Customer Service
Fast Company, 6/04: Cuckoo For Customers
Here's one high-tech company where dedication to customers borders on the loony.
By: Alison Overholt
Joey Parsons is wearing a straightjacket, and he's surrounded by a crowd applauding his commitment. Not to a mental institution, but to providing the best service to his company's customers. Parsons, 24, has just won the Straightjacket Award, the most coveted employee distinction at Rackspace, a San Antonio-based Web-hosting company. His colleagues voted him March's winner of the award, which recognizes the employee who best lives up to the Rackspace motto of delivering "fanatical support," a dedication to customers that's so intense it borders on the loony.
It's a far cry from the Rackspace that customer-care vice president David Bryce found when he arrived in 1999. The company manages the technology back end of Web sites for clients as diverse as e-tailers, game sites, and online ad agencies--folks for whom having a reliable site is obviously critical. Yet the tech-support staff appeared to feel no urgency about addressing problems, Bryce says, and sometimes seemed openly hostile to customers (sound familiar?).
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Microsoft
The Wall Street Journal, 6/7/04: When Microsoft Claims Your PC Is Now Secure, Don't Drop Your Guard
I know this isn't very likely to happen, but Microsoft really ought to consider putting a label on its boxes of Windows XP: WARNING: MICROSOFT'S TESTS HAVE DETERMINED THAT FOLLOWING OUR INSTRUCTIONS IN THE USE OF THIS PRODUCT WILL PUT YOUR COMPUTER AT SEVERE RISK.
Windows XP is Microsoft's most current operating system for folks like you and me. Recently, I spent $300 buying it to install on a PC I had just put together. I wanted to run a personal Web site, and I assumed that for my money, I was going to be getting the best security the world's biggest software company could offer.
And in a weird way, that is what happened
Wired, 6/4/04: Windows XP Bedevils Wi-Fi Users
By Daniel Terdiman
Kevin Gilmore is a network administrator at MicroDisplay, a small company in San Pablo, California, that uses several Wi-Fi access points to give employees the freedom to roam around the office with their laptops while remaining connected to the Internet.
But these days, Gilmore keeps encountering a problem that many Windows XP users know all too well: the sudden and inexplicable loss of their wireless Internet connections. As Gilmore knows from the flow of support calls, there's little point in trying to find a permanent solution to the problem.
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Security
Infoworld, 6/4/04: Not-so-quick-and-dirty patch management
Priced affordably at zero dollars, Microsoft Software Update Services is primo pick for patching smaller networks
By Oliver Rist
Free, that is, if you don’t measure your own time too much when it comes to configuring the little sucker. We’re installing SUS, typically as a stand-alone box at most client sites where the owner is simply too tight to pay for managed services or a centralized management solution of his own.
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eWeek, 6/4/04: New Armor to Thwart Hacks
By Dennis Fisher
A small cadre of vendors is set to release a new class of host-based security technologies that protect applications and processes running in memory.
While many enterprises are still adjusting to the concept of signatureless defenses such as intrusion prevention systems, Determina Inc., a startup founded by a group of security-industry veterans, and Immunix Inc., a top Linux security provider, are rolling out solutions designed to lock down server memory space and allow only explicitly permitted operations among applications and processes.
[more]
Computerworld, 6/4/04: New worm targets two Microsoft vulnerabilities
It exploits the same flaws used by the Sasser and Blaster worms
News Story by Paul Roberts
Antivirus software companies are warning customers about a new e-mail worm that targets unpatched Microsoft Corp. Windows machines through either of two recently disclosed software vulnerabilities.
The new worm, known as both Plexus and Explet.A, was first detected on Wednesday and spreads by exploiting Windows machines with vulnerabilities used by two recent worms, Sasser and Blaster, according to alerts. Network Associates Inc.'s McAfee Antivirus Emergency Response Team and Symantec Corp. both said the new worm doesn't pose a serious threat, but the companies issued software updates yesterday to detect it.
[more]
Computerworld, 6/4/04: Microsoft calls for outbound filtering against spam
The filtering would kick in when users send a large number of messages
News Story by Joris Evers
In its continuing fight against unsolicited commercial e-mail, Microsoft Corp. plans to filter outgoing messages on its consumer mail services and is busy developing new "proofing" technologies, the software maker's chief spam fighter said yesterday.
The fight is also one against the clock. Microsoft last year set a two-year goal to make spam a problem of the past; there are now 19 months left, said Ryan Hamlin, general manager of Microsoft's Security Technology & Strategy group, at Inbox, a conference on e-mail in San Jose.
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