Cisco today announced their inaugural Global Cloud Index report, providing statistics and forecasts on both the current and future use of the cloud.

While Cisco has been predicting for years the growth of the network by way of their Visual Networking Index, the Cloud Index takes a look at traffic both inside and outside of the data center. Among the key forecasts from the new Cloud report is that overall data center IP traffic will grow between 2010 and 2015 at a compound annual growth rate of 33 percent. Overall traffic will grow from 1.1 Zettabytes in 2010 to 4.8 Zettabytes in 2015.

“The interesting part about the 4.8 Zettabyte figure is that it is higher than what we forecast in the Visual Networking Index for the network itself and this caught us by surprise,” Doug Webster, Sr. Director of SP Marketing at Cisco told InternetNews.com. “The vast majority of traffic is staying within the data center itself.”

Webster noted that approximately 76 percent of traffic stays within the data center as virtual machines migrate from one server to another. Data center to data center traffic is also on the rise, accounting for as much as 17 percent of total traffic.

Cisco analyst Shruti Jain added that many people don’t realize how much supplementary data is generated for different types of transactions. For example, Jain told InternetNews.com that if you send a 1 MB email to four people, you’d expect to have used 5 MB of data. As it turns out according to Cisco’s findings, that transaction can generate as much as 30 MB of data due to all the storage, replication and backup that goes on.

Looking specifically at cloud traffic, according to Cisco, the cloud represents only 11 percent of data center traffic today. That number will grow to 34 percent by 2015. Overall cloud traffic is set to increase as well, growing from 130 Exabytes today to 1.6 Zettabytes in 2015.

In terms of defining the cloud, Cisco is using the NIST definition of cloud, which isn’t just about virtualization, but also includes the idea of elastic services that are billed on a usage basis.

“We’re aligning with a broader view than just saying that anything that is virtualized is cloud,” Jain said. “We’re not equating cloud to virtualization and we’re making sure we include things like usage based pricing.”

From a workload perspective, only 21 percent of workloads were cloud based in 2010. Cisco expects that number to grow to 51 percent by 2014. While cloud will represent the majority of workloads in 2014, it will not represent the majority of data center traffic.

“That is due to more efficiency on the cloud side,” Jain said. “Also there is the fact that some workloads are less traffic intensive to begin with.”

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If you’ve been weighing buying a new Mac or iPad but are holding out for one of Apple’s rare discounts, Black Friday is your chance. As it’s done in recent years, Apple is holding a “one-day shopping event” for the day after Thanksgiving. A page on Apple’s site invites Black Friday shoppers to visit its online store; it’s not clear whether the same deals will be offered at the company’s retail stores as well.

Apple’s promotional copy touts “iPad, iPod and Mac gifts.” Conspicuously absent is any mention of deals on the new iPhone 4S, which starts at $199 (with two-year wireless-carrier contract) and will probably not be discounted.  In typically cryptic fashion, the company isn’t offering specifics on its seasonal markdowns. But the blog 9to5Mac published what it claims are some leaked details: Modest discounts of $101 on Macs, $41-$61 on iPads (depending on storage capacity) and $21-$41 on iPods.

Those would be in line with the Black Friday deals Apple offered last year, although the company only marked its iPads down by $41. 9to5Mac also says some accessories, such as iPad covers, will be discounted Friday. There was no mention of any deals on iPhones.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment Wednesday on the report or on potential discounts.  Even at a briefly discounted price of $458, the cheapest iPad has new
competition this holiday season from smaller, less expensive tablets like  Amazon’s Kindle Fire ($199) and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet ($249).  BlackBerry also has slashed the price of its 7-inch PlayBook tablet from $499 to about $200, depending on the retailer.

Some observers also had expected Black Friday to mark the debut of Apple’s huge new retail store inside New York City’s iconic Grand Central Station. But
according to tech-news blog Mashable, a CNN.com content partner, construction workers at the site don’t expect the store to open until December.

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Expert tip: choosing “password” as your online password is not a good idea. In fact, unless you’re hoping to be an easy target for hackers, it’s the worst password you can possibly choose.

“Password” ranks first on password management application provider SplashData’s annual list of worst internet passwords, which are ordered by how common they are. (“Passw0rd,” with a numeral zero, isn’t much smarter, ranking 18th on the list.)

The list is somewhat predictable: Sequences of adjacent numbers or letters on the keyboard, such as “qwerty” and “123456,” and popular names, such as “michael,” are all common choices. Other common choices, such as “monkey” and “shadow,” are harder to explain.

