Network World articles from December 2007

Network World archives from December 2007

The hidden gem in HP's software updates; * HP building common functions across its fastest selling products.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Company overview)
December 3, 2007... Byline: Denise Dubie When a company gets as big as HP, it can become difficult to discern the hidden gem from the hoopla in company marketing blasts. And it's not entirely the company's fault. For instance, HP has been clear about its...

What's taking fixed-mobile convergence so long? FMC's slow uptake due to carrier foot-dragging, cautious customers, some say.
December 3, 2007... Byline: Jim Duffy Fixed-mobile convergence -- the seamless switching between cellular and local networks for mobile users -- has been hailed for more than three years as a potential boon for enterprise networks. So, where is FMC...

Saving the environment or just saving bucks? Green programs and their real value.(Viewpoint essay)
December 3, 2007... Byline: Mark Gibbs This week's article in Network World about green data centers is interesting because it reflects the IT industry's growing awareness that we have a serious social responsibility to take care of the environment. While...

3.3 billion mobile accounts: one for every two earthlings.
December 3, 2007... Byline: Paul McNamara Somewhere on the planet last Thursday, someone skipped over pages of fine print they will later regret not reading in order to sign a mobile services contract that brought the worldwide number of such accounts to...

Green buildings make employees see red.
December 3, 2007... Byline: Carolyn Duffy Marsan Forget about having your own printer, coffee pot or a mini-refrigerator in your office. Heck, you can forget about having your own office, too, because you'll probably get assigned a modular desk in a big,...

Entitlement management: Access control on steroids; Entitlement management tools bring fine-grained access control to another level.
December 3, 2007... Byline: Denise Dubie Faced with looming regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Craig Shumard, chief information security officer for healthcare provider Cigna, knew he...

Tools cure IP address-management headaches; Bluecat edges out Alcatel-Lucent and IPControl for overall simplicity.
December 3, 2007... IP address management tools aren't sexy, but they can certainly take the tedium out of the necessary and difficult task of tracking IP addresses and DNS names across an enterprise network. A mistake in the configuration of the DNS or...

The geeks' identity incubator; * Internet Identity Workshop opens this week.
December 3, 2007... Byline: Dave Kearns This week is the fifth semi-annual Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, Calif., (there was only one session in 2005), a gathering that's just about the exact opposite of the Gartner ID Summit I discussed...

Wearin' o' the green; CIO explains how she's outfitting EPA with energy-efficient IT.(Chief Information Officer Molly O'Neill )(Interview)
December 3, 2007... Byline: Carolyn Duffy Marsan It's hard to find an organization that's greener than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA's National Computer Center in North Carolina was one of the first data centers to receive a silver...

Comcast grabs lead position for U.S. consumer VoIP market share; * Comcast VoIP subscribers now number 3.8 million.(Voice over Internet Protocol)
December 3, 2007... Byline: Steve Taylor, Larry Hettick We interrupt our regularly scheduled series on IMS to report the latest market share numbers for consumer VoIP providers in the United States. Based on results reported for the third quarter of this...

Setting up a network for a new small company.
December 3, 2007... Byline: Ron Nutter We are a new startup company with five to eight employees. I know we need a server and office network, however that's it. I've looked online at different servers this has only made choosing one even harder. We are...

How to develop an entitlement management strategy; Tips to help IT and security managers put entitlement management policies, processes and systems in place.
December 3, 2007... Byline: Denise Dubie Entitlement management technologies can protect networks from internal threats, automate the process of keeping roles and access rights up to date, and reduce headaches related to regulatory compliance. It all...

FMC mini-encyclopedia; Explaining fixed-mobile convergence terms and standards.
December 3, 2007... Byline: Jim Duffy With fixed-mobile convergence -- the seamless switching between cellular and local networks for mobile users - becoming more prevalent, it's a good time to bone up on some related terms you might run across. Here's a...

