The ethics expert for the New York Times has come out with a startling declaration: It's perfectly fine to hop onto any Wi-Fi network and use the bandwidth, even without asking the owner's permission.

Hi there, I just thought I'd drop in and let you know that Network Computing has a security editor again... Me.

You may have read some of my stuff when I was testing Storage and Servers, you may have even emailed back and forth with me about my quirky storage blogging. Or you may remember me as "That guy we fired for..." Oh, no, nevermind. You wouldn't remember me as that.

I figure it is time for an update, though there's not all that much to say... Yet.

After numerous emails flapping about the globe, I finally determined that the SAS controler I have is not PCI compatible. Note to all you system builders out there, though the standard says PCI-X is backward compatible, most implementations are not.

Here's the latest from the people who brought you massive, illegal wiretapping and the Patriot Act: Trust us when it comes to privacy. The Justice Department has filed papers in federal court contending that Google should comply with a subpoena to turn over massive amounts of information because it's not an invasion of privacy.

Happy Friday!

Today we have ... nothing. Nada. Not a single thing.

Cisco enjoys fat-and-happy profit margins for its routers and other networking gear, but an open source startup may sound the death knell for such high-profit hardware. Vyatta is building routers and other net gear using open source software, and has its sights set squarely on Cisco.

In the Latest editon of The Last Mile, you'll find our reader submitted "Top 11 Ways to Shorten a Dull IT Staff Meeting." We couldn't cram them all into the page, so submitted for your approval (or revulsion) are all the entries from our rogue's gallery.

Think the politically correct thinking on campus has gone too far? How about this one: The president of Canada's Lakeland University has banned Wi-Fi on campus, because he claims it may have "fairly significant" health risks.

Is the Itanium market cratering or flourishing? You may think there'd be a clear answer to that, and it's not at all an unimportant question -- the direction in which Itanium is headed is going to influence a lot of big-bucks budget decisions for many of you.

Collaboration On The Go Podcast (download here). Despite the cries and moans of a few cynics, podcasting has not turned into a temporary Internet fad, nor does it look like it will anytime soon. People are now starting to look towards making some real money off of podcasts, from the amateur hobbyist to the massive corporation. In today's episode, I explore and give my opinion on varying ways to earn some cash.

If you're worried about the Feds snooping on your phone calls, there may be an easy solution: Use Skype VoIP software. Top security expert Bruce Schneier says that Skype encryption can foil the NSA wiretappers.

If you really want to (or are having trouble sleeping) first read this Bill.

Basically it says that if you are annoyed by anything I write in this entry, you can certainly press federal charges. Oh wait, no you can't, because I'm LORI MACVITTIE. There you go, I've identified myself and therefore I am not breaking the law.

With little fanfare, Microsoft last week revealed it would release a free VoIP app that will let Office users to make free calls on Wi-Fi phones running Windows Mobile software. If I were a mobile operator, I'd be kissing billions of revenue good-bye right now.

The last time we posted an IT Haiku, folks were just starting to string up the holiday lights around the servers. Hey, don't blame us -- some of guys just don't know how to count syllables.

Fortunately, John Gregor remembered the 5-7-5 rule of Haikus and came through for us. John's poem is no doubt an homage to that often-told Tech Support 'horror' story:

Research in Motion (RIM) has its problems -- a nasty patent battle, not to mention Microsoft looming in its rear view mirror -- but NWC's review of the new BlackBerry Enterprise Server shows the company's technology progressing nicely. Get the scoop on RIM and its product direction, plus wireless editor Dave Molta checks in on the future of 3G and we deliver today's NWC Take on the News, all in today's edition of Network Computing's Daily Spin.

Ausssie Olympic gold medallist Dale Begg-Smith does more than attack the slopes -- he's also a spyware king, through his companies AdsCPM and CPM Media, which are linked to home page hijackers, spyware, porn redirectors, and more, say several reports.

Happy Very Snowy Friday!

Today I've got two freebies for you, so sit back and ignore the need to shovel the sidewalk for a while longer and read on...

