Integration problems arise with DLP tools
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Vendors of data leakage prevention (DLP) systems claim that customers will avoid integration issues by using packaged tools that encompass all the different elements of the technology, but some early adopters of DLP are already running into serious problems.
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The leading vendors in the data warehousing market are running scared of new entrants to the market that are offering data warehouse appliances (i.e. pre-integrated hardware, software, storage combinations) that can offer greatly superior performance at a significantly lower price.  In this white paper we will dispel the 'fog of war' that currently pervades the data warehousing landscape, dismissing those question marks that are irrelevant and gratuitous, but highlighting any genuine issues that need to be addressed.
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How often have you thrown up your hands in disgust at the poor quality of documentation for an open source project?  Wouldn&#8217;t it be nice if someone put together a documentation coverage tool that worked like test coverage too ls?  Well, you&#8217;re in luck&#8212;dcov is here (at least for Ruby code).read more
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Higgins-project developers are creating a tool equivalent to Windows CardSpace but need Microsoft's go-ahead for certain features.
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Some are questioning the fit between the two companies from the perspective of open-source tools and APIs.
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XPlanner is a web-based project planning and tracking tool for eXtreme Programming (XP) teams. XPlanner is implemented using Java, JSP, and Struts, and MySQL (user contributed support for other databases). XPlanner 0.6.2 provide many improvements and bug fixes including sortable tables, object ID quick queries, improved page printing (image-based progress bars), improved interfaces (history, role editing, time entry, iterations, and developer/customer tasks), dynamic attribute support for enhanced SOAP integration, and contributed functionality for NTLM authentication and WackoWiki-compatible text formatting.  You can find the latest release here: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=49017&package_id=42226
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Killing two birds with one stone Hands on Iâve been fascinated by cross-platform programming for more years than I care to remember, and my interest has recently been sharpened by the acquisition of a number of Apple Macs â both Intel and PPC (PowerPC). This article focuses primarily on some technical aspects of Qt, Trolltechâs cross-platform C++ toolkit which, as you may know, is the architectural core behind the KDE desktop on Linux. At the end, I show how easy it is to create a simple application without writing a line of code.â¦
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TA-Lib provides more than 130 technical analysis functions for financial and trading applications.  Main feature of this release is a new generated XML file to provide meta information of the interface. This facilitate integration within .NET and Java applications.  New Features ============ - New Functions: BETA, MINMAX, MINMAXINDEX, MININDEX, MAXINDEX - Debian and RPM packaging available. - Java JAR packaging available. - New TA_FunctionDescription() returns XML description of API. - New ta_func_api.xml file generated in root directory of the package. - Support for unmanaged static libraries with Visual Studio 2005.  Fixes ===== #1526632 : Fix bug in LINEARREG_ANGLE #1544555 : Now do proper divide by zero detection in TA_ADX  Other Changes ============= - Better Java/.NET naming convention. - ta_func_list.txt moved in root directory of the package. - Removed dependencies on trio and Mersenne Twister functions. - Volume and Open Interest are now double instead of integers. - Add license specific to Excel users.  Info: http://ta-lib.org
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Numerous applications, including some of Microsoft&#39;s own, have encountered compatibility problems with Windows XP SP2 (Service Pack 2).
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In a new post on her blog today, Elizabeth Smith talks about her "PECL Windows nut project" of wanting to get every single PECL extension she can get her hands on to compile under Windows.   Now there will be some that are just frankly impossible (but there are some extensions that are impossible on *nix as well - you're not going to see me messing with xmms) What does this mean? Playing with lots of open source libraries, fixing simple errors, creating config.w32 files for extensions. Basically just looking at what is broken and fixing it.   She's already started on the project, fixing several of the base extensions and moving on to try to correct one to five extensions a day. These changes are getting committed into CVS so anyone can get at them and try them out for themselves. She's also trying to get them over into the PECL4WIN packages to make things more "official".
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Jikes is a great compiler but they could really benefit from better project management.  This bug  has been open for greater than 3 years now with no resolution.  One of the developers sent me a *private* email (without commenting or closing the bug) this this could be fixed by avoiding the use of symlinks but wasn't sure. Of course this email was sent more than 2 years ago so I have no decent way of finding it.  Adding insult to injury is the fact that IBM won't let me comment on the bug without an account.  The only problem is that my account won't activate.  In a nutshell if you want to use incremental compile with jikes you need to specify relative paths not full paths.  For example if y ...
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A distributed multi-protocol load testing tool.
