InfoWorld.com articles from March 2007

InfoWorld.com archives from March 2007

Software Vulnerability Index making progress; Officials with the Common Weakness Enumeration project say they are rapidly achieving their goal of creating a catalog of software vulnerabilities for use by developers.
March 1, 2007... Byline: Matt Hines Security experts working on the CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) project claim that the initiative to create a central resource of software vulnerabilities for developers is gaining momentum. Sponsored by the...

Oracle snaps up Hyperion but will customers bite? The enterprise wants performance management as a separate solution from ERP. Did Oracle read the cards wrong?
March 1, 2007... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz PM (performance management) vendors appear to be universal in their delight at the news that Oracle will buy Hyperion for $3.3 billion. Their pleasure comes mainly from believing that enterprise-level companies...

Black Hat hears of data leak dangers; Security experts at the Black Hat DC conference warn of data seepage and the risks for PCs, handhelds, and corporate networks.
March 1, 2007... Byline: Matt Hines The biggest threat to your personal and professional security may be the information that your computer is already transmitting to the world around you. Data leakage might be a hot topic, given the list of...

Ruby brightens the NetBeans platform; Sun extending Java IDE to scripting language.
March 1, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Sun Microsystems has added Ruby support to the NetBeans IDE and bolstered the JRuby platform as well, company officials acknowledged on Thursday. The early-access release of the NetBeans Ruby Pack is comprised of a...

IBM lands HR outsourcing deal with American; The airline hires Big Blue to take management of personnel functions, including training, recruitment, and staffing, to the tune of $217 million.
March 2, 2007... Byline: Matt Hines IBM reported on Mar. 2 that it has signed American Airlines as its latest major human resources outsourcing customer, announcing a $217 million deal to take over much of the airline's personnel operations. The...

Avaya Talks Up Voice as a Service; New VoIP offering melds voice, SOA.
March 5, 2007... Byline: Eric Knorr The great thing about SOA is that when you add a service, you instantly increase the potential of any application that can consume that service. Today, Avaya threw a new set of VoIP services into the enterprise SOA mix...

Red Hat looks to entice developers; Exadel partnership leverages JBoss.
March 5, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Red Hat and Exadel are joining forces to try to make the open source Red Hat platform more of a destination for software developers. The two companies will offer Eclipse-based developer tools for building...

Rootkits evade hardware detection; At Black Hat, researcher shows how advanced rootkits can hide in system RAM.
March 5, 2007... Byline: Matthew Broersma, Techworld Security researcher Joanna Rutkowska has demonstrated several methods that sophisticated rootkits can use to hide from even the most reliable detection method currently available -- hardware-based...

Zend ships Windows-ready PHP; Parity seen between apps deployment on Linux and Microsoft platform.
March 5, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Zend Technologies plans on Tuesday to announce availability of its PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) distribution tuned for deploying PHP applications on Windows. First detailed in October, with a beta program having...

BEA flies Eclipse flag; Products recast as plug-ins.
March 6, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Casting the open-source Eclipse platform as a linchpin of product uniformity efforts, BEA Systems plans to reconfigure several middleware clients so they can be plugged into the Eclipse IDE, a company official said on...

Eclipse executive chides Microsoft on interoperability; OSGi also a big topic at EclipseCon event.
March 6, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Santa Clara, Calif. -- Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich criticized Microsoft on Tuesday for not approaching Eclipse about interoperability between .Net and open source Eclipse technologies. ...

McAfee ushers in new CEO; After watching its boardroom partially emptied by a stock options backdating scandal, McAfee reloads with a new CEO: former EMC and Documentum executive David DeWalt.
March 6, 2007... Byline: Matt Hines McAfee introduced its newest chief executive on Feb. 5 in its latest step to rebuild the firm's leadership ranks after a 2006 stock options backdating probe that led to the departure of several top officials. The...

Update: Mozilla issues fix for critical flaw; 'Critical' JavaScript vulnerability in the Firefox browser and SeaMonkey app suite has been fixed.
March 6, 2007... Byline: Matt Hines The Mozilla Foundation has published a fix for a "critical" JavaScript vulnerability in the Firefox browser and the SeaMonkey application suite. The fix, released Monday, targets Firefox versions 2.0.0.2 and...

