Reactions to story from InfoWorld
Comcast sets monthly bandwidth limit for customers
http://www.infoworld.com/ article/ 08/ 08/ 29/ Comcast_sets_monthly_bandwidth_limit_f...
Comcast, the largest provider of cable-based broadband service in the U.S., will limit residential customers to 250GB of bandwidth a month beginning Oct. 1, the company announced late Thursday.
Reactions / posts that link to this article
View all reactions »-
The three business tech risks you don't know about
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=htt...Business travelers will soon need to carry the name of their corporate lawyer in addition to their passport when returning home to the United States, and they may need to bring with them a different business laptop as well. This is because U.S. Customs can search and confiscate your laptop without any prior cause, according to policies that have been posted online since a Ninth U.S. Circuit Court ruling in April. Alice Stitelman, a consultant who writes about e-mail usage and legal matters, says this is just one example of "what you don't know about legal computer issues [that] can hurt you. Many business users mistakenly believe that their data is private -- whether it is on their laptop, cell phone, or mobile device. In fact, they should have no expectation of privacy. Users have much less control over who reads their data than they may realize." There are other examples of new regulations and policies that will have a profound impact on business technology policy in the coming years. As legal battles over content filtering, Net neutrality, tracking Web history, and laptop searches ensue, corporate IT managers will need to rethink their strategies on how they implement cloud computing, formulate their e-discovery and records retention policies, and safeguard business data carried by traveling executives using various mobile devices. Confiscated laptops: Time to revise data access strategies for execs The Department of Homeland Security has reaffirmed its policy that lets it search, copy, or even impound your employees' laptops when they return to the United States. This is completely at the security screeners' discretion, and applies to anyone entering the country -- citizens and noncitizens alike. Security consultant Jeff Bardin, writing on the CSO Online blog, calls it a "virtual strip search" and cautions somewhat facetiously, "I'd best not forget to take the microdot off the woolly boogers that collect in my pockets." But all kidding aside, this policy is very much a reality and not just for the tin-hat paranoids. "It definitely has been happening more and more recently, and we have gotten lots of complaints," says Danny O'Brien, the international outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group. "A CEO I know was detained and his computer's hard drive was copied and returned," says David Burg, a principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers' advisory and forensics practice. As a result, his client's company has changed its practice, so "employees aren't allowed to travel outside their home countries with their standard-issue laptops," he says. Instead, they are issued bare-bones laptops that have very little corporate data and use VPNs to communicate securely back to their offices. Other countries are also randomly inspecting laptops: "Canada has been looking for child pornography on laptops entering their country," says John Pescatore, a Gartner security analyst and a former security engineer for the U.S. Secret Service. "It is hard for anyone to argue against that." And as more countries claim the right to copy or confiscate laptops -- or, worse, to install monitoring software -- soon this idea of having a "travel laptop" will become more common practice so that sensitive corporate data is left behind. "Given that the majority of corporate PCs are laptops now, your data is now more vulnerable," says the EFF's O'Brien. "You might want to consider limiting the data on your laptop to what you are willing to share with the government," says Kevin Clark, network operations manager of Clearpointe, a managed services provider. "I would never travel with any data that I cared about anyway," says John Kindervag, a senior analyst for Forrester Research. "I would put it on my iPod or encrypt it." Certainly, "you should have been encrypting the hard drives of your laptops; these are just more reasons to do so," says Gartner's Pescatore. But using encryption is no guarantee that the government won't obtain your employee's data, according to legal authorities, especially if a security screener demands your password to decrypt your files. "We would say that you have some strong protections against giving out your password, and believe that falls under self-incrimination," says the EFF's O'Brien. Other lawyers agree that requiring users to give up their passwords to the government could fall under the category of unreasonable searches that the courts have long ruled are impermissible, but they note that overall case law is still evolving, so there's no hard-and-fast rule to rely on. "A lot of this is just security theater," says Forrester's Kindervag, meaning it's just for show. He was detained -- although not at an airport -- and "I stood my ground and refused to give up my data, and eventually the screener backed down." Clearly, one prudent course of action is to have ready access to legal counsel when returning to the United States. If your execs' laptops are impounded, you have several critical issues to address. First, do you have the executives' data backed up so that you can get them up and running quickly on new computers? Second, is sensitive data protected from prying eyes -- whether bored screeners or investigating authorities? This is where having the cleaned "travel laptop" begins to sound compelling. Finally, does this change your corporate policies on other mobile devices besides laptops, such as smartphones and PDAs that often have all sorts of personal and customer confidential information on them? Net neutrality: Carrier controls could limit remote work and cloud computing The topic of Net neutrality also has unintended consequence for IT managers. The concept of Net neutrality is that all Internet traffic should be treated the same and not prioritized (in terms of service or price) by the carriers. The carriers have justified non-neutral traffic management, such as metering and blocking, as necessary because of a few people who continually access large video files or play bandwidth-intensive games. The carriers argue this traffic fills their networks and gets in the way of everyone else's access to the Internet. They also cite the rise of peer-to-peer sharing of music and video files, which the entertainment industry says is a form of theft. But in a Net neutrality case involving Comcast, the Federal Trade Commission recently ruled that Comcast can't entirely block peer-to-per file sharing traffic, at least not without prior notification to its customers. The FTC's concerns were based on how such controls might limit the overall Internet access marketplace and lead to possibly monopolist practices by carriers as their policies favored certain types of usage or providers. Businesses had more immediate concerns about Comcast's actions since it affected their home-based workers. "Comcast, in trying to block BitTorrent, inadvertently was also blocking some Lotus Notes traffic," says the EFF's O'Brien. And at least one Canadian ISP has had a peer traffic block that also affected business-related traffic. The ruling has major implications for distributed corporate workforces and on the projected greater reliance on cloud computing and Web-based services and applications in the coming years. As more businesses make use of Internet-based services and store more of their data in the cloud, the assumption is that this data is universally accessible no matter where a user is located and no matter what provider is used to get online. That may not be an assumption businesses can count on. The FTC ruling was not conclusive, and Comcast has appealed, so the door is still open to carriers controlling traffic that passes through them to the Internet. And other countries -- such as China and Saudi Arabia -- already block and regulate Internet traffic, so global companies may face this issue even if the United States ends up supporting Net neutrality. And Comcast continues to find ways to regulate Internet access. After the FTC ruled against controlling peer-to-peer traffic specifically, Comcast decided to place a blanket cap of 250GB of data usage per month per residential account. The FTC action was not the only place where federal policymakers have shown concern over carriers' actions or possible actions to regulate Internet traffic. Last month, FCC commissioner Robert McDowell asked AT&T Wireless to provide the information on its peer-to-peer policy during a recent hearing tied to broadband issues. Although AT&T doesn't block peer-to-peer traffic today across its wireless network, there is concern that it and other major carriers