IDC Forum: Why IT matters
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PARIS -- IT commoditization? Asian threat? Crippling viruses? Speakers at IDC's European IT Forum 2004 in Paris didn't have to look far for contentious issues.
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com September 10, 2004, 1:42 PM PT. Most IT Managers won&#39;t question the importance of security, but this priority has been sliding between the third and fourth most important focus for companies.
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There&#39;s been a fair amount of debate recently about whether AMD or Intel is winning the ever-present chip arms race. Based on the experience of this year&#39;s Intel Developer Forum (IDF), I&#39;m not sure that Intel can still claim to be in the lead.
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(InfoWorld) - Whitfield Diffie has been credited with making privacy possible in the digital age. As a co-inventor of public key cryptography, he is one of the most respected contributors to the field of computer security and is in constant demand as a speaker. In his day job as Sun Microsystemsâ chief security officer, he works out of a corner office in the Sun Labs, just down the hall from where scientists are working on Sunâs next-generation Proximity Communication processors, which seek to do away with wire connections. Although he describes his job as a âmarketingâ position, Diffie didnât sound anything like a corporate pitch man when he spoke with IDG News Service reporter Robert McMillan at his Menlo Park, California office recently. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation. InfoWorld: When the PC went on the network, there were security implications that nobody thought about. Microsoft has spent the last five years fixing all of the security problems that maybe could have been foreseen.                                                     Whit Diffie: Wait a minute. I think there are two issues. I think youâll find that lots of them were foreseen. I think the critical thing [is] that Microsoft showed that its judgment was correct. If it had paid less attention to security, maybe it would have had less market share. It had no real motivation, I think, until the last few years to try to fix these things. The interesting thing to me is why itâs been so hard for them to do so, because they must have half the smart people I know about in the industry, and in security, working for them. And I think it has to do with the problems of legacy code, and the legacy interface expectations of their customers. IW: Nowadays we donât hear about widespread security outbreaks, but thereâs a sense that many of the things we do on the Internet are not trustworthy. People going to Web pages do not have confidence that they are where they think they are. WD: I think thatâs a well-placed misconfidence. IW: So, are things getting better? WD: I certainly donât worry about the security arrangements of going to Americanexpress.com, where I probably make the single largest most routine money transfer that I initiate. Iâm not the least bit worried about that, partly because of the law, and partly because the essential point of SSL [Secure Sockets Layer â a standard used in secure Web connections] is not about the quality of the cryptography but about the fact that the certificate costs enough money that the thieves arenât putting up a front. IW: I think that ties into an interesting point you made earlier: This lack of security is a fair price to pay for growth. WD: Look at Microsoft. It has 99 percent penetration in the Chinese market and 1 percent payment in the Chinese market. The business asset to them of being able to claim that they were ripped off at the same time that they gained this market of one billion people is fantastic. IW: What are your current thoughts on privacy? WD: I believe in privacy, but privacy is just one of a number of considerations. Privacy of political conversation is essential for a democratic society. Is the privacy of information about yourself necessary for it? Thatâs not very clear. Itâs a very squishy concept. In small communities, you have very little privacy, but you have accountability because you know who the members of the community are. What bothers me is that information about people is so readily available in a way not auditable to them, to organizations like ChoicePoint, who broker it around and enable other people, who are not legally constrained in what they do with it, to make decisions based on it. I am, on balance, more pleased with the fact that I can learn lots of information about people in minutes by using the Web than I am concerned about the fact that people can learn lots of information about me that way. And I would not like to see laws that restrict peopleâs ability to go investigate things. Hereâs my scenario: For all its current faults, it wonât be 10 years before facial recognition gets incredibly good. So everybodyâs camera will be saying "hi" to the people who go by. Would I like to see that outlawed? I think what outlawing it would be saying [are] that certain classes of big boys â the Fortune 1,000, the secret police â would be allowed to have access to such information, but you little irresponsible children wonât be. So I have a cowboy viewpoint on this.