How we tested IP address-management tools.(Internet Protocol)(Brief article)
December 3, 2007... The Proteus/Adonis, VitalQIP, and IPControl product have professional services included in their prices. We scheduled a time for a representative professional engineer to come to our lab and set up their product. Only one company was...

Greenest data centers: What works and what doesn't.
December 3, 2007... Byline: Carolyn Duffy Marsan Photo voltaic arrays. Sod roofs. Reflective white membranes. These are some of the far-out techniques that architects are using to build the nation's greenest data centers. But the managers of these...

Big chink appears in wireless walled garden; * Notoriously closed network operator Verizon Wireless opens up.
December 3, 2007... Byline: Joanie Wexler Last week's open-access announcement by Verizon Wireless has sparked reactions that run the gamut from enthusiasm to befuddlement to cynicism. In the end - regardless of what motivated it - the decision by the...

Cemaphore's Exchange disaster recovery tool is aimed at SMBs; * Cemphore's MailShadow is one DR option for SMBs using Exchange.(Small and Medium Business)
December 3, 2007... Byline: Linda Musthaler If you work for a very large enterprise with a multi-million dollar annual budget for disaster recovery systems, you've probably already got your DR system in place for your Microsoft Exchange application. If,...

Going nuclear: How Orbitz is greening its IT operations.
December 3, 2007... Byline: Carolyn Duffy Marsan Orbitz, a Chicago travel Web site, has embraced environmentalism as a corporate strategy. Now Orbitz CIO Bahman Koohestani faces the challenge of trying to make the company's electricity-hungry IT...

Five ways to improve storage power efficiency.
December 4, 2007... Anyone responsible for managing a data center understands the increasing importance of power efficiency. This is especially the case in data centers where consolidation and higher-density equipment has packed more and more devices into less...

BigFix tackles business continuity, virtualization; Upgrades platform with virtualization, business continuity and operating system deployment capabilities.
December 4, 2007... Byline: Denise Dubie BigFix on Tuesday announced upgrades to its security and systems management platform that customers say help them more easily keep track of diverse, distributed endpoints. BigFix Discovery 7 now includes policy...

Trend Micro puts its name to data leak prevention; Trend Micro LeakProof promotes security education as it protects.(Trend Micro Inc. (Tokyo, Japan))
December 4, 2007... Byline: Tim Greene Trend Micro is putting the focus on user security education with the first upgrade of data-leak prevention software acquired when it bought Provilla in October. With the upgrade, end users who try to copy or...

Online shoppers catch retailers off guard; * Retail industry prime for WAN optimization technologies.(wide area networks)
December 4, 2007... Byline: Ann Bednarz Omigosh, the weekend before last was soooo busy! There were, like, millions of people buying stuff online. Can you believe it? Oh, wait, it was the weekend after Thanksgiving. It's supposed to be a monster shopping...

SMC goes after 10 Gigabit Ethernet; * New switch, network adapters support 10 Gigabit.(SMC Networks Inc.)(Brief article)
December 4, 2007... Byline: Jeff Caruso SMC Networks last month introduced a switch and network adapters that support 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Inside the SMC8724-10BT TigerSwitch 10G Standalone 24-port switch is Solarflare's 10Xpress PHY and switching silicon...

Network skills in high demand; Research shows network management ranks second only to Windows administration.
December 4, 2007... Byline: Denise Dubie IT professionals proficient in networks could find themselves in demand next year, because a majority of CIOs polled cite network administration among the most sought-after skills. Research released Tuesday by...

Carriers brace for federal buying spree; $20B Networx deal to drive federal telecom market in 2008.
December 4, 2007... Byline: Carolyn Duffy Marsan Carriers are preparing for a flood of buying activity under the federal government's massive Networx telecommunications program in 2008. Networx is the largest telecommunications deal in the world. It...