may do so in the future. In the meantime, businesses can see what their carriers are doing to Internet traffic to find out if it hinders business and employee access to the Internet. The EFF has developed a test tool called Switzerland that shows what ports a provider is blocking. And it recommends that IT use its purchasing power to make the carriers come clean on what they are controlling, O'Brien recommends: "Anyone who signs up a new provider should consider adding a clause to their contracts about service level agreements that should hold the provider to any transparency about what network management and blocks that they are doing." Privacy and Web history: Is your corporate information actually confidential? Earlier this summer, senior members of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee wrote to broadband Internet providers and other online companies, asking whether they have "tailored, or facilitated the tailoring of, Internet advertising based on consumers' Internet search, surfing, or other use." Although seemingly a consumer issue, this inquiry also raises issues over what is being monitored by corporate users outside of the corporate infrastructure, and whether this will become a legal liability later on if this information is subpoenaed by a court. Within the enterprise, many companies use end-point scanning technology, Web security gateways, and other tools to view what is stored on and transmitted through their employees' PCs when they are on the corporate network. But remote offices and traveling users may not be required to access the Internet through that network. So company-confidential information may be accessible by outsiders. Or consider the implications of smartphones with integrated GPS or other location-detection capabilities. "Given that Google Maps can triangulate your location at any given point in time, imagine if I, as a forensic investigator, can use that data to track your movements as part of an investigation or in connection with discovery related to a legal proceeding," says PricewaterhouseCoopers' Burg. Other risks include the use of external threat-detection services, in which your e-mail and other traffic passes through their services to be scanned for data leaks. Who has access to the results of the scans? More likely is the risk of na?ve user actions, such as sending files to their personal e-mail accounts so that they can work on a project at home, or inadvertently posting confidential information and business contacts on social networks. For example, Google scans all e-mail sent through its Gmail system so that it can target ads, and its beta Chrome browser's terms of service give Google nonexclusive ownership of all content that passes through its browsers. Employees that use Gmail or Chrome could be putting corporate information into an outsider's hands. And LinkedIn, for example, now aggressively promotes a contact-import feature when you log in, making it easy for employees to upload business contacts outside the corporate system. Gartner's Pescatore asks, "Are you checking up on what your employees are doing with their laptops, even when they are outside of the corporate network? You need to know what your employees are doing when they are online." One possibility is to insist on a service level agreement from your Internet providers that cover privacy issues. "I want SLAs from my Internet providers that guarantee me that my e-mail isn't going to be compromised. These agreements aren't about uptime, but for the purposes of privacy and security. I want secure and assured services, including the ability to browse and search the Web without having this information recorded on a server somewhere. I don't think a lot of people are doing this right now," says David O'Berry, director of Information Technology Systems and Services for the South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole, and Pardon Services. He blocks access to peer-to-peer file-sharing sites and others that could compromise his network security. Another solution is to segregate Internet users from those who have access to customer data. "We have taken the stance that if an employee doesn't need the Internet to do his or her job, that computer won't have access of any kind. Those with Web access don't store medical data," says Tony Maro, CIO at HCR Imaging, which processes medical scans and is subject to the strict HIPAA privacy regulations for health care. Clearly, the legal landscape is shifting with respect to individual computing. But the implications reach far beyond the individual and into corporate IT. Technology managers need to consider these and other regulations and adjust their computing policies to ensure that they can deliver IT services in the shifting landscape.
-
The three business tech risks you don't know about
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=htt...Business travelers will soon need to carry the name of their corporate lawyer in addition to their passport when returning home to the United States, and they may need to bring with them a different business laptop as well. This is because U.S. Customs can search and confiscate your laptop without any prior cause, according to policies that have been posted online since a Ninth U.S. Circuit Court ruling in April. Alice Stitelman, a consultant who writes about e-mail usage and legal matters, says this is just one example of "what you don't know about legal computer issues [that] can hurt you. Many business users mistakenly believe that their data is private -- whether it is on their laptop, cell phone, or mobile device. In fact, they should have no expectation of privacy. Users have much less control over who reads their data than they may realize." There are other examples of new regulations and policies that will have a profound impact on business technology policy in the coming years. As legal battles over content filtering, Net neutrality, tracking Web history, and laptop searches ensue, corporate IT managers will need to rethink their strategies on how they implement cloud computing, formulate their e-discovery and records retention policies, and safeguard business data carried by traveling executives using various mobile devices. Confiscated laptops: Time to revise data access strategies for execs The Department of Homeland Security has reaffirmed its policy that lets it search, copy, or even impound your employees' laptops when they return to the United States. This is completely at the security screeners' discretion, and applies to anyone entering the country -- citizens and noncitizens alike. Security consultant Jeff Bardin, writing on the CSO Online blog, calls it a "virtual strip search" and cautions somewhat facetiously, "I'd best not forget to take the microdot off the woolly boogers that collect in my pockets." But all kidding aside, this policy is very much a reality and not just for the tin-hat paranoids. "It definitely has been happening more and more recently, and we have gotten lots of complaints," says Danny O'Brien, the international outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group. "A CEO I know was detained and his computer's hard drive was copied and returned," says David Burg, a principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers' advisory and forensics practice. As a result, his client's company has changed its practice, so "employees aren't allowed to travel outside their home countries with their standard-issue laptops," he says. Instead, they are issued bare-bones laptops that have very little corporate data and use VPNs to communicate securely back to their offices. Other countries are also randomly inspecting laptops: "Canada has been looking for child pornography on laptops entering their country," says John Pescatore, a Gartner security analyst and a former security engineer for the U.S. Secret Service. "It is hard for anyone to argue against that." And as more countries claim the right to copy or confiscate laptops -- or, worse, to install monitoring software -- soon this idea of having a "travel laptop" will become more common practice so that sensitive corporate data is left behind. "Given that the majority of corporate PCs are laptops now, your data is now more vulnerable," says the EFF's O'Brien. "You might want to consider limiting the data on your laptop to what you are willing to share with the government," says Kevin Clark, network operations manager of Clearpointe, a managed services provider. "I would never travel with any data that I cared about anyway," says John Kindervag, a senior analyst for Forrester Research. "I would put it on my iPod or encrypt it." Certainly, "you should have been encrypting the hard drives of your laptops; these are just more reasons to do so," says Gartner's Pescatore. But using encryption is no guarantee that the government won't obtain your employee's data, according to legal authorities, especially if a security screener demands your password to decrypt your files. "We would say that you have some strong protections against giving out your password, and believe that falls under