Outsourcing
Time, 7/28/03: Where the Good Jobs Are Going
Forget sweatshops. U.S. companies are now shifting high-wage work overseas, especially to India
By JYOTI THOTTAM
Little by little, Sab Maglione could feel his job slipping away. He worked for a large insurance firm in northern New Jersey, developing the software it uses to keep track of its agents. But in mid-2001, his employer introduced him to Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest software company. About 120 Tata employees were brought in to help on a platform-conversion project. Maglione, 44, trained and managed a five-person Tata team. When one of them was named manager, he started to worry. By the end of last year, 70% of the project had been shifted to India and nearly all 20 U.S. workers, including Maglione, were laid off.
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Creative use of offshore outsourcing, says Debashish Sinha of Gartner Research, offers benefits that outweigh the direct loss of jobs. In an economy that has shed 2 million jobs over two years, he contends, the 200,000 that have moved overseas are less significant than the potential for cost savings and strategic growth. But he concedes that "when you're a laid-off employee who can't find a job, that's hard to understand."
Perhaps some will follow the example of Dick Taggart, 41, of Old Greenwich, Conn. After 18 years in financial services, most recently at J.P. Morgan Chase, he now works for Progeon, an affiliate of the Indian outsourcing giant Infosys, as its man on Wall Street. One week out of every six or seven, he takes securities firms to India to show them the savings that are possible. He knows the transition is painful for the workers left behind, but he has seen it before. "It was the same thing when we moved from Wall Street to New Jersey and then to Dallas," he says. "Guess what? This is next."
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Security
Computerworld, 8/1/03: Concerns mount over possible big Net attack
A flaw that affects almost all versions of the Windows operating system could be exploited
By Paul Roberts, IDG News Service
Security experts warn that a recently disclosed security vulnerability in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system may soon be used by a powerful Internet worm that could disrupt traffic on the Internet and affect millions of machines worldwide.
The vulnerability, a buffer overrun in a Windows interface that handles the remote procedure call (RPC) protocol, was acknowledged by Microsoft in Security Bulletin MS03-026 on July 16. Today, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security updated an earlier warning about the RPC vulnerability, noting increased network scanning and the widespread distribution of working exploits on the Internet.
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The Register, 8/1/03: MS flaw highlights e-security laziness
In an unprecedented move, the US Department of Homeland Security has issued a second warning over a Windows flaw that leaves computers vulnerable to attack.
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Microsoft has issued patches on its Web site to let administrators repair systems, but analysts have said that there is still a large proportion of computers plugged in to the Net that remain susceptible to attack.
This is said to be partly because Microsoft issues patches so frequently that they are increasingly being ignored. Last year the software giant issued about 70 patches, and about 30 have been made available this year.
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ZDNet, 8/1/03: End of the road for SMTP?
By Paul Festa s
The protocol that has defined e-mail for more than two decades may have a fatal flaw: It trusts you.
Developed when the Internet was used almost exclusively by academics, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMTP, assumes that you are who you say you are.
SMTP makes that assumption because it doesn't suspect that you're sending a Trojan horse virus, that you're making fraudulent pleas for money from the relations of deposed African dictators, or that you're hijacking somebody else's computer to send tens of millions of ads for herbal Viagra.
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Active Directory
Computerworld, 7/30/03: Avoid Active Directory Pitfalls
By Mark Hynes
Windows NT domains tied security and administration processes to the domain, and each domain administrator implemented ways to maximize security and efficiency at the local level. Active Directory (AD) replaces this structure with a central enterprise security model, allowing security authority and administration processes to become independent of prior domain boundaries. As a result, upgrade projects must include explicit decisions on how and why administration authority and process get assigned throughout the organization. Coming to agreement on these contentious issues will involve lots of people with lots of different objectives that are difficult to reconcile.
AD deployments are far-reaching and affect a number of people who are accountable for critical IT objectives, such as security, service levels and cost management. Projects that ignore these stakeholders will meet with significant organizational resistance. Plans that incorporate these objectives, solicit participation by stakeholders and propose technology solutions that limit the need for compromise will be more successful.
