Networking

Pilot fish at this software company is helping the marketing team plan a user conference. And the networking requirements are very impressive: Each demo machine must have full Internet speed.

Security people can talk until they're blue in the face about the dangers of unsecured Windows PCs and how they can be used in botnets. Does anyone listen?

Well, it sure doesn't seem like it some days. Perhaps this Botnet map from CSO will help get the message across.

Apple may be the darling of the hipper-than-thou crowd, but when it comes to climate change, it has one of the worse environmental records of any tech company, according to a new survey. Microsoft beats it by a considerable margin, and IBM is best of all the techs. I have all the results in my blog.

IT pilot fish is testing a new Web site built using an agile methodology. And how's this new development style working out?

If the rumors are true, and Microsoft is indeed considering buying Facebook, Google can start the celebration now. Buying Facebook would hurt, not help Microsoft's battle with its online rival, and end up being billions of dollars badly spent.

The mere act of making music available for sharing on a P2P network does not automatically mean the music is actually being illegally distributed, a District Court in Arizona ruled last week.

I am, shall we say, more than a little cynical, even by my standards, when it comes to wireless networking. For example, I really, really have doubts about the wisdom of moving up to 802.11n. That said, I think the monster Mobile WiMax deal, which was announced today, may actually go places.

As my friend Ryan Naraine, soon to be security evangelist for anti-malware company Kaspersky Labs, recently observed, "This list of 0days is always a source of content for me." The list in question is the Zero Day Initiative's list of vulnerabilities.

Universities need to be more proactive — and vocal — in dealing with their students' use of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks for illegal downloads. Don explains why in this week's editorial.

Computerworld Editorial's blog

The first legal home PCs just went up for sale in Cuba, and it should be no surprise that they're Windows XP-based, not Macs. Macs or Mac-alikes would be far too pricy for cash-starved Cubans, who pay just under $800 for the machines. No Vista, either: The hardware required to run it costs too much money.

Back in March, Apple began tricking Windows users into downloading Safari via a method that Mozilla CEO John Lilly said "borders on malware distribution practices." Malware or not, the scheme paid off for Apple, tripling the use of Safari on Windows in a single month.

At Interop 2008, I realized that a visit to Vegas can be called a success if you don't get hit by a car while jogging there.

A student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts has written an article about an otherwise unpublicized case of a band of students that kept a peer-to-peer filesharing network running on campus so that users of the network could illegally obtain copyrighted material. The story needs to be told, so I'm running it here.

Microsoft recently has been getting a lot of press for its COFEE investigative tool to help police officers gather digital evidence. The device is being used by 2,000 officers in 15 countries, reports the Seattle Times. But Microsoft won't reveal exactly which countries use the tool --- and it's not clear why.

Pilot fish has an urgent problem: There's a major system outage, and it needs to be escalated at once to support Team A. But the outage has knocked out the automated alarm monitoring system.