07 December 2002

Delta RocketCam Videos dmaas -- High quality RocketCam Videos from the inaugural launch of Boeing's Delta IV rocket have just been made available (in MPEG-1 and Quicktime). [Slashdot]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Spam Could Destroy the Internet David Berlind -- If ISPs start clamping down on spammers by invoking blacklists, email will lose its credibility as a channel for always-on connectivity.   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Groove on My Commodore 64? Jeff Chausse -- There's no need to tie up your Windows PC with Groove. Put Groove on a cheap PC. Set it in a closet, hook it up to your LAN. Build whatever interfaces you really need, out of .NET/Java/Perl/Fortran, and access it from your Mac/PalmPilot/WebTV/Commodore 64. [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Sighting: Macromedia Contribute You can set up this slick program in such a way that only certain users have certain privileges. The developer defines the areas of the page that are accessible, so you can easily and quickly define the main body of text (but not the nav features) as being editable. [Webmaster Base] Sent by Nokia 9210i mail2blog over Vodafone HSD.   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Ten Tech Promises That Will Never Be Fulfilled Here are 10 technology myths and our analysis on what solution providers should be doing about them: The Paperless Office Tag line: Remember carbon paper? Myth: E-mail, instant messaging, digital signatures and other electronic technologies will rid the office of paper files and copiers. Reality: E-mail generated more paper as people made copies for their files. In fact, the FBI still works this way, as do many legal offices. Fallout: Copiers and file cabinets are still the norm, though most businesses don't know from carbon paper anymore, so there is some hope. Still, businesses do more printing now than ever before. IP/telephony Tag line: Network your phone! Myth: Get rid of that expensive PBX and connect all your telephones on your corporate Ethernet network. Then you'll only have one infrastructure to manage and maintain. Reality: IP phones aren't that easy to deploy. You have to beef up the quality of service on various network switches and routers, and you may need to retrain your data-center staff to understand telco quality vs. network quality. Fallout: While Cisco and others are briskly selling IP phones, getting all the infrastructure and staff up to par may take a few more years. Desktop videoconferencing Tag line: Live video to your desktop! Myth: The Internet, IP and H.323 protocols and cheap Webcams will bring about a new era in desktop-videoconferencing applications. Reality: While JenniCam and others have made live video feeds popular, the more mundane office communications,at least between people fully clothed,have lagged behind. H.323 is a rat's nest of complicated and confusing protocols, and standards aren't quite as interoperable as they could be. IP networks aren't always up to the task of delivering full-motion video without hogging all of the network bandwidth. Fallout: Some interesting products and applications have come from all this work, nonetheless, including low-priced video servers that can be used to distribute desktop videos, Web-based videoconferencing/applications-sharing and improvements to multicast IP applications. Client-side Java Tag line: Write once, debug everywhere. Myth: Java will revolutionize the software-development industry by providing a standard programming language that will run on numerous desktop OSs. Reality: Subtle differences in Java runtimes and implementations make this almost impossible. Helping to confound matters is that Java was caught in the crossfire between Sun and Microsoft over which company would control its destiny. Fallout: Some good has come of the whole Java mess, and from an unsuspected direction: the server. Java servlets, small pieces of code that run on top of various server-based processors, have taken off and spawned an entire new industry of Web services and standards. Unified messaging Tag line: Faxes in your e-mail inbox! Myth: Workers will soon be able to use a single inbox to sort through all their communications needs, including e-mail, faxes, voice messages and files. Reality: There are inboxes galore littering the computing landscape: Most of us have multiple e-mail, voicemail and fax addresses that accumulate messages quickly. Trying to sort out these different data types in a single location or service isn't as easy as once thought. Fallout: Well, we do have services such as jFax, eFax and other Web-based fax offerings that came from these efforts, which are popular, effective and useful, especially as the number of junk faxes continues to climb. Internet-based payments Tag line: Sending money has never been easier. Myth: Paying for goods over the Internet is fraught with problems because of the exposure to big, bad hackers and crackers. Reality: This is one of those myths that actually works the other way. There is plenty of technology that can solve this problem, and people are buying stuff over the Internet to the tune of many billions of dollars a year. And the reality is that most Web-based attacks are focused on the content or gaining control of the servers themselves, not intercepting individual transactions. Fallout: eBay now owns PayPal, which has become the preeminent Internet-based payment provider and has largely unified a fractious and confused industry overnight. Firewalls Tag line: Protect and serve. Myth: Any corporation with any sense whatsoever will protect its network resources with a firewall. Reality: Most firewalls don't protect everything and don't operate perfectly. Many have holes that allow all sorts of mischief into the average network. Even without these holes, the firewalls can be easily circumvented with some very easy tricks, such as proxy servers or hacked trusted accounts. Fallout: Better intrusion-detection devices have come to market, and better sharing of attack profiles and techniques that can compromise proxy servers and the like are now available. Windows server security Tag line: Just as secure as Unix. Myth: Microsoft will tighten down the hatches, patches and cracks to make Windows servers as safe and secure for corporations as any other OS. Reality: Windows servers running Microsoft applications have so many security loopholes that exploits are legion, frequent and well-publicized. Fallout: