Crumbs
Rich T finds some tasty titbits you might have missed in the week's news
Friday 3 November 2006, 5:35 PM
Early take on MS/Novell is not all bright
First take from this side of the Atlantic on the Microsoft/Novell partnership hasn't been entirely positive.
OK, so it's early days. And on the bright side, Microsoft has (publicly at least) acknowledged that open source plays at least some sort of role in business IT.
But, despite some initial enthusing from our very own technical editor Rupert Goodwins , things aren't looking quite so rosy.
The big question is how Novell will stay within the requirements of the GPL given its restrictive commercial tie-up with Microsoft.
We're sure the devil is in the detail of the partnership contract - and we're pretty sure Novell has it sussed. But for now the company is keeping firmly schtum, and it refused to comment on that very point to us today.
The majorly unhappy party at the moment is Red Hat, which has of course had an exceedingly bumpy week.
Personally I can't think of a more challenging few days than having two of the world's biggest software companies tread on your feet in succession.
Red Hat is bullish, but it has a tight corner to defend against the Novell partnership, and against Oracle's encroachment.
As Red Hat says, the Novell deal does demonstrate the level of business interest in open source.
But there is a lot of mileage to run in the MS/Novell deal, me thinks, and there'll be a few twists to the tale yet.
It will be interesting to see who gets whipped by the open source tale [tail?] first.
I'll leave the last word to NoCalDrummer , a San-Francisco-based reader, who's had a close run with Microsoft before.
Thursday 2 November 2006, 12:12 PM
When data is not the ultimate hacker target
The fact that a US water utility was hacked last week is far from headline news, but what struck a chord here in London was the fact that the hackers were not trying to view, or steal, the company's data.
The hackers were instead trying to gain access to the company's network purely for the purposes of sending spam, probably as part of a wider botnet attack.
The consequences for the company were probably far worse, as it turns out, than a script kiddie viewing some of its data.
Let's face it - there are probably a very small number of people who want to identify the workings of a water filtration plant.
But instead its bandwidth is likely to have been readily consumed, seriously harming business productivity.
Then there are the legal problems which could have resulted.
Fortunately, the company seems to have rid itself of the offending software, but there are lessons to be learnt.
Businesses need to protect not only their confidential data, but also protect themselves against being turned into zombies in that manner.
And that is not easy: no business can be 100% secure.
Tuesday 31 October 2006, 5:31 PM
Securing the perimeter - and the hole in the middle as well
Escaping from launch fever here at ZD Towers, I've spent Tuesday morning with an interesting LAN security start-up called Nevis Networks.
When I was first told of the company, the headlines immediately sprang to mind: Security start-up facing mountainous challenge; Nevis peaks with security capabilities... There were many more. But in the end, none of my pre-formed judgements had been correct.
Nevis has a team of some 190 employees creating silicon which helps to protect enterprise networks through either an appliance or a switch-based approach.
Now this is quite cool as neither product sits on the edge of the LAN, they actually sit in it between the other switches.
It's a rapidly growing area and one which is worth paying a bit of attention.
If you no longer know where the perimeter of your network is - due to mobile workers, contractors, extranets, mobile workers etc, then a security appliance or switch such as Nevis's might be what you are looking for.
Not to forget that there are a number of other companies doing this as well.
Consentry is one start-up worth looking at - it pretty much competes head-on with Nevis.
Router favourites Cisco Systems and Foundry Networks also have their own offerings: the former with NAC and the latter with secure switches.
It's interesting to compare not only the differing type of security protection available from these four firms, but also the price as well.
And of course the old trick to mind the costs of mandatory upgrades must be borne in mind as well.
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