AT&T has been using its considerable checkbook to pay off Congressman to ban cities and towns from setting up their own broadband and wireless networks. The top two recipients of AT&T campaign donations in 2006 have proposed laws to ban or dramatically curtail municipal networks.

In November we began our quest to find the ultimate ESB (enterprise service bus) suite by issuing an invitation to a dozen vendors. Eight took us up on our challenge. Today and continuing for the next few weeks, Lori MacVittie rolls out the results of her testing leading up to March 16, when we'll reveal our Editor's choice winner. Read Lori's first rolling review and hear from Gates, McNealey and co. at the RSA show, all this and more.

Read today's Daily Spin now.

Held in Barcelona, Spain, this week, the 3GSM World Congress is billed by its producers as the world's premiere mobile event. Last year, around 34,000 people attended the show, taking in the offerings of 685 exhibitors. This year's event has attracted nearly 1,000 exhibitors and over 50,000 attendees are expected. Has 3G finally arrived?

OASIS today announced that the WS-Security (WSS) v1.1 specification has been ratified as a standard.

When the new Google Desktop was released, I was one of the first to warn about potential big-time invasions of privacy because your data would be stored on Google servers. But, in fact, those fears are overblown -- while there's potential danger, it's relatively small.

As Microsoft continues to thrash it out with the European Commission over what it needs to do to get the antitrust monkey off its back, reader Bill Flanagan points out that its offer to open up some of its Windows Server source code isn't as munificent as it may appear at first.

Plenty of enterprises play around with Web services, but few have made as big a bet on a full-fledged service-oriented architecture (SOA) as medical manufacturer MedicAlert. Read all about their deployment and learn the five things you need to know to make SOA work for your organization. Plus: reviews editor Jenny Zaino checks in with a podcast on how to deal with spyware and we take an early look at the RSA show in NWC's Take on the News,all this and more in today's edition of Network Computing's Daily Spin.

Read today's Daily Spin now.

Success!

Well, kind of.

I slapped the motherboard into an old white-box case I had laying around, hooked up a CDROM and a 30 Gig drive, and installed Win2K SP4. All went perfectly. I'll hand it to the guys at Via, their stuff "just works". And the VT 310-DP boots faster than most any board I've seen of late.

So since I was having all this success, I thought I'd try installing RedHat onto the Flash disk. I know, I know. RedHat isn't meant for that out of the box, but I figured I could deselect all of the GUI packages and any other unnecessary stuff and be good. After all, if you can get enough to boot, you can mount other disks for actual storage.

It failed miserably. First off it warned me that no, you can't fit the OS AND swap space for all that memory onto that little tiny flash card. Then when I told it "go ahead and install anyway", the lack of swap space caused it to fail.

So the next step is to download a smaller distro - there are a couple out there for embedded I've played with, I'll dig something up. Maybe a larger Flash card is in order too - 128 meg is pretty tiny.

Next I went to install the storage that Adaptec/Maxtor sent me. Pretty sweet system, with a drive bay, four SAS disks and an Adaptec 4800SAS controller. Unfortunately, the 4800 does not appear to be PCI compatible. I tried slipping it in, and the controller won't go in the expansion slot unless I take of the mounting bracket and reverse the card. Due to dimension issues, that would involve rotating the motherboard such that the back connectors no longer face out the back of the box. Bad JuJu. But not an impossible task. This is akin to prototyping, and I've done more ridiculous things prototyping.
But I've also blown a component or two by assuming too much. So I set about researching the card and its interfaces. I also delved into some competitors' cards as reference points.
My research shows that even though the standard says that PCI-X is backward compatible to PCI, most controller vendors have at least one card that isn't. Caveat Emptor apparently, for the vendors I looked at never say "this is not PCI compatible" in an upfront manner. I ended my research with the impression that the card I received - the 4800SAS is not PCI compatible, but the 48300SAS is. I hope I'm wrong, but that's what it looks like.

I've got a note out to Adaptec asking them if my research is correct - is the 4800SAS not compatible. No big deal if it isn't, I've got a machine here with plenty of PCI-X slots, not as cool as "buid your own SAS-based NAS", but still mondo cool IMO.

