03 September 2002

Why Firewalls Suck Simson Garfinkel -- We need effective firewalls less than we need an effective data protection policy. In his Technology Review editorial, Simson Garfinkel says ...firewalls often provide a mere illusion of protection. They don’t make business systems significantly more secure. And by focusing attention on defending the perimeter, rather than on defending information assets within an organization, firewalls foster lax internal security practices that magnify the damage that insiders can inflict. What firewalls do accomplish, however, is this: they make the Internet more cumbersome to use. I recently visited a friend’s firm in New York and wanted to check my e-mail, so I plugged my laptop into a network jack in an unused office. Access denied: my PC wasn’t set up to work with the company’s firewall. So instead of reading my e-mail, I occupied myself by sniffing the traffic on the office network and probing for a way out. (Had I been inclined, I could have read everybody else’s e-mail—or done real damage.)

X Serve in my Sitting Room MAC MEGASITE.com -- Could the X Serve become the centre of a sitting room? I like the idea of a server in my stereo component rack. It could streaming audio and video through the whole house.That would be the entertainment system of the future.

The Veneration of Ellen Feiss LA TIMES.com -- Ellen Feiss is on my desktop. My veneration of Apple Computer's leading Switch ad has been replicated by others. who also identify with a computer that goes "beep beep beep." The LA Times says, "Dressed slacker casual in a zip-up sweatshirt, her wind-swept hair pulled back from her face to reveal clear skin, full lips and cocker-spaniel eyes, Feiss would probably have slipped under the radar if she weren't so darned cute. But there's another reason for her popularity: Her slightly slurred speech and reddish eyes have led to much speculation online as to whether or not she is stoned on marijuana--something that has made Feiss even more popular."

Why Promote SMS? FLAGSTAFF, Arizona -- Misty just finished her first week at Northern Arizona University and she's figured out the SMS thing. She can send messages to me in Ireland from her cell phone. Should American cellular providers spend buckets of marketing money to promote SMS? That would run counter to the European experience, where text messaging just caught on. All you have to do is let a little viral marketing kick in and you will generate more than 1bn text messages a day, the rate experience in England currently.