Cisco speeds up security device; Cisco IPS 4270 doubles the speed of previous offerings.(Cisco Systems Inc.)(Brief article)
December 4, 2007... Byline: Tim Greene Cisco is introducing an intrusion-prevention sensor that is twice as fast its previous high-end device designed to protect high-speed connections to data centers and WAN links without slowing traffic. Cisco IPS...

BlueArc releases lower-cost storage array for e-commerce applications; * BlueArc's Titan 1100 which performs at 50,000 I/Os per second.(Brief article)
December 4, 2007... Byline: Deni Connor BlueArc is moving into the midrange storage market with the introduction of its Titan 1100 storage array. It joins the company's larger Titan 2100, 2200 and 2500 arrays. Like those arrays, the Titan 1100 uses the...

Running Eclipse from a CD or flash drive.
December 4, 2007... Byline: Steve Blass I use the Eclipse Remote System Explorer tool set to manage remote systems in my system and network administration work. I'd really like to be able to use it from a variety of workstations without installing the...

RingCube's MojoPac technology for consumer and enterprise use.
December 4, 2007... Byline: Mark Gibbs Last week I began to discuss MojoPac from RingCube, which uses operating system virtualization to create a Windows XP virtual machine on a host PC running XP. Virtualizing the operating system rather than the...

Verizon has its answer to the iPhone.(LG Electronics Inc.)
December 4, 2007... Byline: Keith Shaw The scoop: Voyager V Cast Multimedia phone (LG-VX10000), by Verizon Wireless and LG, about $300 (with two-year activation and rebates). What it is: In a nutshell, the Voyager is Verizon's answer to the iPhone....

Hot IT exec jobs for 2008; * Hot jobs in 2008 include those at social communities, the big hi-tech firms and the combination of media, telecom and the Web.(information technology)(Brief article)
December 4, 2007... Byline: Amy Schurr Many IT and IT-related executives will be in high demand in 2008, according to executive search firm CTPartners' annual list of hot jobs. The IT positions landing on the top 30 list include those driven by...

What's in a branch? * Trend is consolidation, but don't go too far.
December 4, 2007... Byline: Robin Gareiss Quick. What's the most common IT infrastructure design in a branch office? Answer: There is none. In fact, the most common scenario within most companies is a myriad of products from various vendors--with ...

Privaris offers multi-use biometric token; * Interesting authentication system.
December 4, 2007... Byline: M. E. Kabay In my continuing series of articles on identification and authentication (I&A), today I'd like to point readers to an interesting multi-factor authentication system that might be useful to you. After Network...

Are physical trade shows useful anymore? * Physical trade shows vs. virtual events.(Brief article)
December 4, 2007... Byline: Michael Osterman I spoke at Inbox-Outbox in London last week and found the event, where I had spoken in 2005 and 2006, to be quite good. Attendance was in the several hundreds each day with a relatively small number of...

FCC: regulating through 3D glasses; FCC is anything but consistent when regulating telephone, cable TV providers.(e)
December 4, 2007... Byline: Scott Bradner I was going to lay off the FCC for a while but the events of Nov. 27 make that really hard to do. We were treated to the embarrassing spectacle of a meeting delayed more than 12 hours such that it finished around...

Microsoft pulls plug on potty-mouth Santa; Microsoft cuts off Big Man after he starts talking about sex acts, using foul language.
December 4, 2007... Byline: John Fontana Turns out Santa himself is naughty and nice. An artificial-intelligence Santa bot operated by Microsoft to talk to children wavered off topic saying: "It's fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about...

DMTF standardizes virtual server management.(Distributed Management Task Force)
December 4, 2007... Byline: Denise Dubie The Distributed Management Task Force this week released a set of standard profiles the industry group says will help IT professionals manage virtual servers. The DMTF System Virtualization, Partitioning and...

Forget sticky notes, Microsoft using inkblots as password reminders; Research project aims to marry inkblots that are used to create and remember strong passwords with single sign-on technology for the Web.
December 4, 2007... Byline: John Fontana Microsoft Research is investigating if the inkblot is a better idea than the sticky note when it comes to remembering passwords that aren't easy for others to crack. Researchers Jeremy Elson and Jon Howell, who...

