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| Volume 7, Issue 1 |
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In This Issue:
 Five hackers who left a mark on 2006?
 Companies pay dearly for [CES] tech trade show
Sharp unveils 108-inch LCD television
[Video] Gates: A server in every home
Queuing up for Jobs and iPhone
Attack of the zombie computers is a growing threat
Can your computer run Windows Vista?
 On the eve of CES: Nightmare on elm street, mobility-wise
Microsoft woos bloggers with free computers, Vista
Major League Baseball hits a web site home run
Adobe calls for upgrades to mitigate vulnerability
[Video] Security trends for 2007
 Gates on lessons learned as Tech visionary
Smart ways to stretch your IT budget
The biggest rubes, boobs and noobs of 2006
 How Microsoft fights off 100,000 attacks per month
How to cope with jerks at work
How indispensable should you be?
Bud Broomhead and other great IT moments in 2006
FAQ: Second Life (and why you care)
 Seven strategies for attracting and retaining top IT talent
Fear of dependency
 El Nino and humankind conspiring dept: Summary of abnormal weather
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Five Hackers Who Left a Mark on 2006
In the security year that was 2006, zero-day attacks and exploits dominated the headlines.
However, the year will be best remembered for the work of members of the hacking—er, security research—community who discovered and disclosed serious vulnerabilities in
the technologies we take for granted, forced software vendors to react faster to flaw warnings and pushed the vulnerability research boat into new, uncharted
waters. In no particular order, here's my list of five hackers who left a significant mark on 2006 and set the stage for more important discoveries in 2007: H.D. Moore...
Read the article. Back to top
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Companies Pay Dearly for Tech Trade Show
For a small technology company called Digeo, the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is one of the biggest opportunities of the year.
For the next few days, the city will be jampacked with potential customers, partners and press--but the price of participation is daunting.
It starts with $24,500 for reserving 700 square feet of booth space on the sprawling convention center floor, tens of thousands more to furnish and operate the booth,
plus $300 a night for hotel rooms for each of the 29 Digeo employees who are
attending the convention.
Then there is the cost of rental vans, thousands of dollars to advertise at the show and meals for employees. The 8-year-old company, which makes gear and software for
home entertainment, estimates that it will spend...
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Sharp Unveils 108-inch LCD Television
LAS VEGAS--Sharp Electronics took the wraps off a 108-inch LCD television, what it called the world's largest, during a press conference Sunday on the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show.
The market for these behemoth televisions is small, but Sharp executives noted
that prices over time decline and that other large televisions have found
customers despite early skepticism. The 108-inch television comes out this
summer for an as-yet unspecified price...
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[Video] Gates: A Server in Every Home
CES 2007: Gates touts a server for every home.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates speaks with CNET News.com's Ina Fried and discusses his vision of each home having a server that will host files for multiple PCs. (3 minutes 6 seconds)...
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Queuing up for Jobs and the iPhone
SAN FRANCISCO--It may be darkest just before dawn in some places of the world, but that's not the case on the streets of San Francisco hours before Macworld.
Most folks would think 4:45 a.m. is a time fit only for sleeping and garbage-collecting. But I had agreed to meet a few local television reporters for an interview prior to
the start of Macworld 2007 Tuesday morning. As I drove down 4th Street in front of the sprawling Moscone Convention Center looking for a parking place, I spotted a line
of chattering figures huddled against the glass walls of the building. They were queued up hundreds deep, and they were waiting for Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs...
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Attack of the zombie computers is a growing threat
In their persistent quest to breach the Internet’s defenses, the bad guys are honing their weapons and increasing their firepower.
With growing sophistication, they are taking advantage of programs that secretly install themselves on thousands or even millions of personal computers, band these
computers together into
an unwitting army of zombies, and use the collective
power of the dragooned network to commit Internet crimes.
These systems, called botnets,
are being blamed for the huge spike in spam that bedeviled the Internet in
recent months, as well as fraud and data theft. Security researchers have been
concerned about botnets for some time because they automate and amplify the effects of viruses and other malicious programs. What is new is the vastly escalating scale
of the problem--and the precision with which some of the programs can scan computers for specific information, like...
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Can your computer run Windows Vista?
CNET and System Requirements Lab can analyze your computer for FREE in just seconds.
This service from CNET and System Requirements Lab looks at your computer's hardware and system software to determine whether or not your current system's components are
robust enough to adequately run Microsoft Windows Vista. Each of your computer's components is evaluated against CNET's recommended Vista requirements, and
suggestions are provided on how to update or upgrade each component that does not meet the recommended specs...
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On the eve of CES: Nightmare on Elm Street, mobility-wise
I was reading about a new personal navigation device and the snazzy new software features, including a voice interface, the ability to guide you into specific
lanes, warn you about speed zone changes, show you actual signs along the route,
and point out to you branded points of interest.