self-incrimination," says the EFF's O'Brien. Other lawyers agree that requiring users to give up their passwords to the government could fall under the category of unreasonable searches that the courts have long ruled are impermissible, but they note that overall case law is still evolving, so there's no hard-and-fast rule to rely on. "A lot of this is just security theater," says Forrester's Kindervag, meaning it's just for show. He was detained -- although not at an airport -- and "I stood my ground and refused to give up my data, and eventually the screener backed down." Clearly, one prudent course of action is to have ready access to legal counsel when returning to the United States. If your execs' laptops are impounded, you have several critical issues to address. First, do you have the executives' data backed up so that you can get them up and running quickly on new computers? Second, is sensitive data protected from prying eyes -- whether bored screeners or investigating authorities? This is where having the cleaned "travel laptop" begins to sound compelling. Finally, does this change your corporate policies on other mobile devices besides laptops, such as smartphones and PDAs that often have all sorts of personal and customer confidential information on them? Net neutrality: Carrier controls could limit remote work and cloud computing The topic of Net neutrality also has unintended consequence for IT managers. The concept of Net neutrality is that all Internet traffic should be treated the same and not prioritized (in terms of service or price) by the carriers. The carriers have justified non-neutral traffic management, such as metering and blocking, as necessary because of a few people who continually access large video files or play bandwidth-intensive games. The carriers argue this traffic fills their networks and gets in the way of everyone else's access to the Internet. They also cite the rise of peer-to-peer sharing of music and video files, which the entertainment industry says is a form of theft. But in a Net neutrality case involving Comcast, the Federal Trade Commission recently ruled that Comcast can't entirely block peer-to-per file sharing traffic, at least not without prior notification to its customers. The FTC's concerns were based on how such controls might limit the overall Internet access marketplace and lead to possibly monopolist practices by carriers as their policies favored certain types of usage or providers. Businesses had more immediate concerns about Comcast's actions since it affected their home-based workers. "Comcast, in trying to block BitTorrent, inadvertently was also blocking some Lotus Notes traffic," says the EFF's O'Brien. And at least one Canadian ISP has had a peer traffic block that also affected business-related traffic. The ruling has major implications for distributed corporate workforces and on the projected greater reliance on cloud computing and Web-based services and applications in the coming years. As more businesses make use of Internet-based services and store more of their data in the cloud, the assumption is that this data is universally accessible no matter where a user is located and no matter what provider is used to get online. That may not be an assumption businesses can count on. The FTC ruling was not conclusive, and Comcast has appealed, so the door is still open to carriers controlling traffic that passes through them to the Internet. And other countries -- such as China and Saudi Arabia -- already block and regulate Internet traffic, so global companies may face this issue even if the United States ends up supporting Net neutrality. And Comcast continues to find ways to regulate Internet access. After the FTC ruled against controlling peer-to-peer traffic specifically, Comcast decided to place a blanket cap of 250GB of data usage per month per residential account. The FTC action was not the only place where federal policymakers have shown concern over carriers' actions or possible actions to regulate Internet traffic. Last month, FCC commissioner Robert McDowell asked AT&T Wireless to provide the information on its peer-to-peer policy during a recent hearing tied to broadband issues. Although AT&T doesn't block peer-to-peer traffic today across its wireless network, there is concern that it and other major carriers may do so in the future. In the meantime, businesses can see what their carriers are doing to Internet traffic to find out if it hinders business and employee access to the Internet. The EFF has developed a test tool called Switzerland that shows what ports a provider is blocking. And it recommends that IT use its purchasing power to make the carriers come clean on what they are controlling, O'Brien recommends: "Anyone who signs up a new provider should consider adding a clause to their contracts about service level agreements that should hold the provider to any transparency about what network management and blocks that they are doing." Privacy and Web history: Is your corporate information actually confidential? Earlier this summer, senior members of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee wrote to broadband Internet providers and other online companies, asking whether they have "tailored, or facilitated the tailoring of, Internet advertising based on consumers' Internet search, surfing, or other use." Although seemingly a consumer issue, this inquiry also raises issues over what is being monitored by corporate users outside of the corporate infrastructure, and whether this will become a legal liability later on if this information is subpoenaed by a court. Within the enterprise, many companies use end-point scanning technology, Web security gateways, and other tools to view what is stored on and transmitted through their employees' PCs when they are on the corporate network. But remote offices and traveling users may not be required to access the Internet through that network. So company-confidential information may be accessible by outsiders. Or consider the implications of smartphones with integrated GPS or other location-detection capabilities. "Given that Google Maps can triangulate your location at any given point in time, imagine if I, as a forensic investigator, can use that data to track your movements as part of an investigation or in connection with discovery related to a legal proceeding," says PricewaterhouseCoopers' Burg. Other risks include the use of external threat-detection services, in which your e-mail and other traffic passes through their services to be scanned for data leaks. Who has access to the results of the scans? More likely is the risk of na?ve user actions, such as sending files to their personal e-mail accounts so that they can work on a project at home, or inadvertently posting confidential information and business contacts on social networks. For example, Google scans all e-mail sent through its Gmail system so that it can target ads, and its beta Chrome browser's terms of service give Google nonexclusive ownership of all content that passes through its browsers. Employees that use Gmail or Chrome could be putting corporate information into an outsider's hands. And LinkedIn, for example, now aggressively promotes a contact-import feature when you log in, making it easy for employees to upload business contacts outside the corporate system. Gartner's Pescatore asks, "Are you checking up on what your employees are doing with their laptops, even when they are outside of the corporate network? You need to know what your employees are doing when they are online." One possibility is to insist on a service level agreement from your Internet providers that cover privacy issues. "I want SLAs from my Internet providers that guarantee me that my e-mail isn't going to be compromised. These agreements aren't about uptime, but for the purposes of privacy and security. I want secure and assured services, including the ability to browse and search the Web without having this information recorded on a server somewhere. I don't think a lot of people are doing this right now," says David O'Berry, director of Information Technology Systems and Services for the South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole, and Pardon Services. He blocks access to peer-to-peer file-sharing sites and others that could compromise his network security. Another solution is to segregate Internet users from those who have access to customer data. "We have taken the stance that if an employee doesn't need the Internet to do his or her job, that computer won't have access of any kind. Those with Web access don't store medical data," says Tony Maro, CIO at HCR Imaging, which processes medical scans and is subject to the strict HIPAA privacy regulations for health care. Clearly, the legal landscape is shifting with respect to individual computing. But the implications reach far beyond the individual and into corporate IT. Technology managers need to consider these and other regulations and adjust their computing policies to ensure that they can deliver IT services in the shifting landscape.