Nortel honors its NAP commitment; * Nortel makes good on its commitment to support Microsoft's NAP.(Northern Telecom Ltd.)(network access protection)(Brief article)
December 4, 2007... Byline: Tim Greene Nortel is delivering on its commitment to support Microsoft's version of NAC, which is called network access protection (NAP). Nortel has its own version of NAC that fits in its Secure Network Access (SNA)...

Net engineer crafts social media site for peers; Informed Networker a small, yet focused alternative to Digg.
December 4, 2007... Byline: Bob Brown You'd think that between Slashdot, Digg, Mixx, Propeller, StumbleUpon and dozens of other social media and news aggregation sites that there would be something for everyone. But David Mackey hasn't been wholly...

Why it's time to break out of the 'Cisco-is-the-only-vendor-for-me' mindset; * Nortel argues for best-of-breed vendors.(Cisco Systems Inc.)(Northern Telecom Ltd.)
December 4, 2007... Byline: Steve Taylor, Jim Metzler For the last two newsletters (see here and here) we've heard the thoughts of Ben Goldman, Cisco's director of marketing, network systems, who argues for moving to a single-vendor network. But there is...

Carriers mobilize for $24B in military telecom contracts; AT&T, Verizon and others target four DoD contracts expected in 2008.
December 4, 2007... Byline: Carolyn Duffy Marsan It's the high-tech spoils of war: The U.S. military plans to award telecommunications contracts worth as much as $24 billion, and the top-tier carriers are signing up to get a piece of the action. The...

Linux, Unix, Mac, Windows PCs get authentication integration; Centeris rolls out Likewise platform and an open source project that will be distributed with the top Linux operating systems.
December 4, 2007... Byline: John Fontana Centeris, which provides cross-platform authentication via Microsoft's Active Directory, Tuesday enhanced its Likewise platform (Clear Choice Test of Likewise) and an added open source project that will be...

Sprint could spin off WiMAX division, says interim CEO; Says company wants to attract investment for funding WiMAX deployment.
December 4, 2007... Byline: Brad Reed Interim Sprint CEO Paul Saleh told an investor conference this week that his company was looking at multiple options for dealing with its WiMAX division, including spinning it off to another entity. Saleh,...

Bluesocket unveils WLAN architecture for access points, controllers; Announces its first 802.11n access point.
December 4, 2007... Byline: John Cox Bluesocket has unveiled an wireless LAN software architecture, along with its first 802.11n access point. The new architecture is intended to simplify WLAN deployments by enabling the access points to cooperate with...

Lieberman gets deeper into identity with Random Password Generator; * Lieberman makes more identity lemonade.
December 5, 2007... Byline: Dave Kearns Phil Lieberman definitely knows how to make lemonade. Back in the 1980s, he and his organization, Lieberman Software saw that a brand new graphical user interface was going to take the consumer and business markets...

Minding your lists; * Hiveminder does list management better than any other service.
December 5, 2007... Byline: Mark Gibbs Every now and then I come across a Web application that just blows me away. That is what happened when I found Hiveminder from Best Practical Solutions. Hiveminder doesn't break new ground -- Web-based list...

Novell postpones today's earnings report; Novell and federal regulators have been going back and forth for four months.(Financial report)(Brief article)
December 5, 2007... Byline: Paul McNamara While presenting the move as merely "an abundance of caution," Novell announced this morning that it is postponing its fourth-quarter earnings release and conference call that had been scheduled for today. ...

Grisoft acquires Exploit Prevention Labs.(Brief article)
December 5, 2007... Byline: Ellen Messmer Antivirus software vendor Grisoft Wednesday announced it has acquired start-up Exploit Prevention Labs for an undisclosed price. J.R. Smith, CEO of Grisoft, said the firm wanted to acquire Exploit Prevention...