And I fell into musing about the future of the mobile, personal, location-based, context-aware digital lifestyle. It goes something like this...
I've decided to test drive the newest, feature-rich version of the Acme Galactic Personal Navigator (Your personal guide to the World!), trying it out on my
journey to Boston's Logan International Airport to catch my plane to Las Vegas and CES....
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Microsoft woos bloggers with free computers, Vista
Microsoft's efforts to woo influential bloggers by sending them free computers loaded with the Vista operating system is generating controversy, with some online writers attacking would-be Vista reviewers for taking what were tantamount to bribes, while recipients defend their editorial independence, arguing that journalism-style rules prohibiting such gifts are outdated.
Bloggers who acknowledged receiving the computers as part of the joint Microsoft and AMD marketing program include Mary Jo Foley, Om Malik, Michael Arrington, Ed Bott and others. In total, Microsoft and AMD gave away 90 PCs, all loaded with the highest-end version of Windows Vista, the 64-bit Ultimate edition...
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Major League Baseball hits a Web site home run
Citrix NetScaler application accelerators help keep MLB.com at the top of its game.
Among Ryan Nelson’s nightmare scenarios is when a major league baseball team pinch-hits for the lead-off batter in an inning. That simple act has mighty repercussions
when you're the director of operations for Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM), which runs the MLB.com Web sites where millions of fans track games pitch
by pitch.
“After the third out in an inning, everyone goes away, then we have 60 seconds
for commercials,” Nelson says. “God forbid they pinch-hit at the top of the next inning. Then half a million people request the same JPEG within a 10-second span.
You go from zero to 600 miles per hour really fast.”
These days, however, MLB.com is able to weather such pinch-hitter storms with relative aplomb. As Nelson explained during a presentation at the Network IT Roadmap event
in Chicago in June, a combination of Citrix NetScaler appliances and Akamai
content distribution services is helping the company ensure nobody misses a pitch...
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Adobe Calls for Upgrades to Mitigate Vulnerability
Adobe Systems Inc. is urging users to update to the latest versions of Adobe Reader and Acrobat to avoid being affected by a recently discovered cross-site scripting
flaw in its software that allows attackers to run malicious JavaScript on a user's PC.
The discovery of the flaw has caused considerable industry concern because of the
ease with which it can be exploited and because any Web site hosting PDF files
could be used to conduct an attack...
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[Video] Security trends for 2007
Hot Seat.
Got a data leakage problem? Here's what will and won't work to stop the flow of critical data outside the company...
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Gates on Lessons Learned as Tech Visionary
Microsoft chairman talks about connected entertainment.
Microsoft Corp. is at a crucial point in its expanding efforts in the consumer arena. Company Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates used his keynote address at
the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to unveil the Windows Home Server and announce that major service providers like AT&T Corp. would offer the Xbox 360 as
a set-top box alternative.
These announcements follow the launch of the Zune MP3 player and come right before
the late January release of the retail version of Vista. A few hours before his keynote speech, Gates took time to discuss the evolution of what the company calls
connected entertainment. He also talked about the future of product distribution over the Web,
how far Microsoft will go in hardware, and -- as he enters his last 18 months at Microsoft full time -- lessons he's learned as a technology visionary...
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Smart Ways to Stretch Your IT Budget
Strategic spending is everything when it comes to ensuring IT success.
InfoWorld breaks down seven IT project domains to expose where you may overindulge or come up short in 2007: SOA, compliance, security, virtualization,
collaboration, networking, and application development...
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The Biggest Rubes, Boobs, and Noobs of 2006
It’s that time again in Cringeville when we present The MOONies, honoring the most Morally Obtuse, Offensive, and Noxious behavior in high tech.
This year’s MOONie winners will receive a handsome statuette of Steve Ballmer bending over and dropping his trousers, affectionately known around Redmond as The
Google Salute. Along the way I offer a few tips of the Cringely fedora to deserving folks who made the tech world a better place. So without further ado...
Been there, Dunn that Our top award goes to Hewlett-Packard Board Chairperson Patricia Dunn, who apparently underwent a scruples bypass shortly before ordering the most
elaborate spying program
this side of G. Gordon Liddy...
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How Microsoft fights off 100,000 attacks per month
Microsoft Corp. has long encouraged its employees to "RAS" into the corporate network from home or from the road to access e-mail, shared files and applications.
RAS, short for Remote Access Services, is an old Microsoft term for what most people now call a client VPN. Microsoft, of course, maintains valuable intellectual property on
its internal network, including the source code to all its operating systems and applications. These are constant targets for hackers, and Microsoft tries to protect
its most valuable assets with defenses in depth; they are behind firewalls and on networks segmented with IPsec. In addition, the entire network is monitored
for suspicious activity, scanned for malware and so on. What do I mean by a
constant target? Last year, Microsoft IT said it was the target of more than 100,000 intrusion attempts per month. Currently, Microsoft filters out about 9 million
spam and virus e-mails a day out of 10 million received. Yes, that means that roughly 90% of incoming e-mails are spam. In that environment, you'd think that VPN
connections might expose Microsoft to serious security risks. So how does Microsoft mitigate those risks while continuing to offer VPN access to remote
employees and contractors? The answer to that is manifold...
