FRAMINGHAM (10/03/2003) - There are some ugly screens in your applications. Your users know them all too well. They're the screens where users have to copy information with a pencil and paper, or where one wrong keystroke will wipe out 15 minutes of work, or where the application can suddenly freeze for no apparent reason.
FRAMINGHAM (09/25/2003) - What were they thinking? What insanely stupid impulse possessed the people at VeriSign Inc. to hijack the Domain Name System? This is a system built on trust. The U.S. government has entrusted VeriSign with control of root domain name servers. Everyone else has trusted VeriSign to deliver accurate domain name information using well-understood DNS standards.
FRAMINGHAM (09/18/2003) - What do you do about someone like Adrian Lamo? Last week, Lamo turned himself in to U.S. marshals at the federal courthouse in Sacramento, California and was charged with hacking his way into the internal network of The New York Times and running up a US$300,000 bill on the newspaper's LexisNexis database account (QuickLink 41209). At that price, you can understand why the Times wasn't as forgiving as WorldCom, Yahoo and other companies that praised Lamo after he found security holes in their networks and then helped to fix them for free.
Enough with the name-calling already! "Rogue IT" — cases where users have launched their own IT projects without inviting the IT department to the party — doesn't deserve that insulting name. Rogue implies that these users are unprincipled scoundrels or at least way out of line when they do IT themselves.
Bugbear. Klez. Sobig -- that's the one that appears to come from Microsoft.com. This (northern) summer, the virus hits just keep coming. It's as if, for the past month, the virus world has been softening us up for Microsoft Corp.'s announcement last week that it's getting into the antivirus business.
There's supposed to be plenty of good news to go around in the "2003 IT Workforce Survey" released recently by the Information Technology Association of America.
How bad is the IT burnout problem? Pretty bad. Next week, Meta Group will issue a report that says 71% of IT managers surveyed believe employee burnout is a serious issue in their organisations.
Here's a new number to keep in mind for when you're thinking about ROI: $US1.65 million. That's how much each of five Wall Street investment houses will pay as part of a settlement announced with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, stemming from their inadequate systems for archiving old email messages.
On Thursday afternoon, October 24, Swedish software vendor Intentia International uploaded its financial results to its web server more than an hour before the company was scheduled to announce them officially.
While the New Zealand IT sector is anxiously awaiting new laws outlawing hacking and allowing digital signatures, Americans are anxious about another legislative initiative. UCITA, the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act, is a proposed law that would allow vendors to cripple software by remote control, sue users wherever they please and prevent anyone from reporting on software performance. Computerworld US’ Frank Hayes reports that after version one of the law was widely pilloried, a revision released a fortnight ago is only slightly more palatable.
There are bad ideas, and then there are really awful ideas. Example of a bad idea: the proposed uniform state law called the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA), with its "self-help" provision that lets vendors remotely sabotage software you've bought if they believe you're not conforming to their licence terms. That one is such a stinker that three states have actually outlawed UCITA provisions from being enforced.
Will your IT shop survive these budget-slashing, outsource-everything days?
Yesterday marked day 30 since the Nimda.e worm showed up on the internet. Microsoft and a few of its security cronies would have us believe that 30 days is about the right amount of time for everyone to shut up about any particular security vulnerability.
The trouble with talking about the Microsoft antitrust settlement is that everything keeps changing.
So who won? Who lost? Hewlett-Packard Co.'s planned purchase of Compaq Computer Corp. is a gamble -- and we won't see the ultimate results for years. A lot could change in the time it will take for HP and Compaq to gain regulatory approval, complete their merger and rationalize product lines and sales strategies. Technology, the economy and the marketplace could shift dramatically along the way.