I'll keep you posted. If it's not PCI compatible, I'm going to either (a) Pick up some SATA disks to string off the motherboard's built-in SATA controllers or (b) get an old EIDE array controller card and string my collection of IDE disks off of it in an attempt to build an array. Either way it should be fun, but I'm hoping that the SAS controller really is PCI compatible.

Google just launched a blog for its China site, and because it's written in Chinese, I used Google's own translation tools to translate it. The results? No mention of the words "censorship" "freedom" or "Tiananmen Square" but plenty of hilarious non sequiturs.

An interview in this week's Time cover story on Google has this interesting tidbit: Larry Page says that only "a small, single-digit percentage" of people search for porn on Google.

Remember that just after SNW last year I blogged "The only constant is change, so stay tuned"?

Well change is here.

First off, I'd like to welcome Steve Hill to the full time staff of Network Computing. We've had him freelancing nearly full time, so now he gets benefits too.

Effective the 20th of this month, Steve will be taking over Storage and Servers. Since Steve and I work well together, and will be based in the same lab, you the reader should not feel too much pain from the trasition. And if you've read storage stuff in NWC or Storage Pipeline, then you already know who Steve is. A bang-up writer with an excellent grasp of the space. We're lucky to have him, and I'm glad he took the position.

I will be moving over to fill the (currently empty) slot of Security Editor for Network Computing. I've worked in security, and I'm particularly well versed in the App Dev security space. I'm also keenly interested in security. But I'll be learning non-stop because I've not had reason to play with some security technologies. Good stuff, and I'm really looking forward to it.

In the interim, I will be finishing up my blog series on "Really Build Your Own NAS", as I received an Adaptec SAS controler and Maxtor SAS drives yesterday from the crew at Adaptec. That's the last piece. I've got a gig of memory, the dual CPU Via motherboard, and a ratty old case that I salvaged from a dead machine. Soon, very soon, I will put all the pieces together, set it up to boot from flash, and report back to you.

Please welcome Steve aboard. We full time staff like to hear from readers about what we're doing both right and wrong, so don't hesitate to contact him at shill@nwc.com.

Storage has been a blast, and I'll miss some of it, but I'm vying to keep Storage Security in my baliwick (ie: take it with me from Storage over to Security), so I won't be completely gone.

Until next time.
Don.

There's got to be a better way to keep your system free ofspyware than the scan/clean/remove method. Aluria Software thinks it's got one.

Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg wimped out yesterday, backing off his company's increasingly vitriolic attacks on Google. A few days ago, a top Verizon honcho said Google "drinks spiked Kool-Aid." Yesterday, Seidenberg tried to tone down the rhetoric, saying, "I love what Google is doing." But he still wants to extort money from the Web site.

It was a sad statement that a discussion of women who've had an impact in technology, specifically computer science, often results in a discussion of just one woman, Admiral Grace Hopper (1906-1992).

Happy (snowy, at least where I am) Friday!

Today we have two freebies for you...

COTG Podcast - Streaming blogs and cattle prods - It's time for another Collaboration On The Go (COTG) podcast (download here). Streaming media reviews can sometimes cause quite a bit of controversy. Incorrect testing procedures, poor choices on video encoding settings, disputes on score weighting and testbed errors have all plagued streaming comparatives in the past. Fortunately, I don't think my latest streaming review had any of those problems. How can I tell? Lack of flame mail.

Google's new Desktop Search could prove to be the biggest government invasion of privacy of all time. The new tool lets you store your desktop data on Google servers. So when the feds come with a subpoena (or without one, as they frequently do), they'll be able to search through your PC's files.

Today, along with Borland's announcement that it would acquire software testing vendor Segue Software, it also announced its intention to divest itself of its IDE lines.

Verizon has fallen to new lows in its veiled threat to cut off Google's bandwidth if the Web site doesn't pay extortion money. A top Verizon honcho says that Google drinks "spiked Kool-Aid" because the search giant doesn't think that Web sites should have to pay to be carried on broadband networks.