-
The three business tech risks you don't know about
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=htt...Business travelers will soon need to carry the name of their corporate lawyer in addition to their passport when returning home to the United States, and they may need to bring with them a different business laptop as well. This is because U.S. Customs can search and confiscate your laptop without any prior cause, according to policies that have been posted online since a Ninth U.S. Circuit Court ruling in April. Alice Stitelman, a consultant who writes about e-mail usage and legal matters, says this is just one example of "what you don't know about legal computer issues [that] can hurt you. Many business users mistakenly believe that their data is private -- whether it is on their laptop, cell phone, or mobile device. In fact, they should have no expectation of privacy. Users have much less control over who reads their data than they may realize." There are other examples of new regulations and policies that will have a profound impact on business technology policy in the coming years. As legal battles over content filtering, Net neutrality, tracking Web history, and laptop searches ensue, corporate IT managers will need to rethink their strategies on how they implement cloud computing, formulate their e-discovery and records retention policies, and safeguard business data carried by traveling executives using various mobile devices. Confiscated laptops: Time to revise data access strategies for execs The Department of Homeland Security has reaffirmed its policy that lets it search, copy, or even impound your employees' laptops when they return to the United States. This is completely at the security screeners' discretion, and applies to anyone entering the country -- citizens and noncitizens alike. Security consultant Jeff Bardin, writing on the CSO Online blog, calls it a "virtual strip search" and cautions somewhat facetiously, "I'd best not forget to take the microdot off the woolly boogers that collect in my pockets." But all kidding aside, this policy is very much a reality and not just for the tin-hat paranoids. "It definitely has been happening more and more recently, and we have gotten lots of complaints," says Danny O'Brien, the international outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group. "A CEO I know was detained and his computer's hard drive was copied and returned," says David Burg, a principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers' advisory and forensics practice. As a result, his client's company has changed its practice, so "employees aren't allowed to travel outside their home countries with their standard-issue laptops," he says. Instead, they are issued bare-bones laptops that have very little corporate data and use VPNs to communicate securely back to their offices. Other countries are also randomly inspecting laptops: "Canada has been looking for child pornography on laptops entering their country," says John Pescatore, a Gartner security analyst and a former security engineer for the U.S. Secret Service. "It is hard for anyone to argue against that." And as more countries claim the right to copy or confiscate laptops -- or, worse, to install monitoring software -- soon this idea of having a "travel laptop" will become more common practice so that sensitive corporate data is left behind. "Given that the majority of corporate PCs are laptops now, your data is now more vulnerable," says the EFF's O'Brien. "You might want to consider limiting the data on your laptop to what you are willing to share with the government," says Kevin Clark, network operations manager of Clearpointe, a managed services provider. "I would never travel with any data that I cared about anyway," says John Kindervag, a senior analyst for Forrester Research. "I would put it on my iPod or encrypt it." Certainly, "you should have been encrypting the hard drives of your laptops; these are just more reasons to do so," says Gartner's Pescatore. But using encryption is no guarantee that the government won't obtain your employee's data, according to legal authorities, especially if a security screener demands your password to decrypt your files. "We would say that you have some strong protections against giving out your password, and believe that falls under self-incrimination," says the EFF's O'Brien. Other lawyers agree that requiring users to give up their passwords to the government could fall under the category of unreasonable searches that the courts have long ruled are impermissible, but they note that overall case law is still evolving, so there's no hard-and-fast rule to rely on. "A lot of this is just security theater," says Forrester's Kindervag, meaning it's just for show. He was detained -- although not at an airport -- and "I stood my ground and refused to give up my data, and eventually the screener backed down." Clearly, one prudent course of action is to have ready access to legal counsel when returning to the United States. If your execs' laptops are impounded, you have several critical issues to address. First, do you have the executives' data backed up so that you can get them up and running quickly on new computers? Second, is sensitive data protected from prying eyes -- whether bored screeners or investigating authorities? This is where having the cleaned "travel laptop" begins to sound compelling. Finally, does this change your corporate policies on other mobile devices besides laptops, such as smartphones and PDAs that often have all sorts of personal and customer confidential information on them? Net neutrality: Carrier controls could limit remote work and cloud computing The topic of Net neutrality also has unintended consequence for IT managers. The concept of Net neutrality is that all Internet traffic should be treated the same and not prioritized (in terms of service or price) by the carriers. The carriers have justified non-neutral traffic management, such as metering and blocking, as necessary because of a few people who continually access large video files or play bandwidth-intensive games. The carriers argue this traffic fills their networks and gets in the way of everyone else's access to the Internet. They also cite the rise of peer-to-peer sharing of music and video files, which the entertainment industry says is a form of theft. But in a Net neutrality case involving Comcast, the Federal Trade Commission recently ruled that Comcast can't entirely block peer-to-per file sharing traffic, at least not without prior notification to its customers. The FTC's concerns were based on how such controls might limit the overall Internet access marketplace and lead to possibly monopolist practices by carriers as their policies favored certain types of usage or providers. Businesses had more immediate concerns about Comcast's actions since it affected their home-based workers. "Comcast, in trying to block BitTorrent, inadvertently was also blocking some Lotus Notes traffic," says the EFF's O'Brien. And at least one Canadian ISP has had a peer traffic block that also affected business-related traffic. The ruling has major implications for distributed corporate workforces and on the projected greater reliance on cloud computing and Web-based services and applications in the coming years. As more businesses make use of Internet-based services and store more of their data in the cloud, the assumption is that this data is universally accessible no matter where a user is located and no matter what provider is used to get online. That may not be an assumption businesses can count on. The FTC ruling was not conclusive, and Comcast has appealed, so the door is still open to carriers controlling traffic that passes through them to the Internet. And other countries -- such as China and Saudi Arabia -- already block and regulate Internet traffic, so global companies may face this issue even if the United States ends up supporting Net neutrality. And Comcast continues to find ways to regulate Internet access. After the FTC ruled against controlling peer-to-peer traffic specifically, Comcast decided to place a blanket cap of 250GB of data usage per month per residential account. The FTC action was not the only place where federal policymakers have shown concern over carriers' actions or possible actions to regulate Internet traffic. Last month, FCC commissioner Robert McDowell asked AT&T Wireless to provide the information on its peer-to-peer policy during a recent hearing tied to broadband issues. Although AT&T doesn't block peer-to-peer traffic today across its wireless network, there is concern that it and other major carriers may do so in the future. In the meantime, businesses can see what their carriers are doing to Internet traffic to find out if it hinders business and employee access to the Internet. The EFF has developed a test tool called Switzerland that shows what ports a provider is blocking. And it recommends that IT use its purchasing power to make the carriers come clean on what they are controlling, O'Brien recommends: "Anyone who signs up a new provider should consider adding a clause to their contracts about service level agreements that should hold the provider to any transparency about what network management and blocks that they are doing." Privacy and Web history: Is your corporate information actually confidential? Earlier this summer, senior members of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee wrote to broadband Internet providers and other online companies, asking whether they have "tailored, or facilitated the tailoring of, Internet advertising based on consumers' Internet search, surfing, or other use." Although seemingly a consumer issue, this inquiry also raises issues over what is being monitored by corporate users outside of the corporate infrastructure, and whether this will become a legal liability later on if this information is subpoenaed by a court. Within the enterprise, many companies use end-point scanning technology, Web security gateways, and other tools to view what is stored on and transmitted through their employees' PCs when they are on the corporate network. But remote offices and traveling users may not be required to access the Internet through that network. So company-confidential information may be accessible by outsiders. Or consider the implications of smartphones with integrated GPS or other location-detection capabilities. "Given that Google Maps can triangulate your location at any given point in time, imagine if I, as a forensic investigator, can use that data to track your movements as part of an investigation or in connection with discovery related to a legal proceeding," says PricewaterhouseCoopers' Burg. Other risks include the use of external threat-detection services, in which your e-mail and other traffic passes through their services to be scanned for data leaks. Who has access to the results of the scans? More likely is the risk of na?ve user actions, such as sending files to their personal e-mail accounts so that they can work on a project at home, or inadvertently posting confidential information and business contacts on social networks. For example, Google scans all e-mail sent through its Gmail system so that it can target ads, and its beta Chrome browser's terms of service give Google nonexclusive ownership of all content that passes through its browsers. Employees that use Gmail or Chrome could be putting corporate information into an outsider's hands. And LinkedIn, for example, now aggressively promotes a contact-import feature when you log in, making it easy for employees to upload business contacts outside the corporate system. Gartner's Pescatore asks, "Are you checking up on what your employees are doing with their laptops, even when they are outside of the corporate network? You need to know what your employees are doing when they are online." One possibility is to insist on a service level agreement from your Internet providers that cover privacy issues. "I want SLAs from my Internet providers that guarantee me that my e-mail isn't going to be compromised. These agreements aren't about uptime, but for the purposes of privacy and security. I want secure and assured services, including the ability to browse and search the Web without having this information recorded on a server somewhere. I don't think a lot of people are doing this right now," says David O'Berry, director of Information Technology Systems and Services for the South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole, and Pardon Services. He blocks access to peer-to-peer file-sharing sites and others that could compromise his network security. Another solution is to segregate Internet users from those who have access to customer data. "We have taken the stance that if an employee doesn't need the Internet to do his or her job, that computer won't have access of any kind. Those with Web access don't store medical data," says Tony Maro, CIO at HCR Imaging, which processes medical scans and is subject to the strict HIPAA privacy regulations for health care. Clearly, the legal landscape is shifting with respect to individual computing. But the implications reach far beyond the individual and into corporate IT. Technology managers need to consider these and other regulations and adjust their computing policies to ensure that they can deliver IT services in the shifting landscape.