As some websites have begun to require passwords to include both numbers and letters, it makes sense varied choices, such as “abc123″ and “trustno1,” are popular choices.

SplashData created the rankings based on millions of stolen passwords posted online by hackers. Here is the complete list:

1. password
2. 123456
3. 12345678
4. qwerty
5. abc123
6. monkey
7. 1234567
8. letmein
9. trustno1
10. dragon
11. baseball
12. 111111
13. iloveyou
14. master
15. sunshine
16. ashley
17. bailey
18. passw0rd
19. shadow
20. 123123
21. 654321
22. superman
23. qazwsx
24. michael
25. football

SplashData CEO Morgan Slain urges businesses and consumers using any password on the list to change them immediately.

“Hackers can easily break into many accounts just by repeatedly trying common passwords,” Slain says. “Even though people are encouraged to select secure, strong passwords, many people continue to choose weak, easy-to-guess ones, placing themselves at risk from fraud and identity theft.”

The company provided some tips for choosing secure passwords in a statement:

• Vary different types of characters in your passwords; include numbers, letters and special characters when possible.
• Choose passwords of eight characters or more. Separate short words with spaces or underscores.
• Don’t use the same password and username combination for multiple websites. Use an online password manager to keep track of your different accounts.

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The event is expected to bring the launch of Google‘s online music download store, the latest such digital storefront from the search giant. Google already operates a digital store for books, as well as for software applications on both its Android and Chrome platforms.

The new service will play into Google’s existing music offering, a beta service that lets users store digital copies of their music tracks on the company’s servers.

Alongside the formal launch of that service, Google is expected to unveil deals with most of the big record companies to sell digital music downloads from those catalogs. Purchased tracks can then be accessed from both the Web and on mobile devices, including those running Google’s Android operating system.

There may be more too. CNET broke the news that Google will add extra social features on top of its store. According to the Wall Street Journal, that social feature will include letting users share tracks they’ve purchased with their friends on Google’s social network Google+.

The press event kicks off at 2 p.m. Pacific, and Google is providing a live stream of it at YouTube.com/Android. As usual, we’ll be using Cover it Live to bring you updates and photos from the press conference as it’s happening. Just bookmark this page and come back to it Wednesday afternoon, or sign up to get an e-mail reminder just ahead of the start. Plus: We’ll have running commentary in a special Google Music segment on Buzz Out Loud.

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Developers around the world believe IBM Watson’s sophisticated analytics capabilities will transform industries that are managing massive amounts of data, according to the 2011 IBM Tech Trends Report released today. Survey respondents selected education and healthcare as the areas that could benefit the most, with financial services, life sciences and government also ranking near the top.

The 2011 Tech Trends Report surveyed more than 4,000 Information Technology (IT) professionals from 93 countries and 25 industries who provided their views on future IT trends. The results also show a growing need for technical skills in the areas of business analytics, social business, mobile computing, open source technologies and cloud computing. Read the report at: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/techtrendsreport, share your opinions at #TechTrends and see what IBM experts are saying about the findings at: www.youtube.com/IBMEcosystem

According to the report, business analytics software is the most widely used technology of those surveyed. In fact, business analytics software is being incorporated in almost every business process within organizations. Forty-two percent of respondents believe that business analytics will continue to be in demand for software development. The report also outlines the growing importance of open source platforms such as Apache Hadoop and Linux for business analytics software developers.

The report provides IT and business professionals a roadmap of the technologies and skills that will be in greatest demand in the coming years. Key findings in the 2011 IBM Tech Trends Report include:

• Eighty-seven percent of respondents believe open source and open standard technologies will play a key role in the future of application development.
• During the next two years more than 75 percent of organizations will engage in cloud computing.
• Fifty-one percent of respondents cited the adoption of cloud technologies as part of their mobile strategy.
• Regional cultural differences impact social business adoption. India is strongly embracing social business with a 57 percent adoption rate, followed by the US with a 45 percent adoption rate and China with a 44 percent adoption rate. Russia shows the strongest resistance with a 19 percent adoption rate.

“The results are clear. Mobile computing, cloud computing, social business and business analytics have gone beyond niche status and are now part of any modern organization’s core IT focus,” said Jim Corgel, general manager ISV and Developer Relations, IBM. “IT professionals who can develop the skills needed to work across these technologies will be ready to meet growing business demand in the coming years.”

IBM developerWorks, the company’s online community for IT professionals is the industry’s largest and most visited global site for them to gain technology skills. More than eight million IT professionals have visited the community to gain no-cost access to software tools and code, IT standards and best practices across various industries. Visitors also tap skills training in open technologies, business analytics, cloud computing and mobile computing, among others. In addition, IBM Business Partners and entrepreneurs can access advanced training and resources at IBM’s network of 40 Innovation Centers around the world to further build their skills.