Blog coverage by MacDailyNews from the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week includes more details of Intel's newest Xeon, code-named Tulsa, which our colleagues at CRN first tipped back in November and which is expected for the second half of the year.

One more member of the Telco mafia has threatened Google with a bandwidth cutoff. Verizon senior VP and general counsel John Thorne told a conference that Google "is enjoying a free lunch," by using Verizon's network, and issued a veiled threat to cut off Google's bandwidth.

Life used to be so simple. The golden days when a simple virus was all you had to worry about seem almost idyllic compared to the mean electronic streets that we walk today. I recently spoke with Shane Coursen, a senior technology consultant at Kaspersky Labs, about the once and future world of malware. You can hear the podcast here.

Telcos like AT&T and Verizon have announced their plans to extort money from Google and other sites if those sites want to get adequate bandwidth. But there's some evidence that Google may be planning to bypass the Telcos altogether, and roll out its own national broadband service.

Happy Friday! Today's Friday Freebies are all about rich internet application development, because I'm still a code monkey at heart...

AT&T's new motto should be a slightly revamped version of Google's: Only Do Evil. Here's the latest word from the big bad Telco --- it has been turning over personal and protected data about its customers to federal agencies since at least 2001, and possibly longer. And it's been doing it without telling customers, and in direct violation of the law.

Can the purchase of Fidiela, network monitoring vendor of the product NetVigil, pull Newtork General out if's downward slide? The marriage makes sense when looked at the connection made by Network General, from service orinented views of network and systems infrastructure provided by NetVigil, to the deep and mature packet decodes of the Network General Sniffer.

Verizon is prominent among the Telcos that are trying to force sites like Google to pay extortion money so that they get adequate bandwidth. Now there's word that Verizon plans on hogging more than 80% of its fiber optic network in order to provide its own TV service, while demanding that Web sites pay premium fees for the leftovers.

Does it matter when we and Network Computing say that a vendor has declined to participate in a review, due to 'lack of resources'? Most of the it seems like a copout to me. Just the PC thing to say in a magazine article. We spend a lot of time trying to get vendors into reviews, and when we miss a vendor we hear about it, at least from their sales folk. But does the reason make any difference to anyone?

An IM chat sometimes takes the strangest turns...

Just as Firefox has continued to make inroads in the browser market, so have StarOffice and ThinkFree made strides in gaining at least some mindshare in the market. But if you're the one making the choice - or perhaps more importantly, footing the bill - what are you gonna decide?

AJAX is in the news. Not for being an exciting "new" (I disagree with this description and anyone who makes such a claim, for the record) technology but for its ability to potentially expose clients (browsers, really) to vulnerabilities.

Hang on, folks, that Windows Server source code could end up being more free than we thought. Nobody (me included) thought that Microsoft's offer to make the source code available for inspection, at a price to be determined, would be the last word in its antitrust dispute with the European Commission; the EC has continued to press Microsoft to do things the EC's way, and it still has plenty of hammer to swing to enforce its wishes. But its newest demand of Microsoft is hilariously ironic: The EC says Microsoft can't charge anyone to see the source unless it can prove enough "innovation."

Attach the word "wireless" to any topic and you're likely to pique the interest of your colleagues, technical or otherwise. But mention "in-building wireless," and you'll just as quickly lose their attention as your own mind drifts to images of hot and itchy insulation-lined ceilings and narrow elevator shafts.

Very few people write actual letters nowadays. I can't remember the last time I received an actual, hand written letter. I think the last letter I wrote occurred something around age 10. The only exception is christmas cards, and even those are now coming off an inkjet printer. So I was a bit saddened to read that Western Union has discontinued sending telegrams. Granted, with fax machines and email, its time has come. Telegrams: the original electronic instant messaging system.

Cisco, Juniper, Acme Packet, and other Internet hardware makers build wiretap backdoors into their hardware that can allow the government to tap all Internet and network communications. And here's the kicker: The law requiring them to do this hasn't even gone into effect, and the specs aren't even final.