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Unthinkable a year ago, perhaps, but there are currently indications that Microsoft is starting to think about identity management systems in terms of interoperability. A meeting  later this month with vendors and other organizations such as the Liberty Alliance promises to be productive.
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As the number of vendors touting hosted applications grows and the sophistication of their offerings increases, the choice between hosted solutions and on-premise solutions is no longer just a debate between competing vendors. Itâs become a real internal discussion within the enterprise.
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Lukas Smith is sending a wakeup call to the internet providers and web hosters out there - get involved in the PHP community!   We do not seem to have any ISP's active inside the PHP community. This is kind of odd, considering that PHP seems to be driving the business of hosters quite a bit. Why have none of them decided that PHP is important enough for their business that its worthwhile to ensure that their interests are taken into account?   He makes the suggestion of passing along the suggestion to bosses/co-workers/anyone who'll listen about getting involved. Suggested places to start would be as a part of the testers group or even contributing to the migration guide.
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Both Chris Shiflett and Eli White has posted reminders/comments about the upcoming DC PHP Conference happening November 7th through the 9th in Washington, D.C..   Eli mentions the talk he will be giving ("my stock 'High Performance' talk") and Chris points out the two talks being given by other OmniTIers - Paul Jones on framework and application benchmarking and Nate with a look at CakePHP   Registration for the conference is still open so you can still get in on this great three day event with sessions on topics like API design, MySQL security, lots of Facebook talk and where PHP fits in with today's politics.
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Hasin Hayder asks a question in his latest blog post that some in the PHP community have been wondering for a while now - is the International PHP Magazine dead?   I am a subscriber of International PHP Magazine for years. I bought the subscription looking at the back issues. They were sexy, resourceful and yup, very good. But I think these guys don't care about the magazine anymore. It became just a funny stuff for them. All the readers/subscribers and viewers doesnÃ¢ÂÂt bring any value to them. Look what they are doing actually...   He points out six things that the magazine and its staff are doing including RoR articles in an issue, content on the site that's way out of date and the smaller size of recent issues. Comments to the post point out that there has been issues released but that the magazine is published by a non-technical company that just might be pushing this particular publication aside.
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It&#39;s hard to argue against data portability. After all, who could oppose giving people control over the data they load, publish, and store on Web sites?This is particularly timely now that average users have started feeling the &quot;network fatigue&quot; that comes from maintaining multiple social-networking profiles, e-mail accounts, blogs, address book applications, social-news-sites memberships, and the like.And yet, while it is an important and unquestionably worthy endeavor, data portability faces thorny challenges in such areas as technology, privacy, security, business, and regulation and legislation.An informed and articulate discussion of these challenges can be found on the online forum of the DataPortability Workgroup, an organization founded recently to highlight the work that multiple data portability groups have been doing and to create a technical blueprint for vendors to adopt.While the workgroup has about 50 formal members, anyone can join the discussion forum, which now has more than 700 participants and is the workgroup&#39;s main meeting place.Activity on the forum has been engaging in recent weeks as people discuss technical and nontechnical issues, offer up suggestions, ask questions, argue and, mostly, cheer each other on in their collective quest for a satisfactory data portability solution.More than 400 discussion threads have been started, as participants ponder what are the parameters for user data, what data portability truly means, who owns data already created for a specific site, and whether making data portable is illegal in Europe.Other threads focus on how to bring together various data portability efforts already under way, like the Friend of a Friend project (FOAF), OpenID , Attention Profiling Mark-up Language (APML), the Liberty Alliance, and various open data microformats.Despite the magnitude of the endeavor, participants interviewed feel optimistic that the workgroup will yield concrete results that will bring about industry-wide implementations of data portability solutions.&quot;Where there is a will, there&#39;s a way. And so far it seems like everyone has thrown their will behind the project. Now they need to find a way,&quot; said Chris Saad, cofounder of the DataPortability Workgroup.The DataPortability Workgroup positions itself at a higher conceptual level than the groups working to develop specific technical standards for data portability.