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Google has a secret laboratory, unknown even to most of the company’s employees, where it develops projects that sound like something taken from a sci-fi movie, the New York Timesreports.

At the lab, located somewhere in the Bay Area, Google’s brightest engineers are working on some hundred projects, including smart refrigerators and dinner plates, robots that fetch the groceries and elevators that can take you to outer space.

An unnamed Google engineer says that the lab is run mysteriously, in two different office buildings — one for logistics and the other for robotics projects.

The scientists working in the lab include hires from Microsoft, Nokia, Stanford, M.I.T., Carnegie Mellon and New York University. Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin is reportedly “deeply involved” with the project, and he and co-founder Larry Page have come up with a list of ideas for the lab.

It is reportedly headed by robotics and artificial intelligence expert Sebastian Thrun from Stanford, best known for his work on the world’s first driverless car. Andrew Ng, a Stanford professor and an esteemed A.I. expert, also works at the lab.

A Google spokeswoman would not confirm the existence of the lab, but she did say that Google likes to invest in speculative projects. Google’s 20% rule, which lets engineers spend one-fifth of their work time on personal projects, is one example of that, but a secret lab takes this idea a step further and makes you wonder which of these technologies will graduate to be full-fledged Google projects.

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Soldiers Coming Home from War and Surprising Their Loved Ones…Long Live the United States of America!

The Department of Justice has indicted seven people for allegedly hijackingmillions of computers, manipulating traffic on popular websites, and generating more than $14 million in fraudulent advertising revenue.

The defendants — six Estonians and one Russian — allegedly hijacked more than 4 million computers using malware that rerouted Internet traffic to websites where they would get a cut of the ad revenue. Infected computers with users looking for popular websites such as Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes were rerouted to webpages that featured the defendants’ ads.

This case is supposedly the “first of its kind,” according to US Attorney Preet Bharara, because the suspects set up their own “rogue servers” in order to perform the rerouting. Using their rogue servers, the defendants were allegedly able to substitute legitimate Internet ads with their own ads, thereby generating millions in advertising revenue.

According to BusinessWeek, the indictment cited a case in which an American Express ad on the Wall Street Journal’s home page was replaced — instantly, once users clicked on it — with an ad for “Fashion Girl LA.”

About 500,000 of the infected computers were located in the United States, Bharara said in a news conference in New York. The alleged scheme, which ran from 2007 to 2011, was first discovered at NASA, where 130 computers were infected.

The defendants are being charged with 27 counts of wire fraud, conspiracy, money laundering, and computer-related crimes. The most serious charges, wire fraud and money laundering, carry a maximum punishment of 30 years in prison.

The six Estonian defendants — Vladimir Tsastsin, Timur Gerassimenko, Dmitri Jegorow, Valeri Aleksejev, Konstantin Poltev, and Anton Ivanov — were arrested Tuesday, but the Russian suspect, Audrey Taame, remains at large.

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UPDATE 8:39 A.M. PST: Adobe confirmed it will cease Flash development on mobile devices in a press release published Wednesday morning.

In an abrupt about-face in its mobile software strategy, Adobe will soon cease developing its Flash Player plug-in for mobile browsers, according to an e-mail sent to Adobe partners on Tuesday evening.

And with that e-mail flash, Adobe has signaled that it knows, as Steve Jobs predicted, the end of the Flash era on the web is coming soon.

The e-mail, obtained and first reported on by ZDNet, says that Adobe will no longer continue to “adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations,” instead focusing on alternative application packaging programs and the HTML5 protocol.

“Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores,” the quoted e-mail says.

In the past, Adobe has released software tools for mobile developers that create a single platform programmers can use to make applications that work across three major mobile platforms: Android, iOS and the BlackBerry OS. While it’s seemingly easier than learning all of the native languages for each operating system, some developers have claimed a loss in app performance when coding in a non-native language that then gets translated into other languages.

The move indicates a massive backpedaling on Adobe’s part, a company who championed its Flash platform in the face of years of naysaying about its use on mobile devices. Despite Flash’s near ubiquity across desktop PCs, many in the greater computing industry, including, famously, Apple Computer, have denounced the platform as fundamentally unstable on mobile browsers, and an intense battery drain. In effect, Flash’s drawbacks outweigh the benefits on mobile devices.