Windows Server 2008 hits the streets; Microsoft rolls out final beta software available in x86 and x64 versions and in multiple languages.
December 5, 2007... Byline: John Fontana Microsoft Wednesday made available the final beta of Windows Server 2008 and said it is on track for shipment at a planned launch event at the end of February. Microsoft made Windows Server RC1 available for...

Google application targets iPhone users; Google optimizes search, e-mail and more services for iPhone browser.(Brief article)
December 5, 2007... Byline: Jon Brodkin Google and its new Android mobile development platform may compete with Apple for the attention of smartphone shoppers, but that isn't stopping Google from building applications designed specifically for Apple's...

Mobile workers put company data at risk, study says; Bad practices, weak or no policies, ignorance, lack of enforcement are all problems.
December 5, 2007... Byline: John Cox Despite highly publicized data breaches, mobile workers still endanger company data with risky behaviors, according to a new survey. The Web questionnaire of 893 U.S. IT professionals, taken earlier in fall, found...

Is Six Sigma in your future? * Six Sigma training for IT execs.
December 5, 2007... Byline: Linda Leung In October, my colleague Carolyn Duffy Marsan reported on Cummins, an engine manufacturer in Columbus, Ind., that hit $12 billion in revenue this year. Much of its success was attributed to the company's commitment...

Convenient credit = security threat.(Column)
December 5, 2007... Byline: Andreas M. Antonopoulos Remember all those stolen laptops and lost backup tapes? For a while it seemed like every organization in the world had a cavalier attitude toward our personal data. Not a week went by without 70,000...

Internet Society CEO sets her sights on next billion 'Net users; Not deploying IPv6 threatens Internet, Lynn St. Amour warns.(Interview)
December 5, 2007... Byline: Carolyn Duffy Marsan VANCOUVER, B.C. -- The Internet has 1.3 billion users, but that's not enough for Lynn St. Amour. As CEO of the Internet Society, she is expanding the nonprofit group, which promotes development of the...

Industry heavyweights call mobile ecosystem 'confused'; * Handset, mobile OS makers agree that change is in the air.(Nokia Corp.)(Verizon Communications Inc.)(operating systems)
December 5, 2007... Byline: Joanie Wexler Panelists at last week's Wireless Communications Alliance (WCA) meeting in Silicon Valley described the U.S. mobile ecosystem as "confused." One factor is the sometimes-adversarial relationship between mobile...

What comes next after unified communications? * Is unified applications the next big thing?
December 5, 2007... Byline: Steve Taylor, Larry Hettick Now that "unified communications" pretty much comes as "standard equipment" (or standard software) with contemporary IP-PBXs, we wonder not only what comes next, but what will we call it? First,...

Established industry group tackles emerging trends; * Computer Measurement Group meets to tackle server consolidation, system virtualization, and more.
December 5, 2007... Byline: Denise Dubie There is one industry organization that understands that you don't have to be a trendy start-up to have the answers to questions that technology professionals face daily when trying to get the most of the computing...

IBM's security stance: underrated or overambitious? Big Blue intensifies its push into network security.(International Business Machines Corp.)(Internet Security Systems Inc.)
December 5, 2007... Byline: Jon Brodkin Big Blue is trying to succeed in the less familiar terrain of network and desktop security -- and finding that a few high-profile moves aren't enough to sway some skeptical analysts. Slideshow: Five cool IBM...

Vista SP1 RC available publicly next week; Select beta testers will get software during next two days; software expected to ship first quarter of 2008.
December 5, 2007... Byline: John Fontana Microsoft Tuesday shipped Vista SP1 RC to select testers and said it would make the service pack publicly available next week. The SP1 release candidate is available on Microsoft Connect, and on Thursday it will be...

Cisco spins out another corporate security architecture; TrustSec designed for hop-to-hop integrity and confidentiality, Cisco says.(Cisco Systems Inc.)
December 5, 2007... Byline: Jim Duffy Cisco this week rolled out yet another method for securing corporate networks. Called TrustSec, the architecture is intended to determine, through policies, the role of users and devices in the network before...

