Usually, I am fairly unmoved by hardware. But Panoram Technologies grabbed my attention when I saw this beauty! I'm afraid to ask what it costs, so I bet that means I can't afford it. Oh Well.
Read more about this and other video products at Panoram Technologies' web site, http://www.panoramtech.com/products/pv290.html.
Cloudmark has made us smile today.
After I talked my better half through the installation their free product SpamNet, I was explaining how it worked. And it worked, she got a SPAM and it was seamlessly routed to her SPAM folder. We were both amazed.
The product compares a unique message identifier against a database of known SPAM and dynamically filters messages based on the results of the comparison. A user base of over 200,000 installed users check over 14 million messages per day through this free service. The database that these users help to create is used in the company's enterprise offering, Authority, which blocks mail at the corporate gateway.
The product gives you the ability to retrieve incorrectly marked items from the SPAM folder, and the ability to identify and report new soources of spam. The database uses a straightforward wieghting system they call Truth Evaluation System.
Users can "white list" addresses, ensuring that mail from a certain addresses does not get flagged as spam. This product is specifically designed for users of Outlook, but *nix users can use Vipul's Razor, which has been around for years and is the technology that enabled the development of SpamNet.
Our first impressions are very good.
(Added 2/23/03 - By a very unscientific method of thinking back over the past three days and doing math in my head: I had 2 daily messages go into the spam folder incorrectly. To be fair these messages do contain a fair amount of commercial and promotional language. Also noted about 5-20% per day get missed. This over the course of over 100 SPAM messages is good by me.)
In doing some research for my new servers, I noticed the RedHat has withdrawn support for the i386 and i486 series processors in its latest release, 8.0. One of the things that early Linux geeks touted about the OS was that it would run reasonably well on older hardware, such as the 386 class PCs. In fact, we still have some 486 hardware somewhere in the building that at last glance had a copy of RedHat 6.something on it. (I think the HD crashed, but this makes me want to fix it.) Heres the list from Redhat's hardware compatibility web site, http://hardware.redhat.com.
Does it mean I am getting old if I was nastalgic for a 15 year old computer? Nah! If you think that's bad, see the Retro Computing Society of Rhode Island.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/02/11/hacker.hacked.ap/index.html
Thanks to Greg B for pointing out this article about how Kevin Mitck's web servers were defaced. More anecdotal evidence that the only safe box is one that isn't connected to the Internet.
Recently a client who had just had a server compromised by the SQL slammer worm told us he had "applied the patch this summer." By some accounts, this should have protected him. But it got us to thinking about lies, damned lies and statistics again. And how often should we tell our clients that thier systems should be updated? And what's it going to cost?
The graph above represents (in a crude fashion) the number of security advisories released by our two primary Operating Systems vendors over the past few years. That could provide a point of departure, and don't worry this isn't an OS crusade. We think the manufacturers do a fine job of supplying the patches. Problems occur when they aren't applied correctly or more frequently when they aren't applied in time.
Last year RedHat released 293 security or bug advisories. These are not all security related, and certainly a lot of the advisories were for bugs not related to security issues. But that's around one per work day. The potential cost impact is between almost none to review an advisory for software you don't use, to the hour or so that a kernel upgrade will typically involve; these occur about three times a year. It works out to about 51 hours a year.
Or, you can look at it from the other side of the coin. Some Windows boxes were disabled by Code Red and NIMDA in 2001 and more recently we noticed large disruptions on the Intenernet because of the SLAMMER worm which affected (and was spread by) unpatched Microsoft SQL Servers. These disruptions to business cost the global economy heavily. The cost can be measured in price of recovering from the intrusions and to get running again, the business lost while operations are disrupted, and sometimes actully loosing customer confidence. On the web, if they don't have confidence in you, they have a choice.
Some figures place the costs of Code Red at 2.6 billion dollars world wide. While 2.6 billion is a rather abstract number, the more recent SLAMMER worm caused outages in Bank America Corp's ATM network, a direct effect that most Americans can probably relate to. In addition to banking networks, other networks one would expect to be isolated from Internet attack were affected. In an extream instance showing potential global nature of this issue, China Telecom a nationwide phone company shut down all Internetional calls for the weekend, with only limted service being restored
JSW4.NET offers a service for a nominal monthly fee to keep your business servers up to date if you have a dedicated Internet connection with secure remote access.