The world is getting flatter every day according to Thomas L. Friedman, author of The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. And nowhere is that more apparent than in e-commerce, where you can purchase stuff online, pay for it in whatever coin of the realm you choose, and still get it delivered with instant-gratification speed. Such is the case with M-Tech's very inexpensive, and thus novel, Network Time Protocol (NTP) server, which at $500 is one third the price of the... Read the rest of entry >>
Posted @ 06/30/2005 12:31 PM By Mel Beckman
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At 6:50 p.m. on Tuesday, June 14th a magnitude 7.2 earthquake occured in the deep sea 90 miles off the coast of northern California. Shortly thereafter, the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center issued a Tsunami warning to all residents of coastal California. An hour later, to everyone's relief, the warning was rescinded, as no Tsunami occurred.
Unfortunately, most people knew nothing of the warning until after it was canceled. That's a problem.... Read the rest of entry >>
Posted @ 06/17/2005 10:11 AM By Mel Beckman
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Keeping track of passwords and user IDs is tedious; doing so securely seems almost impossible. Numerous commercial products have pretended to solve the problem, but all that I've seen have fallen short in security, convenience, or both. Bruce Schneier -- a well-known security consultant, author of the classic security tome Applied Cryptography, and the creator of the Blowfish encryption algorithm -- has released to the open-source community his own personal password managagment tool called... Read the rest of entry >>
Posted @ 06/17/2005 9:50 AM By Mel Beckman
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E-commerce authentication is a bugaboo. Users typically log in with just a user ID and password, and these are easily compromised with phishing attacks and password guessers. The result is the current flood of e-commerce fraud and identity theft, which dampens users' enthusiasm for e-commerce and represents a huge liability for e-vendors. One fix to the problem is to use two-factor authentication -- a second credential that a user must supply in order to log into his or her e-commerce account.... Read the rest of entry >>
Posted @ 06/02/2005 9:26 AM By Mel Beckman
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An interesting new product niche for network managers is log management. All of our network devices spew reams of log information, in multiple formats and stored on multiple ancillary systems. These logs must be tended regularly to be useful -- both to detect significant events and to prevent the logs from overflowing available storage. New regulatory requirements -- such as Sarbannes-Oxley and HIPPA -- will likely mandate that we keep these logs on hand for a long time and protect them from... Read the rest of entry >>
Posted @ 06/02/2005 8:45 AM By Mel Beckman
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