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How to cope with jerks at work
Incendiary co-workers can kill workplace productivity.
We've all worked with them at one time or another: people who are disruptive, abusive or otherwise demeaning or mean-spirited. In short, they're jerks. Incendiary co-workers
are more than a workplace distraction, however. Indeed, a growing body of research is being conducted in the U.S. and Europe that examines the impact bullies have
on productivity and financial performance. Computerworld's Thomas Hoffman spoke yesterday with Robert Sutton, the author of The No Asshole Rule: Building a
Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't, which is scheduled to be published by Warner Business Books on Feb. 22, about his inspiration for the book and some
of the lessons that managers can draw from it...
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Why New IT Managers Fail
Common misconceptions about the role often doom novices.
It's an old story: Brilliant individual contributor gets promoted to IT manager, then crashes and burns. But why? For 15 years, Harvard Business School professor Linda
A. Hill has studied workers struggling with the transition to management. Difficult as that shift has always been, she says, it has become even harder as companies have
gotten leaner, less siloed and more integrated with customers and suppliers. In this month's Harvard Business Review, Hill writes that although most new managers
see themselves as leaders, use the rhetoric of leadership and feel its burdens, they just don't get it. She explained why to Kathleen Melymuka...
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Bud Broomhead and other great IT moments in 2006
Most Awesome New Acronym of 2006: ARSE.
Q: Steve, what were the best and the worst of 2006? -- A.R., New York
A: Ah, so many interesting things happened in 2006, both good and bad. In no specific order, here ya go.
Best IT Industry Name: Bud Broomhead. Not a cartoon character, but a real-life luck machine. Bud was a founding member of storage resource management pioneer
HighGround Systems Inc., which was sold for a ton of money to Sun (see "Sun buys software firm HighGround"). Interestingly enough, HighGround was a Windows
application, which I'm pretty sure you can't buy from Sun anymore. Bud then moved on to Topio Inc., which was just bought for another ton of money by NetApp...
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FAQ: Second Life (and why you care)
The virtual world and free-market petri dish explained.
What is Second Life? Second Life is a virtual environment in which avatars -- visual representations of users or "residents" -- can interact. If you're familiar with
The Sims, it's superficially similar, since it's less a game with goals than a venue for socializing. However, Second Life is radically different in one important way:
The entire world -- attractions, objects, events -- is created and owned by the residents...
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Seven Strategies for Attracting and Retaining Top IT Talent
Adopting these tactics for attracting and keeping the cream of the crop will help you become a better leader and a more sought-after candidate for the top IT jobs.
Wouldn’t it be great to start the New Year armed with award-winning IT organizations’ best practices for attracting and retaining top talent?
If your answer isn’t a resounding yes, consider this your wake-up call. According to Business 2.0 magazine, for every two baby boomers who retire in the next decade,
there will only be one college grad to take their place. “The challenge [for IT managers] is going to be getting candidates in the door and hanging onto them,”
says former Northwestern Mutual Life VP of IT Phil Zwieg, given what he calls the “abysmal” enrollment in college IT programs...
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Fear of Dependency
Small to midsize organizations, using small to midsize vendors, must always be ready to break away and stand on their own two feet.
The technology leader's challenge is to provide business tools and solutions as efficiently as possible in a world of limited resources. That's the case no matter the size of your organization, but it's especially true when you're a small to midsize enterprise. Our budgets receive closer scrutiny; even low-cost line items must be justified. Technology staffing is weighed against the cost of staffing the mission of the organization...
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El Nino and humankind conspiring dept: Summary of abnormal weather
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Posted by kdawson on Wednesday January 10, @04:29AM
from the El-Nino-and-humankind-conspiring dept.
kpw10 writes "Dr. Jeff Masters from Wunderground has a great
summary of this year's rather abnormal weather (his blog is the best source on the net for in-depth weather analysis).
The post discusses some of the cyclical climate forces at work this year and
compares this year's record temperatures to records from the past. There are some interesting differences, particularly in the extent of the northern hemisphere
seeing record highs this year." From the article: "December's weather in the Northeast U.S. may have been a case of the weather dice coming up thirteen — weather not seen on the planet since before the Ice Age began, 118,000 years ago. The weather dice
will start rolling an increasing number of thirteens in coming years, and an ice-free Arctic Ocean in summertime by 2040 is a very real possibility..." Here is the
The National Climatic Data Center's report announcing the
entry of 2006 into the record books...
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