-
The three business tech risks you don't know about
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=htt...Business travelers will soon need to carry the name of their corporate lawyer in addition to their passport when returning home to the United States, and they may need to bring with them a different business laptop as well. This is because U.S. Customs can search and confiscate your laptop without any prior cause, according to policies that have been posted online since a Ninth U.S. Circuit Court ruling in April. Alice Stitelman, a consultant who writes about e-mail usage and legal matters, says this is just one example of "what you don't know about legal computer issues [that] can hurt you. Many business users mistakenly believe that their data is private -- whether it is on their laptop, cell phone, or mobile device. In fact, they should have no expectation of privacy. Users have much less control over who reads their data than they may realize." There are other examples of new regulations and policies that will have a profound impact on business technology policy in the coming years. As legal battles over content filtering, Net neutrality, tracking Web history, and laptop searches ensue, corporate IT managers will need to rethink their strategies on how they implement cloud computing, formulate their e-discovery and records retention policies, and safeguard business data carried by traveling executives using various mobile devices. Confiscated laptops: Time to revise data access strategies for execs The Department of Homeland Security has reaffirmed its policy that lets it search, copy, or even impound your employees' laptops when they return to the United States. This is completely at the security screeners' discretion, and applies to anyone entering the country -- citizens and noncitizens alike. Security consultant Jeff Bardin, writing on the CSO Online blog, calls it a "virtual strip search" and cautions somewhat facetiously, "I'd best not forget to take the microdot off the woolly boogers that collect in my pockets." But all kidding aside, this policy is very much a reality and not just for the tin-hat paranoids. "It definitely has been happening more and more recently, and we have gotten lots of complaints," says Danny O'Brien, the international outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group. "A CEO I know was detained and his computer's hard drive was copied and returned," says David Burg, a principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers' advisory and forensics practice. As a result, his client's company has changed its practice, so "employees aren't allowed to travel outside their home countries with their standard-issue laptops," he says. Instead, they are issued bare-bones laptops that have very little corporate data and use VPNs to communicate securely back to their offices. Other countries are also randomly inspecting laptops: "Canada has been looking for child pornography on laptops entering their country," says John Pescatore, a Gartner security analyst and a former security engineer for the U.S. Secret Service. "It is hard for anyone to argue against that." And as more countries claim the right to copy or confiscate laptops -- or, worse, to install monitoring software -- soon this idea of having a "travel laptop" will become more common practice so that sensitive corporate data is left behind. "Given that the majority of corporate PCs are laptops now, your data is now more vulnerable," says the EFF's O'Brien. "You might want to consider limiting the data on your laptop to what you are willing to share with the government," says Kevin Clark, network operations manager of Clearpointe, a managed services provider. "I would never travel with any data that I cared about anyway," says John Kindervag, a senior analyst for Forrester Research. "I would put it on my iPod or encrypt it." Certainly, "you should have been encrypting the hard drives of your laptops; these are just more reasons to do so," says Gartner's Pescatore. But using encryption is no guarantee that the government won't obtain your employee's data, according to legal authorities, especially if a security screener demands your password to decrypt your files. "We would say that you have some strong protections against giving out your password, and believe that falls under self-incrimination," says the EFF's O'Brien. Other lawyers agree that requiring users to give up their passwords to the government could fall under the category of unreasonable searches that the courts have long ruled are impermissible, but they note that overall case law is still evolving, so there's no hard-and-fast rule to rely on. "A lot of this is just security theater," says Forrester's Kindervag, meaning it's just for show. He was detained -- although not at an airport -- and "I stood my ground and refused to give up my data, and eventually the screener backed down." Clearly, one prudent course of action is to have ready access to legal counsel when returning to the United States. If your execs' laptops are impounded, you have several critical issues to address. First, do you have the executives' data backed up so that you can get them up and running quickly on new computers? Second, is sensitive data protected from prying eyes -- whether bored screeners or investigating authorities? This is where having the cleaned "travel laptop" begins to sound compelling. Finally, does this change your corporate policies on other mobile devices besides laptops, such as smartphones and PDAs that often have all sorts of personal and customer confidential information on them? Net neutrality: Carrier controls could limit remote work and cloud computing The topic of Net neutrality also has unintended consequence for IT managers. The concept of Net neutrality is that all Internet traffic should be treated the same and not prioritized (in terms of service or price) by the carriers. The carriers have justified non-neutral traffic management, such as metering and blocking, as necessary because of a few people who continually access large video files or play bandwidth-intensive games. The carriers argue this traffic fills their networks and gets in the way of everyone else's access to the Internet. They also cite the rise of peer-to-peer sharing of music and video files, which the entertainment industry says is a form of theft. But in a Net neutrality case involving Comcast, the Federal Trade Commission recently ruled that Comcast can't entirely block peer-to-per file sharing traffic, at least not without prior notification to its customers. The FTC's concerns were based on how such controls might limit the overall Internet access marketplace and lead to possibly monopolist practices by carriers as their policies favored certain types of usage or providers. Businesses had more immediate concerns about Comcast's actions since it affected their home-based workers. "Comcast, in trying to block BitTorrent, inadvertently was also blocking some Lotus Notes traffic," says the EFF's O'Brien. And at least one Canadian ISP has had a peer traffic block that also affected business-related traffic. The ruling has major implications for distributed corporate workforces and on the projected greater reliance on cloud computing and Web-based services and applications in the coming years. As more businesses make use of Internet-based services and store more of their data in the cloud, the assumption is that this data is universally accessible no matter where a user is located and no matter what provider is used to get online. That may not be an assumption businesses can count on. The FTC ruling was not conclusive, and Comcast has appealed, so the door is still open to carriers controlling traffic that passes through them to the Internet. And other countries -- such as China and Saudi Arabia -- already block and regulate Internet traffic, so global companies may face this issue even if the United States ends up supporting Net neutrality. And Comcast continues to find ways to regulate Internet access. After the FTC ruled against controlling peer-to-peer traffic specifically, Comcast decided to place a blanket cap of 250GB of data usage per month per residential account. The FTC action was not the only place where federal policymakers have shown concern over carriers' actions or possible actions to regulate Internet traffic. Last month, FCC commissioner Robert McDowell asked AT&T Wireless to provide the information on its peer-to-peer policy during a recent hearing tied to broadband issues. Although AT&T doesn't block peer-to-peer traffic today across its wireless network, there is concern that it and other major carriers may do so in the future. In the meantime, businesses can see what their carriers are doing to Internet traffic to find out if it hinders business and employee access to the Internet. The EFF has developed a test tool called Switzerland that shows what ports a provider is blocking. And it