Security
Computerworld, 7/18/03: New Windows flaw raises fresh doubts about Microsoft security
The latest vulnerability affects Windows Server 2003
By JAIKUMAR VIJAYAN
Users this week reacted with a mixture of concern and resignation to the discovery of a critical flaw in almost all versions of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software, including the Windows Server 2003 operating system.
The vulnerability exists in a communications protocol that deals with message exchange over TCP/IP (see story). It allows attackers to take over a victim's system and install malicious code; view, modify or delete data; or create new user accounts.
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Spam
Infoworld, 718/03: Blacklists: The new neighborhood watch
E-mail blacklist operators turn the Internet into a gated community
By Tom Yager
The dnsbl (DNS-based blacklist) concept is simple. By default, mail servers are configured to accept all incoming connections; DNSBL-enabled mail servers can put each connection on hold and consult one or more blacklists. If the sender’s IP address is blacklisted, the mail server has the option of hanging up on the sender before the questionable mail is received.
Operators of DNSBLs, including spews.org, spamhaus.org, and spamcop.com, feel the best way to stop spam is: Keep spammers from connecting to targeted mail servers in the first place. Users are not inconvenienced, and bandwidth is conserved. Blacklisted senders can deliver no e-mail whatsoever to servers or recipients that block blacklisted addresses. It seems like an ideal solution.
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Infoworld, 7/18/03: Throwing the book at spam
Despite rising calls for national spam legislation, it’s proving tricky to craft loophole-free anti-spam laws
By Ed Foster
There ought to be a law. E-mail users, besieged by a vast array of fraudulent and/or obscene junk messages, often wonder why our lawmakers can’t put a stop to it.
It’s not that there are no laws against spam. Some states have had statutes on the books for several years that attempt to control UCE (unsolicited commercial e-mail), and in recent months, many more states added legislation. But the state laws vary widely in their approach and have resulted in only a handful of successful actions against spammers.
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Infoworld, 7/18/03: The best way to can spam
It’s a security risk, a productivity drain, and just plain annoying. Put a lid on unwanted e-mail with a multi-layered strategy
By Jon Udell
Spontaneous end-to-end communication used to be the Internet’s magic ingredient. But scarcity of IPv4 address space and legions of vandals resulted in NATs and firewalls. Now, unfiltered end-to-end communication happens, for the most part, by invitation only.
Until recently, the lone exception was e-mail. You didn’t need permission to contact someone by e-mail, and you could be reasonably certain that a message you sent would land in the recipient’s inbox. Inevitably that had to change, too. The spam epidemic compels us to create and use the e-mail equivalent of NATs and firewalls: a combination of content filters, white lists, and blacklists
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Infoworld, 7/18/03: SpamAssassin takes aim at e-mail
InfoWorld isn’t immune to spam, but we're getting there: A look at one solution that helped
By Kevin Railsback
Unfortunately, InfoWorld is not immune to spam. When seeking solutions to our spam problem, we wanted a product that would easily integrate into our existing environment while offering the flexibility to modify filtering rules and score assignments. After evaluating several possibilities, InfoWorld chose SpamAssassin, a popular open-source project that detects and marks messages deemed to be spam.
Our basic mail configuration matches that of many businesses: SMTP gateway servers accept mail from the outside world and then relay that mail to our cluster of mail servers. In our case, the SMTP gateways are Debian Linux boxes running Sendmail. The back-end mail cluster consists of Lotus Domino servers running on Windows. Our mail clients are a mixture of mostly Lotus Notes with some MozillaMail, BlackBerry, and Outlook users. To this mix, we added a separate Debian server running Sendmail and SpamAssassin using the “milter” in-line filtering capabilities of Sendmail.
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Press Release, 7/21/03: Introducing Brightmail Anti-Spam 5.0 Software - Complete Spam Defense for the Enterprise
Market Leader Integrates New Anti-Spam Software on Gateway Servers, Hosted and Appliance Platforms
SAN FRANCISCO, July 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Brightmail, the market leader in anti-spam technology, today announced the availability of Brightmail(R) Anti-Spam 5.0 software, a major milestone in the battle against spam. Brightmail Anti-Spam 5.0 brings even greater spam fighting effectiveness to enterprise email users -- while still providing the spam protection accuracy rate of only 1 in 1,000,000 false positives. Brightmail Anti-Spam 5.0 software delivers "complete spam defense" for the enterprise environment, helping further protect email users from unwanted and dangerous spam mail messages.
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Open Source
The Wall Street Journal, 7/21/03: Two Men, Two Ways To Speak Computerese
By LEE GOMES
They live a few dozen miles from each other, have strikingly different backgrounds and world views, but in their own separate ways they have created computer languages among the most important in the world.
Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum are the driving forces behind Perl and Python, respectively. If you haven't heard of any of them, it's because you don't run a Web site, write server software, or toil in the many other fields where both men and their creations have enormous and very zealous followings.
Perl and Python are free and freely modified "open source" software, just like the better-known Linux operating system. Mr. Wall, 48, and Mr. von Rossum, 47, each started working on his language in the 1980s, a few years before Linus Torvalds began Linux. In all three cases, what began as a hobby grew into a global phenomenon.
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