April 2004 News
- Gates predicts the demise of the password
- DII is too hot for Lockheed Martin
- Open source good for lawyers
- MS gets hit with EC fine
- Oracle told to keep hands off PeopleSoft
- Dell keeps Rollins along
- BT become more flexible
Gates predicts the demise of the password
The standard user-id / password combination is no longer adequate to protect information or systems. The SecurID two-factor authentication model is used by many large organisations can be brought up to date with smartcard technology. What Bill Gates has highlighted is that the method of user identification has to be addressed to meet the information security requirements. Well done Bill, you have caught up again.DII is too hot for Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin pulled out of the Defence Information Infratructure competition. The reason given was that the consortium including HP, Deloitte Consulting, QinetiQ, SAIC and Unisys could not deliver requirements and still make a profit. Still hanging in are RaDII led by Thales and Atlas led by EDS.
Open source good for lawyers
Legal battles are the biggest problem for the open source future rather than technical problems. It seems strange and worrying that non-technical issues could de-rail the open source train and the idea of low-cost software becoming the latest income stream for the legal community.
Microsoft gets hit with EC fine
The European Commission ruled that MS broke the law "by leveraging its near-monoploy in the market for PC operating systems onto markets for workgroup servers and for media players" - anti-competitive behaviour in clear-speech - and fined them £331M. In addition, MS have been instructed to reveal networking code within 90 days. Microsoft are not likely to take this lying down and have flown Steve Ballmer to Brussels to explain where they have got it wrong. MS will make an appeal, so it could take anything up to 7 years to go through the legal process!!
Oracle told to keep hands off PeopleSoft
The EC have been busy lately and don't seem to like IT companies. They have told Oracle that it objects to the less than friendly takeover of PeopleSoft. Oracle will get a chance to respond to the competition and effect of merger concerns.
Dell keeps Rollins along
In July, Michael
Dell will hand over the reins to Dell's president and COO, Kevin Rollins.
Michael will remain as chairman and will continue to focus more on strategic
initiatives. These changes will coincide with the 20th anniversary of
its foundation. It will still continue the "two-in-a-box" chief
executive office.
BT become more flexible
BT have at last begun to take broadband seriously. They have announced a number of products and services including flexible bandwidth. This will allow users to increase the from 512Kbps to 2Mbps on accasions when a faster down-loading speed is required. Other services include voice calls over the internet and improved service management.
Shorties
- Welsh Windows, Catalan Windows and Gujarati Windows. Its a pity that the dictionary in Word still insists on American English.
- Microsoft has entered the music world with its Portable Media Centre. I'm sure the iPod is recharging its batteries.
- AMD have launched the Athlon 64 FX53 chip that includes a built-in anti-virus chip protection.
- Google launches free e-mail (GMail). It is built upon its search and link capabilities so there will be no need to use folders.
- Telbria wants to deploy meshed wireless telephony systems in rural areas to provide high-speed access where DSL is not available.
- PDA's put business data at risk. The problem is that PDA's don't belong to the business so don't comply with the security rules.
- Apache fix file-handling vulnerability. The hacking technique of writing strings to the error-log without filtering is no more.
- Oracle, IBM and Sun to support J2EE 1.4 (or J2EE with web services). Interestingly BEA Systems who have WebLogic server 8.1 with equivalent API's have said other features are more important. It will be in the next release though.