AJAX IDE called good idea; Eclipse panelists ponder need.(Discussion)
March 7, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Even if text editors have been prominent in AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) development, developers nonetheless would benefit from an IDE, panelists agreed at the EclipseCon 2007 conference on Wednesday. In a...

The enterprise DST checklist; Think you're ready for daylight-saving time? Read this first.
March 7, 2007... Byline: Ted Samson The new DST (daylight-saving time) is drawing near. Do you think you're ready? Run down this checklist to be sure. 1. Do a datacenter inventory. You need to know exactly which applications and systems you have...

Daylight savings a nuisance, but no Y2K; Enterprises are taking the earlier time switch in stride.
March 7, 2007... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz, Paul F. Roberts Timed stock market trades will go awry. Manufacturing lines will grind to a halt. Perplexed executives will hold court before empty conference rooms. These are just a few of the doomsday scenarios...

IBM, Cisco launch joint Unified Communications platform; Companies hope a single platform will kick start application development.
March 7, 2007... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz, Stephen Lawson IBM and Cisco will announce today at the Spring 2007 VoiceCon conference in Orlando, Florida, a joint effort to create an industrywide unified communications and collaboration platform. The...

Otellini’s famous last words; Analysis: Intel’s CEO squirms as the buck gets harder to pass.
March 7, 2007... Byline: Tom Yager The leading quote from this week’s news comes from Intel CEO Paul Otellini: "We're doing product refreshes every two years, which is the model we invented and then stopped doing after Pentium 4, shame on us,"...

Visa summit will counter data breach hype; D.C. event will argue breach fallout not that widespread.
March 7, 2007... Byline: Matt Hines Credit-card payments giant Visa is hoping to shed new light on problems like consumer data theft and identity fraud through a conference that will bring together leaders from the business, government, and technology...

ENTERPRISE WINDOWS: Office Live needs a makeover; Microsoft could learn a thing for two from rivals' Web 2.0 apps.
March 7, 2007... Byline: Oliver Rist First, I've got to do a quick correction on the Daylight Saving Time (DST) snafu I wrote about in my previous column -- even though by the time you read this, there's a good chance the whole mess is already over. It...

Desktop Java faces off against AJAX; Desktop Matters conference features comparisons, contrasts between desktop and Web apps.
March 8, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill In a world where Web-based applications have dominated the discourse lately, does the desktop still matter? Presenters at the appropriately named Desktop Matters conference in San Jose, Calif. on Thursday afternoon...

IBM Safari to help developers navigate languages; Project to be offered to Eclipse.
March 8, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Seeking to assist software developers coping with many languages, IBM plans to offer its Safari technology to the Eclipse open source community, an IBM official said at the EclipseCon 2007 conference on Thursday. ...

SEC suspends trading of pump-and-dump spam companies; SEC rolls out Operation Spamalot, investigates 35 suspected firms.
March 8, 2007... Byline: Matt Hines The Securities and Exchange Commission has taken the drastic step of suspending trading in shares of 35 companies whose stocks have frequently been touted in mass spam campaigns. SEC officials said on Feb. 8 that the...

Java Swing technologies highlighted; Desktop Matters conference notes multitude of projects.
March 9, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill A potpourri of Java client application technologies is on the agenda at the Desktop Matters conference in San Jose, Calif. on Friday, where the desktop gets top billing over the Web. Again dominating the discussion,...

Eclipse exec: Platform upgrade a blank slate; Milinkovich also gives thumbs-up to open source for Java.
March 13, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation for open source developer tools, is a frequent interview subject at InfoWorld. Given the popularity of Eclipse and its having attracted just about every...

Viacom seeks $1B in damages from Google; YouTube video suit alleges "massive infractions".
March 13, 2007... Byline: Paul F. Roberts Media company Viacom said on Tuesday that it was filing suit against Google Inc. for what it alleges are "massive intentional copyright infringement" of Viacom’s property. Viacom is seeking more than $1...

ENTERPRISE WINDOWS: Unraveling the Communications Server mystery; The Office in Office Communications Server provides a clue as to what the product's all about.
March 14, 2007... Byline: Oliver Rist Certain things exist without explanation: Ben Affleck's career; the micro PC; Tofurky. For many, LCS (Live Communications Server) 2005 fell into this category. Is it IM? Is it voice over the network? Does it use...

