RSA Conference, day one

Abaca's radical anti-spam tech wins at Yahoo!:

I was almost blinded by the huge grins on the faces of the Abaca reps.

As you may recall, Abaca has a really interesting spin on the spam filtering problem. Finely-tuned mathematics and a big database of receiver statistics give back up some truly impressive claims. As I said last year, I'm reasonably convinced that it's not just a silly "Final, Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem."

A few months ago, I heard unofficially that Yahoo! agreed to roll it out. ... Now, Abaca is announcing that the rollout has been hugely successful, and Yahoo! is extremely satisfied with the result. Nice going.

Here's the (claimed) highlights of the Abaca technology: .99% catch rate; false positive rate one in a million messages; no user training is required; extremely scalable.

Websense (finally) gets appliance religion:

It's easy to be cynical. It wouldn't be hard to see this as Websense being "late to the party." Naturally, the company doesn't view it that way.

Websense saw the need for a complete platform refresh. We're seeing the first fruits of this work in the new V10000 appliance.

Based around a virtualized environment, using Linux and the Xen hypervisor; the first version is a Web gateway / security proxy; future add-ons will include DLP; can run multiple instances on one box; new centralized management platform can control a mixture of appliances and similar functionality provided by the Websense managed service.