Flash became a dominant desktop platform by allowing developers to code interactive games, create animated advertisements and deliver video to any browser that had the plugin installed, without having to take into account the particulars of any given browser. However, with the development of Javascript, CSS, and HTML5, which has native support for video, many web developers are turning away from Flash, which can be a resource hog even on the most advanced browsers.

Apple made its biggest waves in the case against Flash in April of last year, when Steve Jobs penned a 1,500-word screed against the controversial platform, describing it as a technology of the past. Jobs and Apple disliked the platform so intensely, it has since been barred from use on all iOS devices.

Despite attempts to breathe life into Flash on other mobile devices — namely, Android and BlackBerry OS — Adobe has failed to deliver a consistently stable version of the platform on a smartphone or tablet. In WIRED’s testing of the BlackBerry PlayBook in April, Flash use caused the browser to crash on a consistent basis. And when Flash was supposed to come to tablets with Motorola’s Xoom, Adobe was only able to provide an highly unstable Beta version of Flash to ship with the flagship Android device.

“Adobe has lost so much credibility with the community that I’m hoping they are bought by someone else that can bring some stability and eventually some credibility back to the Flash Platform,” wrote software developer Dan Florio in a blog post on Wednesday morning.

The drastic reversal in Adobe’s mobile plans comes in the wake of the company cutting 750 jobs on Tuesday, a move prompted by what Adobe labeled “corporate restructuring.”

An Adobe representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Several U.S. Supreme Court justices hearing arguments in a case today suggested that allowing warrantless GPS tracking of citizens’ cars could lead to a Big Brother scenario of constant computerized government surveillance.

“What is the question that I think people are driving at, at least as I understand it and certainly share the concern, is that if you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States,” Justice Stephen Breyer told a Justice Department attorney. “So if you win, you suddenly produce what sounds like ‘1984‘ from their (opposing counsel) brief. I understand they have an interest in perhaps dramatizing that, but–but maybe overly. But it still sounds like it.”

“And so what protection is there, if any, once we accept your view of the case, from this slight futuristic scenario that’s just been painted, and is done more so in their briefs?” Breyer asked.

The high court heard arguments in a case in which District of Columbia police surreptitiously installed a GPS (Global Positioning System) tracking device on the car of Antoine Jones, a suspected cocaine dealer. At the time, police did not have a valid search warrant. The Justice Department appealed a lower court ruling that threw out the conviction.

A ruling will establish whether a warrant signed by a judge is required before law enforcement can track a driver’s every move on the roads. The Obama administration argues that no warrant is needed.

Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben told the court that cars traveling on public roadways do not have the same Fourth Amendment privacy protections afforded citizens in their homes. In addition, GPS devices on cars are akin to beeper surveillance used to track suspects in their vehicles along with visual monitoring.

However, Chief Justice John Roberts and other justices pointed out that GPS devices make it easy to collect much more information about people than could previously be done, rendering moot the legal notion of a “trespass,” which happens when a device is installed on a person’s property.

“In the pre-computer, pre-Internet age, much of the privacy–I would say most of the privacy–that people enjoyed was not the result of legal protections or constitutional protections; it was the result simply of the difficulty of traveling around and gathering up information,” said Justice Samuel Alito.

“Essentially, I think you answered the question that the government’s position would mean that any of us could be monitored whenever we leave our–our homes, so the only thing secure is the home,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said.

Asked how many GPS devices are used by federal and state agencies, Dreeben said “in the low thousands annually.”

Ginsburg asked defense attorney Stephen Leckar how GPS is different from video cameras, which are trained on streets and public spaces and recording peoples’ movements constantly. “GPS is like a million cameras,” said Leckar.

Justices touched on whether there had been a search or a seizure and whether it was unreasonable or not. “The unreasonableness requirement or prohibition does not take effect unless there has been a search,” said Justice Antonin Scalia. But there is no search “when you are in public and where everything you do is open to the view of people,” he added. “Why is this an invasion of privacy?”

“Because it’s a complete robotic substitute” for human-based surveillance, Leckar said.

In his rebuttal, Dreeben said “Today perhaps GPS can be portrayed as a ’1984′-type invasion, but as people use GPS in their lives and for other purposes, our expectations of privacy surrounding our location may also change.”

“That seems too much to me,” Justice Elena Kagan said. “I mean, if you think about this, and you think about a little robotic device following you around 24 hours a day anyplace you go that’s not your home, reporting in all your movements to the police, to investigative authorities. The notion that we don’t have an expectation of privacy in that, the notion that we don’t think that our privacy interests would be violated by this robotic device, I’m–I’m not sure how one can say that.”

The court did not indicate how it would decide the case or when.

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