There will a free CloudCamp ‘unconference’ in Chantilly VA (outside DC) from 3pm to 9pm on Wednesday 12 November.

“CloudCamp is an unconference where early adapters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.”

Cloud computing is a hot topic this year, with IBM, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Intel, HP and Amazon all offering, using or developing high-end computing services typically described as “cloud computing”. We’ve started using it in our lab, like many research groups, via the Hadoop software framework and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud services.

Bill Poser notes in a post (Trademark Insanity) on Language Log that Dell as applied for a trademark on the term “cloud computing”.

It’s bad enough that we have to deal with struggles over the use of trademarks that have become generic terms, like “Xerox” and “Coke”, and trademarks that were already generic terms among specialists, such as “Windows”, but a new low in trademarking has been reached by the joint efforts of Dell and the US Patent and Trademark Office. Cyndy Aleo-Carreira reports that Dell has applied for a trademark on the term “cloud computing”. The opposition period has already passed and a notice of allowance has been issued. That means that it is very likely that the application will soon receive final approval.

It’s clear, at least to me, that ‘cloud computing’ has become a generic term in general use for “data centers and mega-scale computing environments” that make it easy to dynamically focus a large number of computers on a computing task. It would be a shame to have one company claim it as a trademark. On Wikipedia a redirect for the Cloud Computing page was created several weeks before Dell’s USPTO application. A Google search produces many uses of cloud computing in news articles before 2007, although it’s clear that it’s use didn’t take off until mid 2007.

An examination of a Google Trends map shows that searches for ‘cloud computing’ (blue) began in September 2007 and have increased steadily, eclipsing searches for related terms like Hadoop, ‘map reduce’ and EC2 over the past ten months.

Here’s a document giving the current status of Dell’s trademark application, (USPTO #77139082) which was submitted on March 23, 2007. According to the Wikipedia article on cloud computing, Dell

“… must file a ‘Statement of Use’ or ‘Extension Request’ within 6 months (by January 8, 2009) in order to proceed to registration, and thereafter must enforce the trademark to prevent removal for ‘non-use’. This may be used to prevent other vendors (eg Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Yahoo) from offering certain products and services relating to data centers and mega-scale computing environments under the cloud computing moniker.”

There is an interesting panel to open the Microsoft faculty research summit featuring Rick Rashid, Daniel Reed, Ed Felten, Howard Schmidt, and Elizabeth Lawley. Lots of interesting ideas, but one that got thrown out was the recent idea that maybe the world does only need five (cloud) computers. If something like this really does happen, then perhaps we’ll need to think even more aggressively about the information sharing issues — is there some way for me to make sure that I only share with (say) Google’s cloud the things that are absolutely needed. Once I have given some information to Google, can I still retain some control over it. Who owns this information now? If I do, how do I know that Google will honor whatever commitments it makes about how it will use or further share that information ? We’ll be exploring some of these questions in our “Assured Information Sharing” Research. Some of the auditing work that MIT’s DIG group has done also ties in .

The Washington Posts Security Fix blog has a post, Amazon: Hey Spammers, Get Off My Cloud!, reporting on allegations that spammers are starting to use Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) servers. It only makes sense — you can sign up easily without committing to a contract of any length, the price is low, and the IP addresses are drawn from a wide range, making it hard to block them all. Besides, if Amazon’s EC2 IP addresses all get put in a spam blacklist, it will be bad for their many legitimate users. It may be tricky for Amazon to police this.