Outsourcing
Baseline, 7/03: Outsmarting Outsourcers
By Larry Dignan
Deals with computing service providers are still murky. The best negotiators are insisting on performance goals.
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"You have to think everything out because once you sign that contract all of your leverage is gone," says Jack Benton, director of marketing for Technology Partners International (TPI), a Woodlands, Texas, firm that advised Procter & Gamble on the HP deal.
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Security
Darwin, 7/03: Proper Patch Procedures
Do you patch when the vendor says? When your gut says? Or when it's too late?
BY DR. LARRY PONEMON
NOT SO LONG AGO, patch management may have meant keeping a four-year-olds' trousers intact. Today, it is a costly and not trivial process involving the security of an IT infrastructure.
According to one IT professional of a major energy company, "a systems administrator must have the ability to analyze patch information a company receives and decide whether or not it is worth the time and expense to apply it. Because of our budget constraints, we don't want to automatically apply patches simply because Microsoft or another vendor identified a problem."
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ZDNet, 7/17/03: Microsoft's patches: Can you trust them?
Munir Kotadia
News Analysis: Instead of spending time and money implementing every patch that Microsoft releases, stick to the service packs and bolster your security policy, say experts
To survive the next Slammer-like virus attack, updating applications and operating systems with every patch that Microsoft releases is the worst thing any business can do, according to advice from security experts and industry analysts.
Advice being given to companies is that they should avoid installing individual patches released by the software giant, and only deploy service packs once they have been through a rigorous internal testing procedure. The move is a further indication that Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative, which is supposed to increase the company's reputation as a reliable software developer, is not being taken seriously by the industry.
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TechWeb, 7/17/03: New Worm Masquerades As Microsoft Patch
The infection modifies settings in Windows machines and attempts to delete key system files.
Several security firms have identified a new worm that poses as a critical software patch from Microsoft or an antivirus update from Symantec Corp.
The worm, which for the moment goes by multiple name, including W32.Gruel@mm and W32/Fakerr@mm, modifies a slew of system settings in Microsoft Windows machines and attempts to delete a host of crucial system files.
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The Register, 7/18/03: Cisco IOS DoS exploit released in the wild
By John Leyden
The risk posed by a serious DoS vulnerability to a wide range of Cisco Systems routers and switches has been upgraded following the release of an exploit onto a full disclosure mailing list.
As we reported yesterday, The DoS vulnerability arises from a bug in Cisco's core IOS software which means vulnerable devices to stop processing inbound packets on receipt of maliciously constructed IPv4 packets. Normal service would be restored only with a manual reboot.
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Mobile
Fortune, 7/16/03: Will Wi-Fi Revolutionize the Phone?
As Wi-Fi grows to envelop cities, 'Voice over Hot Spots' could replace cell services—and their profits.
By David Kirkpatrick
In January 2002 I moderated an hour-long lunch discussion on wireless at the World Economic Forum in New York. It included many CEOs and top executives of major U.S. and international cell phone carriers. The conversation went on for a long time about the relative merits of various incremental improvements in cell systems, how people would pay, shifting of calls from landlines to cell phones, etc. But with about five minutes left, I remarked that nothing had been mentioned about 802.11b wireless networks (what had yet to be widely called "Wi-Fi"). My comment was met with dismissive, almost derisive, mumbling room-wide. The general reaction: Wi-Fi would be important, but not for a long time, and didn't represent a major threat to incumbent carriers.
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Digital Life
Fast Company, 8/03: D Day for the Techno-Elite
The digital establishment storms the California desert for the Wall Street Journal 's confab, "D."
What happens when you pack the technology industry's leading luminaries and a handful of the media elite's most celebrated boldface names onto a single stage in a single day? At the Wall Street Journal 's inaugural "D" (for "all things digital") conference, it turns out, you get less of an advance look at the digital future and more of an old-home week for the Teflon moguls, digital establishment, and mixed bag of VCs, entrepreneurs, and tech players who flocked to Carlsbad in May.
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