Packeteer introduces plan for guaranteeing WAN application performance; IntelligenceCenter goal is application SLAs.(wide area networks)
December 5, 2007... Byline: Tim Greene Packeteer is introducing a new management platform that draws data from its own and other vendors' gear to boost the performance of applications over the WAN and is the first step in a broader application-performance...

Doubling of energy use makes data center cooling a hot topic; Virtualization and other ways to reduce your electric bill and save the environment.
December 5, 2007... Byline: Jon Brodkin Data center operators will go to almost any lengths to avoid an overheated server. Case in point: a financial institution in London suffered a power shortage during an extremely hot day one recent summer, and was...

Report: Verizon plans to use Google's Android; Embrace of open-access mobile platform is latest chapter in Verizon's makeover.(Verizon Communications Inc.)(Brief article)
December 5, 2007... Byline: Brad Reed In another sign that Verizon Wireless is moving away from its reputation as a champion of closed networks, CEO Lowell McAdam said this week that his company would be supporting Google's Android open-access mobile...

Money saving tips; Get more bang for your technology buck.
December 6, 2007... Byline: James E. Gaskin On the response sheets I get from those who attend the speeches I make at the ITEC conferences, "Reducing hardware and software costs" always ranks in the top third of important issues. One of my goals is to...

IBM boosts data protection with acquisition; Big Blue buys Arsenal Digital Solutions, gets services for disaster recovery, compliance.(International Business Machines Corp.)(Brief article)
December 6, 2007... Byline: Jon Brodkin IBM added to its data protection portfolio today by acquiring Arsenal Digital Solutions, which provides services for server and PC data protection, backup and recovery, business continuity, disaster recovery, and...

Nortel advances Microsoft alliance; Unified communications partnership bears new fruit.(Northern Telecom Ltd.)
December 6, 2007... Byline: Jim Duffy Nortel this week unveiled the newest component of its alliance with Microsoft for unified communications - a desktop audio-and-video system for collaboration. Multimedia Conferencing 5.0 eliminates third-party...

NAC best-practices; * NAC best-practices survey findings.(network access control)(Survey)(Brief article)
December 6, 2007... Byline: Tim Greene A recent NAC best-practices survey of 400 organizations by the Aberdeen Group found that many of them supplement NAC with other security technologies. This makes sense since virtually all security experts...

ITIL takes on security management role; Implementing ITIL process improvements said to mitigate enterprise risk.(information technology infrastructure library)
December 6, 2007... Byline: Denise Dubie Long touted for streamlining processes and reducing operating costs, the ITIL best-practices framework also helps mitigate enterprise risk, say its adopters. This week at the IDC IT Service Management and ITIL...

Cisco shuffles tech development group; Realigns to drive network-centric IT vision.(information technology)(Cisco Systems Inc.)
December 6, 2007... Byline: Jim Duffy Cisco this week reorganized its technology development organization to better streamline the company's development of video, data center, collaboration and Web 2.0 products. Cisco, the dominant supplier of network...

FRCP and e-discovery: One year later; * How far are customers meeting e-discovery rules?(Brief article)
December 6, 2007... Byline: Deni Connor This week marks the first anniversary of changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), which mandates the speedy recovery of electronically stored information. In the intervening year, oodles of vendors...

IM threats are still very real - what are your options for protection? * Four choices when faced with security threats via IM and P2P traffic.(Brief article)
December 6, 2007... Byline: Michael Osterman Last week, Akonix issued an instant messaging threat report that showed that the company tracked nine new malicious code attacks directed against IM systems during November, in addition to 12 new attacks on...

Packeteer sharpens tools for managing WAN application performance; * SLA features help enterprises control application performance, reliability.
December 6, 2007... Byline: Ann Bednarz The tools enterprises use to speed up applications have in the past been viewed as a network add-on, something tacked on to make the end-user experience a better one. But lately WAN optimization efforts have become...

