When a researcher at an ethical-hacking firm discovered mobile devices from Apple, Google, RIM and HTC had a flaw in them that would allow an attacker using malicious Web code to freeze them up and crash them, he contacted the companies last year.
While telecommunication companies in Uganda have welcomed the government's proposed removal of Value Added Tax on telecommunications equipment, they have vowed to continue pushing for the removal or reduction of excise tax on calling vouchers.
Journalist Clive Thompson has published an enlightening piece at Medium.com that shows us how we can tell the difference between a snail-mail letter that has been written by a robot and one that has been written by an actual human being. And I've got a few words about the former.
The significant changes that eBay announced last week have merchants abuzz as they analyze and react to the impact that the restructured fees, modification of the search and feedback functions, and other changes will have on their sales and profits.
A few weeks ago we discussed what has become an epidemic of extortion attempts against companies by people who demand that their victims pay up-typically by wiring money to an offshore bank - or face a potentially debilitating distributed denial-of-service attack.
AT&T preps service to manage threats AT&T is readying a threat-management service for its largest customers that is designed to aggregate security information from dozens of devices and platforms under one umbrella. Called Aurora, the system is linked to the carrier's IP network and promises to let customers more quickly react to threats because information is presented in a more coherent fashion, AT&T says.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/053005-aurora.html?net
As judgment day in the nine-year antitrust battle between Microsoft and the European Commission draws near, neither side in the protracted dispute knows for sure how it will react to the news on the day.
How would you react if you discovered that "DLL Hell" had become a thing of the past? It's not just a theoretical question, because the desktop application virtualization market, first devised by Softricity, has recently been joined by two other players with their own stake in the concept. Together, this group is introducing approaches to application delivery that could very well revolutionize desktop software management.
Hurricane Katrina uncovered many shortcomings in the government's ability to react to a disaster, but one of the more serious deficiencies was the inability for emergency responders to communicate.
We've been conditioned by years of fire drills to assume that alarms are either tests or false alarms, and just mean a 20-minute work break. But if a fire alarm is to serve its function, we need to assume - or at least pretend - that it's the real thing. Most important, we need to assume that we will not be returning to work.
Smaller businesses that compete against larger ones do have a few advantages, the most important being that they are more nimble. The agility inherent in being small means that smaller companies should be able to react to business opportunities or other situations more rapidly than their larger competitors. This is of course a result of inertia - the same law of physics that enables a PT boat to turn more rapidly than a battleship.
There are similarities among all these operating systems but when you've used one relatively exclusively for many years, you become conditioned to look for certain signs that indicate potential problems and instinctively react to those signs.
To make it easier to identify and react to new scam Web sites, Microsoft, eBay and Visa Monday said they are launching a program to share information about online identity theft scams known as "phishing attacks."
Many readers had some thoughts about last week's newsletter, "Linux snaps at the heels of Microsoft servers," which talked about a recent IDC report on the state of the server/client operating systems markets.
I spoke with several experts on free and open source software about the implications of the latest developments with Canonical's IP policy, its impact on Ubuntu licensing, and how the open source world in general is going to react.
In August, my two newsletters on the state of the General Public License elicited some thoughtful and colorful reaction from readers. The newsletters focused on the SCO Group's plan to challenge the GPL's validity as part of its lawsuit against IBM, as well as an analysis of the SCO group's claims against Linux.
One factor that contributes to poor risk analysis is having too much awareness of a problem. Get hypersensitized to an issue, such as security threats, and you're bound to react in a way disproportionate and uncalled for by the facts. We're not just inundated with security information; we're overwhelmed by it. This sets us up to make poor decisions.