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Remote Access
Tech Web, 8/1/03: Boon or Bane: Managing the VPN
By Gregg Keizer
Virtual private networks (VPN) are almost always a boon—but sometimes they can be the bane of managers hoping to keep their networks both accessible to employees and secure from outside troublemakers.
Used to allow mobile and remote workers—which, these days, means everyone from telecommuters to far-flung sales staffs—access to a network, VPNs are also a potential entry-point for attackers. The recent Microsoft vulnerability that has created such a stir—even to the point of garnering attention from the U.S. government's Department of Homeland Security—is of particular danger to companies running VPNs, several security analysts have said.
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Wireless
Techweb, 7/31/03: One Slow User In The Hot Spot Can Degrade Wi-Fi Performance
A group of French researchers said Wednesday that they've spotted a flaw in wireless LAN technology which could allow one slow user to drag down performance of everyone connecting to a hot spot.
Four scientists, who work for France's Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, said in their research paper that anomalies in the IEEE 802.1x standard -- including 802.11a, 802.11g, and the most widely-used Wi-Fi protocol, 802.11b -- can result in degraded performance for all accessing the Internet through a hot spot when just one slow user connects.
They cited an example where several users, who are enjoying a fast 11Mbps connection because they're close to the hot spot, see their performance dramatically drop when a single user -- perhaps because he is further from the access point -- connects at a sluggish 1Mbps. In that case, the French experts said, all are punished for the sins of the one: those users once connected at 11Mbps will see their speeds dragged down to 1Mbps.
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SMB Market
IDG, 8/1/03: Jupiter: SMBs eye open-source as Microsoft alternative
Stacy Cowley
Some price-sensitive small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are turning to Linux and other open-source products as a lower-cost alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s ubiquitous business software, Jupiter Research found in a recent study.
Surveying several hundred businesses of less than 1,000 employees, Jupiter found that 19 percent are using some form of Linux on their desktop computers. Six percent said they use OpenOffice, an open-source suite of productivity applications, with an additional 3 percent reporting plans to deploy it in their next fiscal year, according to Joe Wilcox, a Washington, D.C.-based Jupiter Research senior analyst.
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Collaborative Technologies
First Monday, 8/1/03: The Augmented Social Network: Building identity and trust into the next-generation Internet
by Ken Jordan, Jan Hauser, and Steven Foster
Could the next generation of online communications strengthen civil society by better connecting people to others with whom they share affinities, so they can more effectively exchange information and self-organize? Could such a system help to revitalize democracy in the 21st century? When networked personal computing was first developed, engineers concentrated on extending creativity among individuals and enhancing collaboration between a few. They did not much consider what social interaction among millions of Internet users would actually entail. It was thought that the Net’s technical architecture need not address the issues of "personal identity" and "trust," since those matters tended to take care of themselves.
This paper proposes the creation of an Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complementary capabilities across social networks. The ASN has three main objectives: 1) To create an Internet-wide system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries; 2) To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commons and the values of civil society; and, 3) To enhance the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in the process of democratic governance. In effect, the ASN proposes a form of "online citizenship" for the Information Age.
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New Yorkers Dishing On California
The New York Times, 8/1/03: State of Decline
By PAUL KRUGMAN
From smog to silicon, from the sexual revolution to the tax revolt, the future has usually arrived in California first. Now the Golden State is degenerating into a banana republic. Can the nation be far behind?
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The key factor in rising California spending has been the effort to rebuild a crippled education system. Proposition 13, the 1978 cap on property taxes, led to a progressive starvation of California's once-lauded public schools. By 1994, the state had the largest class sizes in the nation; its reading scores were on a par with Mississippi's.
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Opening This Weekend, @ A Theater Near You
The San Francisco Chronicle, 8/1/03: 'Gigli' not even good for a giggle
Affleck, Lopez dullest onscreen duo of year
"Gigli" doesn't need a review; it needs an inquest. The movie is dead on arrival. Who or what killed it?
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