Foundry Networks adds to wireless LAN family; New products and enhancements zero in on high-density wireless environments, need for real-time security.
March 15, 2007... Byline: Stephanie McLoughlin Foundry Networks gave its IronPoint wireless line a boost yesterday, unwrapping two new infrastructure products and an update to its IronPoint Wireless Location Manager application. The new IronPoint...

Microsoft sings SaaS song; Company sees opportunities in subscription-based, hosted software.
March 15, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Although Microsoft may be overlooked in the SaaS (software as a service) arena, the company is a leader in this space and views subscription-based software as a way to enhance revenues, a Microsoft official said at the...

Bluetooth makeover bolsters security; Hoping to garner more users, new Bluetooth spec will automate log on and authentication.
March 16, 2007... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz The Bluetooth chip, which holds the dubious honor of being available in more devices than any other wireless technology but actually used by the least number of people, will get a much-needed upgrade later this...

Rally adds Ruby to agile platform; Hosted service is upgraded.
March 19, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Rally Software Development will announce on Monday an upgrade to its hosted service for agile software development projects featuring a toolkit accommodating Ruby programming as well as better integration with...

Analysis: Salesforce AppSpace signals major shift in SaaS; Moving from data-centric to process-centric service will keep traditional on-premise vendors up at night.
March 20, 2007... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz The days of dismissing SaaS as 'just another delivery system' are long over. In its Spring 07 rev announced earlier this week, Salesforce.com showed how there is an endless number of ways in which the SaaS company...

Carriers predict boom in managed security services; Telecommunications companies claim they are ready begin helping enterprises offload many security tasks, with carrier executives claiming that the new business opportunities can translate into sizeable profits.
March 20, 2007... Byline: Matt Hines Telecommunications companies ranging from Internet service providers to wireless carriers are betting that a new wave of managed security services can help generate additional opportunities with enterprise customers....

Global malady: Virus writers worldwide team up; Recently, malware and botnet pushers have been increasing cooperation across the world, including partnerships between the West and China, to boost their effectiveness.
March 20, 2007... Byline: Matt Hines Security researchers have been touting the growing nature of professionalism among virus authors over the last several years, but new evidence points to increased cooperation between malware writers spread around the...

Microsoft joins OpenAJAX group; Organization seeks interoperability.
March 20, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Microsoft on Tuesday will reveal that it is now participating in the OpenAjax Alliance, joining with other members to make the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web scripting technique more interoperable. ...

IBM hails Jazz collaboration platform; Jazz community portal is expected in June, and products built on Jazz should be offered in 2008.
March 21, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill IBM's Jazz platform for collaborative application lifecycle management has leveraged Eclipse in terms of processes used to develop both initiatives, an IBM official said during TheServerSide Java Symposium conference in...

TJX stolen data used in Florida crime spree; Police arrest group accused of using credit card info stolen from TJX customers; losses total more than $8 million.
March 21, 2007... Byline: Matt Hines Law enforcement officials in Florida have arrested six individuals suspected of carrying out a fraud scheme built around the misuse of credit card data stolen from retailer TJX Companies. In partnership with the...

Java symposium extends to other technologies; ServerSide Java Symposium has added sessions focusing on SOA and AJAX.
March 22, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Is TheServerSide Java Symposium de-emphasizing Java? A look at the agenda of the Las Vegas-based conference this week finds sessions on SOA, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), enterprise service buses, and...

Ruby luster readied for Java; Developers at Sun target May for 1.0 release of JRuby, the Jave implementation of the Ruby language.
March 22, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Engineers at Sun are eyeing May for the release of a 1.0 version of JRuby, which provides a Java implementation of the Ruby language. In a presentation at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas Thursday, JRuby...

Oracle seeks faster grids with Tangosol buy; Tangosol apps, which improve both performance and scalability, will be integrated with Oracle products as well as sold separately.
March 23, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill In buying Tangosol, Oracle wants to provide computer grids with linear performance and scalability improvements when users add servers to their configuration, Oracle Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian said on Friday...