recommends that IT use its purchasing power to make the carriers come clean on what they are controlling, O'Brien recommends: "Anyone who signs up a new provider should consider adding a clause to their contracts about service level agreements that should hold the provider to any transparency about what network management and blocks that they are doing." Privacy and Web history: Is your corporate information actually confidential? Earlier this summer, senior members of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee wrote to broadband Internet providers and other online companies, asking whether they have "tailored, or facilitated the tailoring of, Internet advertising based on consumers' Internet search, surfing, or other use." Although seemingly a consumer issue, this inquiry also raises issues over what is being monitored by corporate users outside of the corporate infrastructure, and whether this will become a legal liability later on if this information is subpoenaed by a court. Within the enterprise, many companies use end-point scanning technology, Web security gateways, and other tools to view what is stored on and transmitted through their employees' PCs when they are on the corporate network. But remote offices and traveling users may not be required to access the Internet through that network. So company-confidential information may be accessible by outsiders. Or consider the implications of smartphones with integrated GPS or other location-detection capabilities. "Given that Google Maps can triangulate your location at any given point in time, imagine if I, as a forensic investigator, can use that data to track your movements as part of an investigation or in connection with discovery related to a legal proceeding," says PricewaterhouseCoopers' Burg. Other risks include the use of external threat-detection services, in which your e-mail and other traffic passes through their services to be scanned for data leaks. Who has access to the results of the scans? More likely is the risk of na?ve user actions, such as sending files to their personal e-mail accounts so that they can work on a project at home, or inadvertently posting confidential information and business contacts on social networks. For example, Google scans all e-mail sent through its Gmail system so that it can target ads, and its beta Chrome browser's terms of service give Google nonexclusive ownership of all content that passes through its browsers. Employees that use Gmail or Chrome could be putting corporate information into an outsider's hands. And LinkedIn, for example, now aggressively promotes a contact-import feature when you log in, making it easy for employees to upload business contacts outside the corporate system. Gartner's Pescatore asks, "Are you checking up on what your employees are doing with their laptops, even when they are outside of the corporate network? You need to know what your employees are doing when they are online." One possibility is to insist on a service level agreement from your Internet providers that cover privacy issues. "I want SLAs from my Internet providers that guarantee me that my e-mail isn't going to be compromised. These agreements aren't about uptime, but for the purposes of privacy and security. I want secure and assured services, including the ability to browse and search the Web without having this information recorded on a server somewhere. I don't think a lot of people are doing this right now," says David O'Berry, director of Information Technology Systems and Services for the South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole, and Pardon Services. He blocks access to peer-to-peer file-sharing sites and others that could compromise his network security. Another solution is to segregate Internet users from those who have access to customer data. "We have taken the stance that if an employee doesn't need the Internet to do his or her job, that computer won't have access of any kind. Those with Web access don't store medical data," says Tony Maro, CIO at HCR Imaging, which processes medical scans and is subject to the strict HIPAA privacy regulations for health care. Clearly, the legal landscape is shifting with respect to individual computing. But the implications reach far beyond the individual and into corporate IT. Technology managers need to consider these and other regulations and adjust their computing policies to ensure that they can deliver IT services in the shifting landscape.
-
The three business tech risks you don't know about
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=htt...Business travelers will soon need to carry the name of their corporate lawyer in addition to their passport when returning home to the United States, and they may need to bring with them a different business laptop as well. This is because U.S. Customs can search and confiscate your laptop without any prior cause, according to policies that have been posted online since a Ninth U.S. Circuit Court ruling in April. Alice Stitelman, a consultant who writes about e-mail usage and legal matters, says this is just one example of "what you don't know about legal computer issues [that] can hurt you. Many business users mistakenly believe that their data is private -- whether it is on their laptop, cell phone, or mobile device. In fact, they should have no expectation of privacy. Users have much less control over who reads their data than they may realize." There are other examples of new regulations and policies that will have a profound impact on business technology policy in the coming years. As legal battles over content filtering, Net neutrality, tracking Web history, and laptop searches ensue, corporate IT managers will need to rethink their strategies on how they implement cloud computing, formulate their e-discovery and records retention policies, and safeguard business data carried by traveling executives using various mobile devices. Confiscated laptops: Time to revise data access strategies for execs The Department of Homeland Security has reaffirmed its policy that lets it search, copy, or even impound your employees' laptops when they return to the United States. This is completely at the security screeners' discretion, and applies to anyone entering the country -- citizens and noncitizens alike. Security consultant Jeff Bardin, writing on the CSO Online blog, calls it a "virtual strip search" and cautions somewhat facetiously, "I'd best not forget to take the microdot off the woolly boogers that collect in my pockets." But all kidding aside, this policy is very much a reality and not just for the tin-hat paranoids. "It definitely has been happening more and more recently, and we have gotten lots of complaints," says Danny O'Brien, the international outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group. "A CEO I know was detained and his computer's hard drive was copied and returned," says David Burg, a principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers' advisory and forensics practice. As a result, his client's company has changed its practice, so "employees aren't allowed to travel outside their home countries with their standard-issue laptops," he says. Instead, they are issued bare-bones laptops that have very little corporate data and use VPNs to communicate securely back to their offices. Other countries are also randomly inspecting laptops: "Canada has been looking for child pornography on laptops entering their country," says John Pescatore, a Gartner security analyst and a former security engineer for the U.S. Secret Service. "It is hard for anyone to argue against that." And as more countries claim the right to copy or confiscate laptops -- or, worse, to install monitoring software -- soon this idea of having a "travel laptop" will become more common practice so that sensitive corporate data is left behind. "Given that the majority of corporate PCs are laptops now, your data is now more vulnerable," says the EFF's O'Brien. "You might want to consider limiting the data on your laptop to what you are willing to share with the government," says Kevin Clark, network operations manager of Clearpointe, a managed services provider. "I would never travel with any data that I cared about anyway," says John Kindervag, a senior analyst for Forrester Research. "I would put it on my iPod or encrypt it." Certainly, "you should have been encrypting the hard drives of your laptops; these are just more reasons to do so," says Gartner's Pescatore. But using encryption is no guarantee that the government won't obtain your employee's data, according to legal authorities, especially if a security screener demands your password to decrypt your files. "We would say that you have some strong protections against giving out your password, and believe that falls under self-incrimination," says the EFF's O'Brien. Other lawyers agree that requiring users to give up their passwords to the government could fall