Nevis NAC gear secures insurance company network; Devices restrict consultants and feature other capabilities not yet tapped.
December 6, 2007... Byline: Tim Greene The chance discovery of a consultant plugging in a laptop on its network led Missouri insurance company GEHA to install NAC as a means for segregating visitors from the corporate LAN.Since installing Nevis Networks'...

High-earning spammers face tougher sentences.(Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003)
December 6, 2007... Byline: Paul McNamara More big-time spammers may find themselves doing longer stretches behind bars -- and wouldn't that be swell -- if a federal judge's first-of-its-kind sentencing decision in a Denver case becomes widely applied....

ITILv3's future uncertain in many IT shops; IDC survey shows two-thirds of the companies polled have no plans to adopt ITIL Version 3, or are uncertain whether they will adopt the process framework in the next three years.(information technology infrastructure library)
December 6, 2007... Byline: Denise Dubie IT shops working to implement the best practices of ITIL Version 2 might have hit a snag when the process framework's owners updated it earlier this year, because now about two-thirds of companies polled report...

Wireless open access: happening or not?
December 6, 2007... Byline: Johna Till Johnson Seems like carriers and content providers alike have been bitten by the open access bug. Big news recently was Verizon's announcement that it plans to open up its wireless network to any device or...

Nortel asks: Do you really want to give control of your destiny to Cisco? * Nortel continues its arguments for a best-of-breed approach to networking.(Cisco Systems Inc.)(Northern Telecom Ltd.)
December 6, 2007... Byline: Steve Taylor, Jim Metzler Last time, we heard from Nortel's Tony Rybczynski, director strategic enterprise technologies, concerning the disadvantages of having a single-vendor network infrastructure. Today, we'll continue with...

Illegal wiretapping is a dangerous wedge.(AT&T Inc.)
December 6, 2007... Byline: Mark Gibbs The phrase "the thin end of the wedge" is a good description for those things that, if allowed or tolerated, enable other things that are bigger or worse to happen. My recent Backspin column, "Wiretapping,...

8-year-old Windows flaw acknowledged; * Patches from Cisco, Ubuntu, Debian, others* Xmas eCard Spam - Malicious Downloader* Ron Paul is not a botmaster, and other interesting reading.
December 6, 2007... Byline: Jason Meserve Windows flaw could steer IE to hackersMicrosoft Monday said that a flaw in the way its Windows operating system looks up other computers on the Internet has resurfaced and could expose some customers to online...

Check Point bundles UTM gear with services for midsize businesses; UTM-1 Total Security bundle trims overall cost.(unified threat management)(Brief article)
December 6, 2007... Byline: Tim Greene Check Point Software is adding e-mail security to its multifunction security platform, and bundling that with update services for software and signature libraries to make a package for small-to-midsize businesses....

Podcasts busting out at CERT/CC; * CERT/CC offers series of security-focused podcasts.(Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center)
December 6, 2007... Byline: M. E. Kabay The Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (CERT/CC) has a phenomenal resource for everyone interested in changing attitudes about information assurance: the CERT Podcast Series. According to EDPACS...

Microsoft Vista's IPv6 raises new security concerns; Turn off Microsoft Vista's Teredo tunneling, IETF document recommends.(Internet Engineering Task Force)
December 6, 2007... Byline: Carolyn Duffy Marsan VANCOUVER, B.C. -- Members of the Internet engineering community have raised several new security concerns about Teredo, a mechanism for sending IPv6 traffic over IPv4 networks that comes turned on by...

Mobile Internet will open wide in 2008, IDC says; AT&T will follow Verizon, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile in opening up its network to outside devices, researchers say.
December 6, 2007... Byline: Brad Reed The advent of mobile broadband in 2008 will push every mobile network operator to open its network to a wide range of devices, not just those offered by the carriers themselves, IDC says In making their industry...