&quot;Our goal is to highlight, not compete [with], the work of other groups and to encourage the adoption of their work with vendors and users,&quot; Saad said.The workgroup&#39;s main accomplishment so far, Saad said, is that it brought people to the table and started to outline the documents it plans to deliver, chief among which will be the DataPortability Technical Blueprint, envisioned as a key reference document for a complete implementation architecture for the data portability stack of standards.John Breslin is a workgroup supporter who sees it as having a lot of synergy with the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project (SIOC), which he founded in 2004 to provide methods for interconnecting discussion services such as blogs, forums, and mailing lists to each other.&quot;SIOC is a data format essentially to describe communities. It has many different possible applications, of which data portability is one,&quot; Breslin, a lecturer and researcher at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute of the National University of Ireland in Galway, said in a phone interview.Victor Coustenoble shares a similar belief. He co-founded the OSocial.net project with Edwin Taylor to let people see their social-networking data in an open, portable way and let them securely build a friends list across site boundaries without the need for new registrations.&quot;About our participation, we are very interested to implement and use data portability ideas and specifications. It helps us to write applications easily for data management with standards and with a community support, which is very important for us,&quot; Coustenoble said.For Devin Holloway, the workgroup could yield historic results. He plans to move from Silicon Valley to Asia to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities where social networks, mobile phones and Internet technologies intersect.&quot;[Data portability] will pave the way for a future rich in services and applications that harness our aggregate data to help improve our lives in virtually every aspect. The [workgroup] is onto something that is going to change the world, and I&#39;m excited to be a part of the process,&quot; he said.Unfortunately, the enthusiasm, commitment, and passion displayed by participants, many of whom are acting as individual volunteers, hasn&#39;t so far been replicated by the major Internet players.While the decisions by Google and Facebook to become members put the workgroup in a news spotlight, their representatives don&#39;t seem to have yet participated in the forum discussions. Google and Facebook also declined to have their workgroup representatives be interviewed for this article. Each separately sent a brief, prepared statement saying that they want to participate in the group because they&#39;re committed to data portability.This isn&#39;t new. The CEOs of both companies at different times have said that their companies believe in data portability, and yet, neither them nor any other major Internet company can be said to have taken a leadership role in this effort.&quot;I haven&#39;t seen anything convincing from the big Internet companies that illustrates that they want to embrace this wholeheartedly,&quot; Breslin said. &quot;These sites haven&#39;t really been rushing to make their data portable yet.&quot;&quot;We are yet to see if they are fully committed. So far they have only committed to the conversation,&quot; said Saad, who is also CEO of Faraday Media in Australia and cofounder of the APML Workgroup. &quot;That being said, however, it&#39;s encouraging to see them take the first few steps in the right direction,&quot;This isn&#39;t a minor point. The DataPortability Workgroup and the other technical organizations could come up with fantastic solutions, but if the major Internet players -- and in particular the major social-networking sites -- don&#39;t adopt them, data portability will not become a reality for end-users. MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, and Bebo did not reply to requests for comment for this story.Maybe these Internet companies aren&#39;t truly convinced that data portability will be good for their businesses. In what some viewed as an example of words being inconsistent with actions, Facebook recently booted from its social network the well-known technology blogger Robert Scoble.Scoble&#39;s crime? He exported his contacts data in his Facebook account over to Plaxo&#39;s address book management service, Pulse. No can do, Facebook said, explaining that Plaxo&#39;s tool violated Facebook&#39;s terms of service and posed a security risk because it &quot;scraped&quot; the data from the social network. Scoble&#39;s account was later reinstated, but under the condition he doesn&#39;t do this again.If you operate a social-networking site -- or any site where people create an account or profile, list contacts and post content -- a way to discourage them from switching to a competitor is to make it hard or impossible for them to easily export and reuse that data elsewhere.Yet proponents of data portability like Saad say that things are starting to change, and that Facebook, MySpace, Google, and others need to wise up if they don&#39;t want to fall into disfavor with their users.What has changed is that these &quot;social&quot; sites have reached mainstream status, and a critical mass of users have realized the inconvenience of having to reenter and update a lot of the same information and content in multiple &quot;social&quot; sites and applications.