The software community can thank this myth for generating an active industry that keeps track of patches and fixes, to be sure. Desktop Linux Tag line: Better Windows than Windows,cheaper and fun, too! Myth: Linux for the masses, running on your average Intel desktop PC with all the applications that you ever could use, just as long as they don't come from Redmond. Reality: Linux is for servers, not desktops. Getting the right drivers, getting an operating system installed and a graphical interface running, and getting Linux to behave isn't for the faint of heart. Fallout: The Linuxes are getting better at installing themselves, and some corporations have begun to standardize on them for desktops under certain limited circumstances. Secure e-mail Tag line: When you absolutely need privacy in your communications. Myth: E-mail gets transmitted in clear text around the Internet, but it can easily be encrypted to keep prying eyes from reading messages between parties. Reality: Encryption isn't easy. Cryptographic solutions require all sorts of heavy lifting, and getting two e-mail systems to interoperate under these circumstances is more a matter of luck than skill. Fallout: For the most part, secure e-mail is still the pits and still the province of a few techies. But we do have encryption creeping into more and more products: Witness Groove and PKZIP are two examples that include this feature. And e-mail-encryption service providers are beginning to get the ease-of-use message as they deploy their products. [David Strom, VARBusiness] Sent by Nokia 9210i Communicator mail2blog over Vodafone HSD.   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Generating Labels from Web Server OPEN -- Good ways of generating labels from a database on a webserver. As long as you don't mind initially working out a table grid that matches the Avery sheets, use Fop (http://xml.apache.org/fop/index.html). It'll run on just about any modern JVM and turn XML into PDF (and other stuff, but PDF works best). The nice thing about the source files being XML is that it's very easy to do a "plug your data in this end" job. If you set up Acrobat Exchange on their web server, you can schedule a task to run a VBA routine in Access to print to the PDF printer driver. [Dermot McNally and Derek Lawless]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Identity Theft Often an Inside Job Stephen and Chey Cobb -- Society pays huge costs for security breaches related to personal information. The fastest growing crime in America is not drug smuggling or terrorism, but a crime that is increasingly computer-based: identity theft. So says the Federal Trade Commission, the lead agency at the federal level, and many state attorneys general agree. Last week federal prosecutors arrested and charged three people in connection with a scheme to steal the personal financial information of 30,000 Americans. Given that the average cost to a consumer whose identity is stolen is estimated to be more than $6,000, the potential impact of this scheme was over $180m, far bigger than any conventional robbery job. in this case a computer help-desk employee who had access to sensitive passwords from banks and credit companies stole that data and sold it to scam artists, splitting a fee of $60 per name with an accomplice. The theft continued for several years because during that time the passwords were never changed. The economic impact of this category of crime -- which almost always involves some form of computer crime -- is already significant, and looks set to increase. Here's just one example: the identity-theft caseload of the LA County Sheriff's Department was 2,119 cases in 2000, 4,149 in 2001, and will likely exceed 6,000 cases this year. A GAO report earlier this year put the average cost of working ID theft cases at the federal level in the $10,000 to $15,000 range, with prosecutions averaging around $11,000. Exact numbers for ID theft are hard to track down, but one very telling place to look is allegations involving SSN misuse. The GAO reports that these increased more than fivefold, from about 11,000 in fiscal year 1998 to about 65,000 in fiscal year 2001 (about 81% of all allegations of SSN misuse relate directly to identity theft). At the federal level, complaints to the FTC have more than doubled recently (85,820 last year, up from 31,113 in 2000). They are set for more double-digit growth this year (the FTC received 70,000 complaints in the half of 2002). A major reason for this explosion is "a shift by identity thieves from going after single individuals to going after a mass amount of information," according to Joanna Crane, identity-fraud program manager at the Federal Trade Commission, recently quoted in the Washington Post. Not surprisingly she observed: "There's an awful lot of bribery of insiders going on." Lessons learned: Your employees are your biggest threat. Employee access to internal systems needs to be tightly controlled. You can't keep using group logons. Each user must be individually logged on. Group permissions are okay as a way of managing access controls, but the membership of each group must reviewed on a regular basis to make sure only the appropriate individuals are included. Individual passwords upon which permissions and access controls are based must be regularly changed. Personal information (Personally Identifiable Information or PII) is valuable. We now know that the average person's data is worth $60 per head on the street, but that same data could net the buyer many thousands in bank withdrawals, credit card purchases, cash advances and courtesy checks.If your organization has any PII in its computers, it had better make sure it is well protected. The trend in infoseconomics is not to blame the person who sold the PII but to blame the company that didn't do enough to protect the PII from getting stolen. ["Network Security for Dummies" and "Privacy for Business: Web Sites and Email" and ePrivacy Group and Newsscan]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Is Search Engine Optimisation Worth the Bother? GARRINGREEN HOTSPOT --Getting highly placed in search engines can be an exercise in chasing your tail. Focusing on good content organisation and promoting your site within relevant communities, like link exchanges, email marketing lists, or joining a networking group or discussion list and having your URL in your email sig actually delivers more effective site promotion for small businesses.   [Comment on Shoptalk]