Offshoring
C|net, 7/28/04: Is Bangalore bigger than Silicon Valley?
By Andy McCue and Ed Frauenheim
Bangalore may be on the verge of overtaking Silicon Valley as the biggest IT employment region in the world on the back of the rise in offshore outsourcing, according to some estimates.
The high-tech Indian city, which is home to major Indian IT outsourcers, including Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro Technologies, as well as many Western IT companies, now employs 160,000 people in the technology sector. IT accounts for 100,000 of these jobs, with the rest in business process outsourcing and call centers.
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IT Management
C|net, 7/28/04: The CIO time bomb
By John R. Logan
CIOs are sitting on a time bomb, and most aren't even aware of it.
Under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, new mandates went into effect this year that require CIOs to document the adequacy of their corporations' IT internal control systems. Most still mistakenly believe they're doing enough to comply when in fact, it's not nearly enough to pass external audits.
The truth is that when it comes to corporate compliance, more than 80 percent of CIOs are unaware of their actual responsibilities. The problem is the absence of a free flow of communication among CIOs, their corporation's external auditors and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, or PCAOB, which is the organization that recommends Sarbanes-Oxley regulations.
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Security
C|net, 7/28/04: Bulk of year's PC infections pinned to one man
By Munir Kotadia
Sven Jaschan, self-confessed author of the Netsky and Sasser viruses, is responsible for 70 percent of virus infections in 2004, according to a six-month virus roundup published Wednesday by antivirus company Sophos.
The 18-year-old Jaschan was taken into custody in Germany in May by police who said he had admitted to programming both the Netsky and Sasser worms, something experts at Microsoft confirmed. (A Microsoft antivirus reward program led to the teenager's arrest.) During the five months preceding Jaschan's capture, there were at least 25 variants of Netsky and one of the port-scanning network worm Sasser.
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ZDNet, 7/29/04: Hackers striking more suddenly
Robert Lemos
Attackers are writing malicious code more quickly than ever, the founder of the Black Hat Security Briefings has warned
It's mostly bad news for network administrators at this year's Black Hat Security Briefings: Increasingly, attackers are using better tools to find vulnerabilities quickly, exploit flaws and hide their attacks.
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C|net, 7/28/04: Details of Microsoft antivirus software leak out
By Matt Hines and Christophe Guillemin
An executive of Microsoft in France divulged on Wednesday some of the software maker's plans for its highly anticipated entry into the antivirus software market.
A standalone antivirus product will be built from tools the company inherited through its 2003 acquisitions of GeCad and Pelican Software, according to a report published in CNET News.com's sister publication, ZDNet France, citing the technical head of Microsoft's security project in that country, Nicolas Mirail.
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eWeek, 7/28/04: Microsoft Readies Next Round of IE Patches
By David Morgenstern
Microsoft officials say the company is prepping a patch for its Internet Explorer browser to plug the vulnerability exploited by the Download.Ject attacks in June. The patch is expected sometime next week, several weeks before the next scheduled batch release of security fixes.
In late June, security concerns over IE were raised following several serious exploits, including Download.Ject, which allowed Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Services) Web servers to install a keystroke logger and other malware code to steal passwords and other personal data.
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Geeks With Too Much Time On Their Hands
The New York Times, 7/29/04: Now Playing, a Digital Brigadoon
By CHRIS THOMPSON
SANTA CRUZ, Calif.
LIKE most cities in Silicon Valley's outer stratosphere, Santa Cruz has a district dedicated to an odd marriage of high and low tech, where lumber mills and cement factories squat beside gleaming software business parks. But the geeks and hipsters who parked their bikes on this slab of broken land and sneaked past the "no trespassing" sign were not here on business. They were going to the movies.
Few theaters consist of dead weeds and a mound of gray slag squeezed between a laboratory and an alloy manufacturing firm. But these movie buffs have brought their own theater with them. For three years, cult-movie buffs have been organizing "guerrilla drive-ins" in a number of cities, rigging together a nest of digital projectors, DVD players, and radio transmitters or stereo speakers, spreading the word online, and assembling on parking lots or fields to watch obscure films beneath the stars.
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