Networking: Opinions

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.

An Ethernet patent dispute is again rearing its ugly head in court this week as Intel has filed suit against patent licensing firm Negotiated Data Solutions (N-Data) looking to indemnify Intel customers against any royalty claims N-Data is looking to grab.

It's a wireless world, some say, conveniently overlooking the giant balls of cables behind every personal computer and every server, router and printer. But many want to expand the wireless world, so let's look at two companies doing just that.

What do you get when you combine images from Google Earth and the brainpower from researchers at Oak Ridge National Labs? Well in this case you get a tool that enables real-time status of the national electric grid that federal state and local agencies can use to coordinate and respond to major problems such as wide-area power outages, natural disasters and other catastrophic events.

Network traffic data holds a wealth of information about application response time, network usage and bandwidth consumption. Getting at that data in an efficient and inexpensive manner would help network managers better understand and control their networks.

It seems that every decade or so I get the opportunity to write an article on IT deja vu. This time around, the topic is cloud computing, which is the latest IT buzz word.