ShmooCon hacker event gets under way; The third annual convention draws security researchers and other experts to debate everything from wireless hacks to data breaches.
March 23, 2007... Byline: Matt Hines The third annual ShmooCon convention kicked off in Washington, D.C., on March 23 and will run throughout the weekend with a series of lectures and presentations covering a wide range of enterprise security issues. ...

Cisco launches interoperability platform for emergency services; IPICS will allow old-school technologies to talk to each other via IP.
March 26, 2007... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz Taking the concept of unified communications back to the old-school world where first responders and emergency service workers still use walkie-talkies and police radios, Cisco unveiled IPICS (IP Interoperability...

More evidence of U.S. as malware capital; New research confirms that the United States is the leading source of virus content in the world.
March 26, 2007... Byline: Matt Hines Contrary to beliefs that overseas crime networks and unemployed computer programmers in Eastern Europe remain the leading sources of virus code on the Internet, new research supports the growing perception that the...

Microsoft airs Orcas, Rosario dev tools visions; Major upgrades to the Visual Studio development platform due to roll out over the next few years.
March 26, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Microsoft not only plans to release Orcas, a major upgrade to its Visual Studio software development platform, by the end of the year but also plans to follow up Orcas with the Rosario release of the platform a year...

Microsoft maps data management plans; The Conceptual Data Programming concept is explained as an attempt to move to a higher level of abstraction.
March 27, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Microsoft is working on tools and technologies intended to make it easier for developers to deal with data. A Microsoft official presented company plans Tuesday for enhancements to the Visual Studio developer tool...

Web attacks get personal; Researchers with IBM's ISS group say that cyber-criminals are using malware personalization schemes that allow for maximum exposure and more consistent payoff.
March 27, 2007... Byline: Matt Hines Malware purveyors are increasingly tailoring their virus distribution and attack techniques to take advantage of different classes of end-users, according to researchers with the Internet Security Systems' X-Force team...

Security vendors turn eyes to smartphones; Security software makers begin to flood the market with products aimed at helping protect enterprise users' increasingly powerful mobile devices.
March 27, 2007... Byline: Matt Hines Symantec, McAfee, and a swarm of rival security software makers are beginning to ship a wider number of products designed specifically to protect smartphones, the more PC-like handhelds that are finding their way into a...

Microsoft exec hails .Net, cites advantage over Java; Official also elaborates on upcoming product developments.(Interview)
March 28, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Microsoft officials at the VSLive conference in San Francisco this week elaborated on where the company is headed with its software development tools, noting the planned Orcas and Rosario releases of Visual Studio, due...

Formal BPEL standard set for approval; OASIS expected to give nod next week.
March 29, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Without further adieu, an industry-wide specification for orchestrating Web services in business processes appears set to be formally adopted by OASIS next week, nearly five years after the proposal first debuted. ...

TJX data heist confirmed as largest ever; Retailer reveals that attacks resulted in loss of 45.7 million consumer records.
March 29, 2007... Byline: Matt Hines TJX Companies confirmed in its latest filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the network intrusion carried out on its systems resulted in the loss of 45.7 million consumer records, making it the largest...

Payment systems culprit in TJX heist; Security experts contend that criminals found a common weakness in retailers' defenses by targeting TJX's payment card systems.
March 29, 2007... Byline: Matt Hines Confirmed as the largest exposure of consumer information on record in the United States, the network intrusion experienced by TJX Companies highlights serious data security risks posed by outdated payment card systems,...

BEA cites Java, availability in app server upgrade; WebLogic Server 10 supports Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 and is the first to support Java Enterprise Platform 5.
March 30, 2007... Byline: Paul Krill Enhanced software development capabilities and system availability are key focuses in an improved version of BEA Systems' WebLogic Server application server, which is available on Monday. With the release of BEA...

SECURITY ADVISER: Security odds and ends; In like a lion, out like a lamb: Roger wraps up March with paint-on wireless security, new SANS certification programs, and a reading list.
March 30, 2007... Byline: Roger A. Grimes I'm having a strange moment of inner peace. I'm without a rant. Often my column is full of vinegar over some false security product claim, some incorrectly-held security belief, or some strange, insecure maneuver...