under the category of unreasonable searches that the courts have long ruled are impermissible, but they note that overall case law is still evolving, so there's no hard-and-fast rule to rely on. "A lot of this is just security theater," says Forrester's Kindervag, meaning it's just for show. He was detained -- although not at an airport -- and "I stood my ground and refused to give up my data, and eventually the screener backed down." Clearly, one prudent course of action is to have ready access to legal counsel when returning to the United States. If your execs' laptops are impounded, you have several critical issues to address. First, do you have the executives' data backed up so that you can get them up and running quickly on new computers? Second, is sensitive data protected from prying eyes -- whether bored screeners or investigating authorities? This is where having the cleaned "travel laptop" begins to sound compelling. Finally, does this change your corporate policies on other mobile devices besides laptops, such as smartphones and PDAs that often have all sorts of personal and customer confidential information on them? Net neutrality: Carrier controls could limit remote work and cloud computing The topic of Net neutrality also has unintended consequence for IT managers. The concept of Net neutrality is that all Internet traffic should be treated the same and not prioritized (in terms of service or price) by the carriers. The carriers have justified non-neutral traffic management, such as metering and blocking, as necessary because of a few people who continually access large video files or play bandwidth-intensive games. The carriers argue this traffic fills their networks and gets in the way of everyone else's access to the Internet. They also cite the rise of peer-to-peer sharing of music and video files, which the entertainment industry says is a form of theft. But in a Net neutrality case involving Comcast, the Federal Trade Commission recently ruled that Comcast can't entirely block peer-to-per file sharing traffic, at least not without prior notification to its customers. The FTC's concerns were based on how such controls might limit the overall Internet access marketplace and lead to possibly monopolist practices by carriers as their policies favored certain types of usage or providers. Businesses had more immediate concerns about Comcast's actions since it affected their home-based workers. "Comcast, in trying to block BitTorrent, inadvertently was also blocking some Lotus Notes traffic," says the EFF's O'Brien. And at least one Canadian ISP has had a peer traffic block that also affected business-related traffic. The ruling has major implications for distributed corporate workforces and on the projected greater reliance on cloud computing and Web-based services and applications in the coming years. As more businesses make use of Internet-based services and store more of their data in the cloud, the assumption is that this data is universally accessible no matter where a user is located and no matter what provider is used to get online. That may not be an assumption businesses can count on. The FTC ruling was not conclusive, and Comcast has appealed, so the door is still open to carriers controlling traffic that passes through them to the Internet. And other countries -- such as China and Saudi Arabia -- already block and regulate Internet traffic, so global companies may face this issue even if the United States ends up supporting Net neutrality. And Comcast continues to find ways to regulate Internet access. After the FTC ruled against controlling peer-to-peer traffic specifically, Comcast decided to place a blanket cap of 250GB of data usage per month per residential account. The FTC action was not the only place where federal policymakers have shown concern over carriers' actions or possible actions to regulate Internet traffic. Last month, FCC commissioner Robert McDowell asked AT&T Wireless to provide the information on its peer-to-peer policy during a recent hearing tied to broadband issues. Although AT&T doesn't block peer-to-peer traffic today across its wireless network, there is concern that it and other major carriers may do so in the future. In the meantime, businesses can see what their carriers are doing to Internet traffic to find out if it hinders business and employee access to the Internet. The EFF has developed a test tool called Switzerland that shows what ports a provider is blocking. And it recommends that IT use its purchasing power to make the carriers come clean on what they are controlling, O'Brien recommends: "Anyone who signs up a new provider should consider adding a clause to their contracts about service level agreements that should hold the provider to any transparency about what network management and blocks that they are doing." Privacy and Web history: Is your corporate information actually confidential? Earlier this summer, senior members of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee wrote to broadband Internet providers and other online companies, asking whether they have "tailored, or facilitated the tailoring of, Internet advertising based on consumers' Internet search, surfing, or other use." Although seemingly a consumer issue, this inquiry also raises issues over what is being monitored by corporate users outside of the corporate infrastructure, and whether this will become a legal liability later on if this information is subpoenaed by a court. Within the enterprise, many companies use end-point scanning technology, Web security gateways, and other tools to view what is stored on and transmitted through their employees' PCs when they are on the corporate network. But remote offices and traveling users may not be required to access the Internet through that network. So company-confidential information may be accessible by outsiders. Or consider the implications of smartphones with integrated GPS or other location-detection capabilities. "Given that Google Maps can triangulate your location at any given point in time, imagine if I, as a forensic investigator, can use that data to track your movements as part of an investigation or in connection with discovery related to a legal proceeding," says PricewaterhouseCoopers' Burg. Other risks include the use of external threat-detection services, in which your e-mail and other traffic passes through their services to be scanned for data leaks. Who has access to the results of the scans? More likely is the risk of na?ve user actions, such as sending files to their personal e-mail accounts so that they can work on a project at home, or inadvertently posting confidential information and business contacts on social networks. For example, Google scans all e-mail sent through its Gmail system so that it can target ads, and its beta Chrome browser's terms of service give Google nonexclusive ownership of all content that passes through its browsers. Employees that use Gmail or Chrome could be putting corporate information into an outsider's hands. And LinkedIn, for example, now aggressively promotes a contact-import feature when you log in, making it easy for employees to upload business contacts outside the corporate system. Gartner's Pescatore asks, "Are you checking up on what your employees are doing with their laptops, even when they are outside of the corporate network? You need to know what your employees are doing when they are online." One possibility is to insist on a service level agreement from your Internet providers that cover privacy issues. "I want SLAs from my Internet providers that guarantee me that my e-mail isn't going to be compromised. These agreements aren't about uptime, but for the purposes of privacy and security. I want secure and assured services, including the ability to browse and search the Web without having this information recorded on a server somewhere. I don't think a lot of people are doing this right now," says David O'Berry, director of Information Technology Systems and Services for the South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole, and Pardon Services. He blocks access to peer-to-peer file-sharing sites and others that could compromise his network security. Another solution is to segregate Internet users from those who have access to customer data. "We have taken the stance that if an employee doesn't need the Internet to do his or her job, that computer won't have access of any kind. Those with Web access don't store medical data," says Tony Maro, CIO at HCR Imaging, which processes medical scans and is subject to the strict HIPAA privacy regulations for health care. Clearly, the legal landscape is shifting with respect to individual computing. But the implications reach far beyond the individual and into corporate IT. Technology managers need to consider these and other regulations and adjust their computing policies to ensure that they can deliver IT services in the shifting landscape.
