IT Management
IDG, 2/26/03: IT managers must take control of instant messaging
Scarlet Pruitt, IDG News ServiceBoston Bureau
As an IT manager, you like to think you run a tight ship. Antivirus updates come often, unsanctioned software downloads are forbidden and spam filtering is your number-one pastime. Then imagine your surprise to discover one day that 40 percent of your corporate users are doing business over consumer instant messaging (IM) products you had no idea were on their machines.
What do you do?
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Wireless
Computerworld, 2/25/03: Wi-Fi Alliance plans to certify 802.11g WLANs this summer
By Bob Brewin
The Wi-Fi Alliance plans to start interoperability and certification testing this summer of new wireless LAN products based on the still-evolving 802.11g standard, which offers 54M bit/sec. data in the 2.4-GHz band. That compares to 11M bit/sec. throughput for WLAN products that operate in the same unlicensed frequency band and use the better-known 802.11b.
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Mobile
InternetNews.com, 2/25/03: PDA Might Fade Away
By Michael Singer
While it's not in ismmediate danger of becoming obsolete, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) are losing the fight for supremacy against smartphones and customer perception, according to a new report.
Analysts at In-Stat/MDR Tuesday say the PDA market is poised for growth this year, but the outlook for the next four years is not as strong and may get worse depending on world economic conditions.
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Mobile / Security
ZDNet, 2/26/03: Mobile phone hacking expected to spread
By Patrick Gray
United States-based security company @stake has released a security advisory detailing a Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability in the Nokia 6210 GSM mobile phone, and although the flaw isn't serious it could be a sign of worse things to come.
The advisory, posted to the bugtraq security mailing list, describes how a prankster could use the vulnerability to crash a potential victim's phone.
"There is a vulnerability which allows an attacker to send a malicious vCard to a handset, causing (it) to crash," the advisory said.
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The Future
Release 1.0, February, Models and Consequences
Any software application expresses some implicit model of the world, but often that model is no more visible than hidden meanings in the world itself; i.e. the software doesn’t explain anything.
Explicit models in IT potentially enable three things:
• We can look at an IT system to see the impact changes may have, whether on the results of a particular action or on the functioning of the IT system overall.
• We can map from one model to another.
• If we have a proper correspondence between them, we can make changes in a model and see them automatically reflected in software that implements the model.
In the issue that follows, we explore the use of software models: that is, both models of software, and models in software. These tools will variously help users be more efficient in creating and maintaining their code, and more effective in modeling the real world so that they can either automate processes to do what they want, or understand processes that are already happening. Anyone building any kind of software these days needs to build in the capability to communicate not just physically but semantically with the rest of the world, without necessarily knowing what is going to be in that world. (That is, you have to describe yourself well enough for strangers to understand you.) While the code tools are of interest to software developers, the broader modeling tools intrigue everyone from Coca-Cola trying to understand its own reseller network, to various US government agencies trying to model the behavior of terrorists and to detect instances of it amidst mountains of innocuous data.
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