&quot;As more and more applications start to feel the impact of social features, users will begin to demand a data portability solution. Either that or network fatigue will reduce adoption and eventually kill the fun,&quot; Saad said.For example, a concrete result of data portability could be a console-like management application where a person could manage his address book contacts, photos, videos, social news entries, social bookmarks and blog posts. With that application, the user would be able to share data between multiple social applications, sites and services.Unlike other vendors, Plaxo is heavily involved in data portability discussions and efforts precisely because its Pulse service has been designed to help people manage their dispersed contacts data across address books, sites, and e-mail accounts.&quot;By making data portable, you&#39;re enabling all these tools to work together. The user can be the hub and the different services can be spokes. That&#39;s what we&#39;re pushing for: Users in control of the data and interoperability among the services,&quot; said Joseph Smarr, Plaxo&#39;s chief platform architect.Ultimately, the problem represents an opportunity for Internet companies. &quot;In the end, whoever moves first to be truly open will have the advantage,&quot; Saad said.J. Trent Adams, founder and chief innovator at Matchmine, another vendor pushing for data portability, concurs. A stealthy startup could develop a clever application or service built on data portability standards and force other vendors to respond. &quot;All of a sudden, it&#39;s the right idea, and the big boys will have to react,&quot; Adams said.In other words, Internet companies who insist on locking up their users&#39; data to protect their businesses might soon find themselves instead stuck in the mud.
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Computerworld recently conducted a survey of more than 100 IT executives to understand how IT leaders are balancing the supply of IT services with business-driven demands to maximize business value. Learn what your peers had to day about the effectiveness of the approaches they use. Their answers may surprise you.
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This is the question posed by Will Hurley of BMC.  After chatting with him today about life, the upcoming elections, and the open source community in general, I decided that I am pretty curious about how to answer that question myself. read more
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This article provides an overview of ITIL, a management-level set of best practices and guidelines for an integrated and process-based approach to IT and security.
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You could be next in the firing line Comment There are two cases, that I am aware of, moving through the courts in the US relating to accessibility of IT solutions.â¦
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I spent much of this afternoon in a mandatory (for poll workers) four hour training class on the Hart InterCivic eSlate voting system, soon to be in use in elections in my home county. (Hart InterCivic is a privately held firm out of Houston, specializing in election equipment and in software products for county records offices). Contrary to my previous impression, the machines are not touch screen machines, although they share some similarities.  I went into the class skeptical; I have been a critic of what I percieve as an unseemly rush to adopt insecure electronic voting systems. I emerged guardedly optimistic; the systems appear, from what I can tell, to be reasonably secure against vote manipulation by people who are not part of the election staff, and they appear to provide approximately the same level of security against election office malfeasance that paper ballots do. At the end of the day, if the election staff wants to tamper, they can; but that was true with paper ballots as well. That risk can be mitigated by election office procedures intended to mitigate it; in San Mateo County's case, those procedures have in some important regards not yet been established, as I will discuss below.
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IT management? We're listening Reg Reader Studies It won't have escaped your attention that the IT management space is quite a hot topic right now - or at least it is if you listen to IT vendors.â¦
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The most pervasive problem in running IT is not a specific technology issue at all. Itâs dealing with bad vendors. Even if you have been able to reduce your IT operation down to a pure open source environment on the software side, hardware still must be purchased through commercial channels. In the post-boom IT age, the power has supposedly shifted from vendor to buyer, but IT managers continue to be manipulated by vendors who donât always act in the customerâs best interest. To keep vendors in line, IT managers need to stay on the ball â and punish bad behavior when it occurs by finding new suppliers.