-
Weekly Newsletter - Issue 60
http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=254* News about Mint XFCE CE (stable) has been released Fluxbox CE (RC) will be released about a week later KDE CE RC1 was close to being stable. There was a tiny little glitch which now is fixed so hopefully it will be released any time soon. If you have the latest beta (045) you have the final, but with the glitch not fixed - and you will be told how to fix it Work on the x64 edition is on hold for a few days, so we can release as per above There won’t be any time dedicated to the Debian and Enterprise Editions until after the release of Mint 6 Felicia There will be a revision 2 of Elyssa main around the time when Felicia is released This and more is found in a blog post by Clem mintInstall 5.1 and 5.2 was released in Romeo (the unstable branch of our repositories) An interesting interview with Clem * News about Linux UbuntuDeveloperWeek first week in September This is the Year of the Linux Desktop Breakout (heard it before?) Linux under attack: Compromised SSH keys lead to rootkit Open source release takes Linux rootkits mainstream - it cloaks itself by burrowing deep inside a server’s processor and availing itself of debugging mechanisms available in Intel’s chip architecture. What about AMD? In defense of Ubuntu (by Jonathan Corbet) Use of community Linux distributions like Ubuntu, CentOS and Debian are on the rise in the enterprise, PC world AU claims Gentoo developer moves away from Gentoo The latest news about the kernel is always found here * News about IT The Internet’s Biggest Security Hole (Not the DNS problem) Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S. (This is not the security hole You have to wait for an ad before you get to the article) U.S. to deploy DNSSEC in two years The Brittish Home Office is considering to track in real-time every kind of electronic activity undertaken by citizens. They are not alone both Germany and Sweden have similar plans as noted in earlier editions of the newsletter. And the US backed Echelon has been running for a long time Cisco buys PostPath, targets Microsoft Exchange Mozilla introduces Ubiquity which is an application that is to connect other applications Changes in the development of Ecmascript (Ecmascriptis the basis for javascript if not javascript in itself) Microsoft to Acquire Greenfield Online in a transaction valued at approximately $486 million (US). This is “fun” - Microsoft patents ‘Page Up’ and ‘Page Down’ Mozilla’s Google deal extended Here’s another article on that Google to buy GeoEye satellite imagery Google releases the Chrome browser (so far just for Windows) A comic strip is used to introduce Chrome Google Chrome takes more than just inspiration from Mozilla If Google’s new browser isn’t even available on Linux, why is this great news for Linux? Comcast sets monthly bandwidth limit for customers A glitch in a computer, one of just two in the US that play the vital role of distributing flight plans brought air traffic to a standstill in the US Engineer accidentally deletes cloud computing on FlexiScale Facebook Application Transforms Social Network Into Botnet The evil genius of XP Antivirus 2008 Attackers are increasingly using encoding The Number of Machines Controlled by Botnets Has Jumped 4x in Last 3 Months TeliaSonera IC launches child porn sites blocking service for free use by any ISP Neo-Nazi forum hacked Headcount for Bank of New York Mellon’s lost backup tapes rises from 4.2 million to 12 million personal identities Skype ignores PayPal siphoning hijack scheme * Hardware news ATI to Enable High-Definition Video Playback on Linux-Based Computers. Bad soldering behind nvidas problems? Intel acquires Linux distro developer * Trivia and other links China counters U.S. invisibility cloak - this is almost scaring * More about Linux Mint How to donate You find the Wallpaper of the Month in the Blog Home page Blog The planet Wiki Forum * Editors comment As always - if you find something I’ve missed in the newsletter please tell me - you can post a comment here Enjoy life Husse
-
Comcast Bandwidth Limits
http://scott.buffington.me/index.php?action=show&id=611I know this is about ten days old, but I am still catching up from vacation. I have concerns with a bandwidth limit whether I am currently close to that bandwidth limit or not. I have additional concerns that I am not being provided with how much I am consuming currently. For decades we have been provided with how many minutes we on our phone bills, there is absolutely no excuse for Comcast not providing all their customers with their current usage statistics while charging for going over some limit. I have no interest in installing programs on mutliple computers or my routers. Comcast obviously knows what your usage is, your usage statistics should appear on your statement or online when logging into your account. To say that under 1% of their users approach the bandwidth limit does not calm my fears. With devices like the Xbox, Apple TV and Roku about to explode all of us are about to use much more bandwidth. I know for certain that the amount of bandwidth I consume is going to increase quite a lot when Netflix on the Xbox becomes a reality this Fall. I suspect that more devices that are always online will be entering my household in the next few years. As my kids get older they will be online more often, we may even have multiple devices streaming movies into our house. My opinion is that if I am told I can only use so much a month I need to know how much I am currently using each month. If it were not for the fact that Comcast does not block any ports, I would seriously consider looking at Verizon. It is frustrating that we have so little choice for broadband.
-
Comcast Bandwidth Limits
http://scott.buffington.me/index.php?action=show&id=611I know this is about ten days old, but I am still catching up from vacation. I have concerns with a bandwidth limit whether I am currently close to that bandwidth limit or not. I have additional concerns that I am not being provided with how much I am consuming currently. For decades we have been provided with how many minutes we on our phone bills, there is absolutely no excuse for Comcast not providing all their customers with their current usage statistics while charging for going over some limit. I have no interest in installing programs on mutliple computers or my routers. Comcast obviously knows what your usage is, your usage statistics should appear on your statement or online when logging into your account. To say that under 1% of their users approach the bandwidth limit does not calm my fears. With devices like the Xbox, Apple TV and Roku about to explode all of us are about to use much more bandwidth. I know for certain that the amount of bandwidth I consume is going to increase quite a lot when Netflix on the Xbox becomes a reality this Fall. I suspect that more devices that are always online will be entering my household in the next few years. As my kids get older they will be online more often, we may even have multiple devices streaming movies into our house. My opinion is that if I am told I can only use so much a month I need to know how much I am currently using each month. If it were not for the fact that Comcast does not block any ports, I would seriously consider looking at Verizon. It is frustrating that we have so little choice for broadband.
-
Comcast appeals FCC's network management order
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=htt...Comcast, the second-largest broadband provider in the United States, has filed a court appeal of a U.S. Federal Communications Commission ruling last month saying the company couldn't delay some peer-to-peer traffic on its network. The FCC, on Aug. 1, voted 3-2 to prohibit Comcast from slowing BitTorrent p-to-p traffic in an effort to reduce network congestion. Commissioners voting against Comcast said the traffic throttling violated FCC net neutrality principles. [ Your source for the latest in government IT news and issues: Subscribe to InfoWorld's Government IT newsletter. ] Comcast on Thursday asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the FCC decision, saying the commission had no hard rules against the company's network management practices. The FCC's net neutrality principles, adopted in 2005, set out general guidelines, but no specific prohibitions, Comcast said. Comcast filed the appeal to protect its legal rights and to "challenge the basis on which the commission found that Comcast violated federal policy in the absence of pre-existing legally enforceable standards or rules," David Cohen, Comcast's executive vice president, said in a statement. "We are compelled to appeal because we strongly believe that, in this particular case, the Commission's action was legally inappropriate and its findings were not justified by the record." However, Comcast will abide by the FCC's order during the appeal, and it will continue with plans to move toward other network management techniques by the end of the year, Cohen added. "We will follow through on our long-standing commitment to transition to protocol-agnostic network congestion management practices by the end of this year," he said. "We also remain committed to bringing our customers a superior Internet experience." Last week, Comcast announced it would put a 250GB-per-month bandwidth cap on residential customers. Customers may get a warning if they go over the monthly cap, and after their first warning, Comcast will suspend their service for a year if they go over the cap a second time. That cap, which goes into effect Oct. 1, received mixed reactions, with some Internet users saying a cap is preferable to blocking or slowing specific applications. Some critics complained, however, that the cap could penalize certain types of subscribers, such as those who download movies frequently. The average Comcast user uses less than 3GB per month, Comcast said. A spokesman for Public Knowledge, among the three organizations that asked the FCC to investigate the Comcast BitTorrent traffic throttling, said he was not surprised by the appeal. "We expected that they'd appeal," said Art Brodsky. Comcast's traffic management was unveiled by press reports in late 2007. The company didn't tell its subscribers that it was slowing BitTorrent and other p-to-P traffic until the press reports. Comcast later said it was slowing p-to-p traffic only during times of network congestion, but FCC chairman Kevin Martin and some independent tests suggested Comcast was slowing that traffic around the clock.
More rising blog posts
-
Business »
Investors React to the Markets Like Deer in Headlights -
Lifestyle »
Hello Kitty limited edition Sotec netbook -
Politics »
Rotundus GroundBot - surveillance of the future -
Technology »
Anthony's busted ipod -
Entertainment »
ELI STONE Cancelled - It is Official -
Sports »
The Olympic Symphonium Plays More in Sorrow Than in Anger
More rising news stories
-
Business »
Heinz Squirts Out A Profit -
Lifestyle »
Happy Thanksgiving, from Sarah Palin -
Politics »
Washington's Woodstock -
Technology »
Hundreds wait at Verizon stores for BlackBerry Storm -
Entertainment »
Britney's Manager Says She's Ready for a Comeback -
Sports »
Yanks say offer to Sabathia has deadline (AP)
