Just when you thought companies could create another blah blah as a service acronym, Canonical has thrown a couple of new letters at us: MaaS. MaaS stand for Metal As A Service and is a metal to server management service created by Canonical (the team behind Ubuntu).

In the old days (aka last couple of years) companies went crazy buying the biggest meanest servers they could buy to do all they number crunching and big data analysis. The bigger the company the bigger and more expensive the servers they bought. The cloud paradigm forced a shift in approach, since it meant your work got chunked and processed by dozens or hundreds of servers (not one monster monolithic beast in a special room). Cloud meant you no longer cared about processor speed, bus speed, computational capacity of one node, etc. In the cloud, your work can be handled by thousands of smaller, cheaper commodity servers.

Canonical believes MaaS is the secret sauce that allows you to think of your servers as commodity devices that offer services and not as big expensive electronics (what it can do not what it is).

In the world of Ubuntu, MaaS will manage your hardware and Juju will manage your apps and workload. As you read this, you would be forgiven if thoughts of self-deploying OpenStack servers come to mind. This is the market Canonical is targeting.

Metal As A Service is new in Ubuntu 12.04 and you can expect a quick bump is features over the next 12-18 months. Canonical wants to add BIOS and RAID firmware updating capabilities, authentication integration and various self-managed pre-built testing schemes.

Not surprisingly, tech reporters are divided about the usefulness of this new technology (and other competitors in this space). Some believes it is a solution to an age old problem while others believe it is a solution looking for a problem.

I think MaaS is an much needed product in its infancy and it will be important to see how it competes against the likes of Nebula One (which to me seems like a much more refined and enterprise ready solution).

Ubuntu is spyware

December 11, 2012InfoSecEdward Kiledjian

Richard Stallman, the creator of the GNU Project and a leader of the Free Software Foundation, recently called Ubuntu spyware.

He made that claim because the latest version of Ubuntu (12.10) sends desktop search information to Canonical (the makers of Ubuntu) so they can show you customized Amazon ads directly in Ubuntu's program called Dash. His exact explanation was "Ubuntu, a widely used and influential GNU/Linux distribution, has installed surveillance code. When the user searches her own local files for a string using the Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu sends that string to one of Canonical’s servers. (Canonical is the company that develops Ubuntu.)"

Stallman's issue isn't the advertising but rather the monitoring and surveillance done by Canonical to provide targeted advertising (as part of the core operating system). I do want to remind Windows 8 users that many of their built-in apps also come bundled with advertising but in the case of Windows, these aren't core components and you can easily skip using them.

Canonical has a built in switch to allow users to turn this surveillance off but most don't realize it's there. I believe a clear question should be asked during the installation (or update) about this and the switch can then be set to on or off depending on the users explicit response.

What is dash? In Ubuntu, the Dash has always let you search your computer for your files, photos and videos. But now it does more than just search your computer - it can search all your online accounts too. So, once you’ve saved the login details in the ‘Online Accounts’ function, you can expect to see your Flickr photos, Google Drive documents and more in your search results, alongside the files on your computer.