you are following my advice on breathing exercises and daily exercise. Your mind and body must be sharp, in order to master the ways of cyber-jutsu. If you have not yet applied the Microsoft and Adobe patches from yesterday, please see the Black Tuesday post and do so immediately.

Because some of the black belt students have brought up this new technology topic, I will touch on it briefly. The question is: What will the Google Wave protocol and service mean to an organizations information security stance?

Students who have not yet learned of the Google Wave should seek further knowledge at: http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html#video. This is a long video. It is approximately an hour and a half in duration.

Until the service is released, it will be difficult to evaluate the security of Google Wave. Briefly, I will say that Google plans to make this technology open source. Organizations will be able to create their own Wave servers and "Federate" them with the Google Wave servers and others. This is a very good thing. Black belts in cyber-jutsu will have opportunities to dig down deep and understand the new protocol being developed for this Wave technology.

This Google Wave technology will most likely change the way we communicate on the Internet. Some features that are shown in the lengthy video include 'real time' chatting. By this, I mean, character by character transfer of information. This is nothing new for anyone who is old enough to have run or used a true-modem connected BBS (Bulletin Board System). Your sensei ran many such systems back in the 1980's, before there was a World Wide Web. In those days I was not a sensei, but a weenie. In those days my title was "sysop".

But, I digress...

The development video also shows using Google Wave to collaborate on documents instantly with many people making changes at the same time. It will change the way we share pictures, and even the way I maintain this weblog. It allows for the creation of new apps by third parties, such as games. It is, without a doubt as ground breaking a technology as Google Maps. In fact the two brothers who spawned Google Maps, are also responsible for the genesis of this new Google Wave to come.

Black Belts should seek the white papers that Google is releasing regarding this new technology. There are also some planned enhancements to the HTML standards - in order to facilitate a pure open source solution.

Why is this important to our cyber-jutsu? Once black belts watch the video, it should be clear to them. For the sake of the white and green belts who have read this post I will say this:

Anything which facilitates better, faster, and more manageable communications will impact our cyber-jutsu. This new technology will be a tool, not unlike a sword, which must be learned. From an Information Security stance, we will need to find ways to better monitor the waves which enter and leave our organizations. Today, we have serious issues in businesses that have chosen to allow unfettered access to the World Wide Web via often unpatched web browsers. More technology means more responsibility.

Currently, you must be invited to participate in these early days of Google Wave trials. If anyone receives an invitation, please let me know. I, like you, am eager to learn more of what this future will hold.

Your humble sensei,

Metajunkie