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If security industry sources prove correct and Symantec is busy putting the finishing touches on a deal to acquire data leakage prevention specialist Vontu, the acquisition will undoubtedly lead to further integration of DLP technology with many other forms of IT security agents.The Symantec-Vontu deal notwithstanding, industry analysts currently count slightly fewer than 40 different vendors currently pitching some form of DLP tools.With IT industry giants ranging from security specialists Symantec and rival McAfee to networking giant Cisco and storage market leader EMC already blending different flavors of DLP into their products, experts contend that the trend toward consolidation of the applications with other technologies, at least from a vendor perspective, is certain to continue.According to existing users of the content protection systems, the ongoing trend toward the marriage of DLP technologies with other critical IT platforms mirrors the need to link the tools tightly together with other security systems to allow them to have their intended effect.For the process, also known as information leakage prevention, to work on a practical level, users of the tools say, the strategy -- and the technologies used to carry it out -- must be embedded throughout other IT management systems."We want to stay out of the papers, that's the biggest motivator. The real issue isn't so much addressing malicious intent, but rather it's more about preventing inadvertent data misuse, that's the core of the problem," said Michael Gabriel, corporate information security officer for Career Education Corporation, a publicly-held operator of more than 75 professional training schools encompassing 90,000 students.Tasked with creating the decade-old company's information security infrastructure from scratch in 2004 to prepare for its initial Sarbanes-Oxley audits, Gabriel said that it become immediately clear that for any of the technologies he would invest in to pass the tests, they would need to work together in almost seamless fashion."One of the things I learned right away was that if you are going to rely on end-users to play a role in protecting the company, you are not going to have a very good result when it comes to DLP, or content filtering, or e-mail encryption," Gabriel said."Selecting the various technologies was the easy part, but to make it work, I had to get all the providers together in one room; that was the only way we were going to make the whole thing work," he said.The reason he selected Vontu's Network Data Monitoring and Prevention software over products from rivals like Verdasys, Vericept, and PortAuthority -- which was subsequently purchased by filtering specialists WebSense for $90 million in 2006 -- was based on the knowledge that it could be tied efficiently together with e-mail encryption software made by PGP and gateway monitoring applications made by IronPort, Gabriel said.IronPort was subsequently acquired by Cisco for $830 million in January 2007, and in September, the company introduced onboard DLP and encryption capabilities for e-mail traveling through its anti-spam and anti-spyware appliances.Vontu's software becomes a traffic cop At CEC, Gabriel said he uses Vontu's software as a "traffic cop" to determine which e-mails get encrypted by the PGP system and to determine how the messages should be handled by the company's IronPort messaging gateway. An existing partnership between PGP and Vontu had played a role in his decision to invest in the two companies' technologies.After the aforementioned meeting of the vendors -- largely devoted to designing the company's data flow configuration -- Gabriel said he spent a considerable period of time working out the firm's unique business process and creating related information security policies.The end result is system where outbound e-mail at CEC moves from Microsoft Exchange into the IronPort appliance, where it is then forwarded to the Vontu system, where the messages are inspected for policy violations using a data-matching technology.After being fed back into the IronPort system, non-confidential e-mail is distributed, while anything that needs to be encrypted is redirected through PGP's Universal Gateway software before getting sent out.Meanwhile, anything that fails to meet CEC's data leakage policies is redirected into a special inbox where it can be reviewed by the company's human resources department and, when necessary, forwarded for review to the manager of the employee responsible for sending the e-mail."Compared to designing the business process, working with the technology was a breeze, the only sticking point was getting the data flow to work right, which we addressed by getting everyone in a room and staying until it worked," Gabriel said. "Now we're preventing people from attaching the wrong spreadsheet or sending it to the wrong people on a regular basis."As with the integration of DLP into encryption and e-mail filtering, as well as its ongoing blending with everything from storage systems to networking gear, some users are looking for leakage protection that has hooks into the very applications in which most corporate documents are created, Microsoft's Office productivity suite.Workshare, a maker of so-called "document integrity software" -- one the many forms of DLP tools -- was recognized by Microsoft in July as one of its top ISVs worldwide.And while the firm actively pitches its products' abilities to remove "risky data" from Office documents, company executives admit that leakage prevention is only one feature of a broader content management strategy covered by its technologies.Educating end-users to supplement DLP John Meakin, group head of information security at Standard Chartered Bank -- a global concern with more than 1,600 branches and 60,000 employees -- said that he chose to buy Workshare's Protect applications to carry out his DLP strategy because of their direct ties into Office.For DLP to work on a practical and philosophical level, he said, it must be intertwined with other security and information management technologies in such an innate and ubiquitous fashion."Having the integration with the information rights management features in Office was a key determinant in our decision making," Meakin said. "Some vendors are selling tools that are all about matching patterns and locking down certain data types. The reason we didn't think that approach by itself was sufficient was because there is so much data that falls out of the known patterns. Tt's like anti-virus: Once in a while there's a new virus never seen before, and users can make decisions we can't predict."At its essence, the executive said that DLP should be less about blocking certain types of data from leaving the network than it should be about keeping workers constantly aware of the sensitivity of the information they access."It's less about what they try to do with it, like copy it to a USB drive or push it to Web applications, that's certainly part of it, but the most important thing is managing a dialogue with users and putting tools at their disposal that allow them to interact in a way that is fundamentally more secure," he said. "Only then have you really begun to solve the problem."Yet, at the same time that he is looking for integrated DLP technologies, Meakin said he's unsure that the efforts of major IT platform providers to integrate the technologies into their products will sufficiently address the problem.Buying-up smaller technology providers simply because DLP appears to fit in with some element of their business won't necessarily allow the major vendors to offer the right breed of product integration for enterprise customers, he said."I don't see any of the acquisitive vendors trying to build an integrated approach yet, or doing so convincingly; the problem is we are all immature in trying to address the issue of DLP in general," said Meakin. "I don't think this whole market is mature enough yet for these acquisitions to make someone like me think that any of these solutions being sold under an integrated banner are something close enough to a silver bullet."
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InfoWorld - Open source data integration vendor Talend has been working with Microsoft to build better interoperability between Talend's Open Studio product and Microsoft's business software, Talend said Tuesday.
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An Eclipse IDE plug-in that would provide search capabilities specifically for developers is being readied by a University of California, Berkeley computer science professor.ADVERTISEMENTSBC Case Study: Crate & BarrelWhat sold them on improving their network? A system that could cut management costs from the get-go. Find out more.
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How often have you thrown up your hands in disgust at the poor quality of documentation for an open source project?  Wouldn&#8217;t it be nice if someone put together a documentation coverage tool that worked like test coverage too ls?  Well, you&#8217;re in luck&#8212;dcov is here (at least for Ruby code).