Networking: Opinions

Heard about a competitor's security being breached? Then you're probably next. In fact, you may already be owned.

The initial approach to storage virtualization, which has been around for years, was to address it in the storage-area network because the SAN sat between the storage and servers, and would cause the least disruption to these systems. However, after nearly a decade, this approach has not taken off while server virtualization has become widely accepted. What needs to be changed to make storage virtualization as ubiquitous as server virtualization?

Not long ago, the powers-that-be detected an impending crisis. To resolve it, they rushed into action crafting a proposal that represented an unprecedented upheaval of existing infrastructure. On the grounds that "something needed to be done" to avert the crisis, they brushed aside objections that the upheaval was too convulsive and might nonetheless fail to address the underlying issues that had created the crisis in the first place.

There's IT, and then there's shadow IT.

In terms of malicious insiders committing fraud, can anything "really" be done?

Whenever I plan and configure an enterprise WLAN system, I always advise that an additional 10 to 20 percent of the capital budget be reserved for expansion and filling in holes in coverage or capacity that couldn't be anticipated during the planning process.

Last week Microsoft released MS08-055 [1], patching a remote code execution vulnerability affecting the handling of onenote:// URLs in different versions of Office. What was surprising about the patch is that the vulnerability being fixed only bore a passing resemblance to the one that was notified to Microsoft in March of this year.

In the world of content distribution networks, A is for Akamai. What about the rest? Is B for BitGravity, or maybe BitTorrent because of the potential impact of peer-to-peer technology on CDNs? Is C for content? I don't think so. I think it's for carrier or maybe cloud -- and in either case, the "C change" is potentially a major one for the CDN world.

How do you justify maintaining a defence against historical vulnerabilities that should be well out of common circulation or not viable against a modern system? An infected system on the International Space Station has demonstrated the importance of maintaining such a posture just last week when it was infected with a worm that was more than a year old.

Last week I suggested that the IT world, particularly when it comes to marketing, is crazy, and I cited as evidence Microsoft's recently announced US$10 million plan to use comedian Jerry Seinfeld to hawk Vista.

Microsoft's Security Vulnerability Research & Defense team (SVRD) have recently posted information online about the Cross Site Scripting (XSS) filter to be incorporated into Internet Explorer 8 when it is released.