The Skype co-founders last week personally paid millions of dollars in the over $100 million plus settlement against Kazaa, which they also co-founded. Why did they fork over such big bucks, when they had sold the company long ago and are no longer liable? Merely so they could enter the U.S., fear-free.

Cell phone radiation: Maybe it's bad for us...maybe it's not so bad. But until we know for sure, the nice folks at Handy-fashions.com don't want you taking any chances.

Ok, some days the craziest press releases cross my email. They usually get deleted based on the headline, but this one caught my eye because the FUD factor just jumps out right from the title.

Listen as RSA Security's Chief Executive Officer Art Coviello talks with NWC contributor Robert Hertzberg about Internet crime, privacy protection, terrorism—and storage behemoth EMC's impending $2.1 billion acquisition of RSA. | Listen Now

If Microsoft is going to make an inroads at all with its Zunes iPod rival, it's going to have to make the device perform a lot of tricks the iPod can' dot. Here's a start: Make it a Wi-Fi phone.

Today, July 28, has been designated as the 7th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day and marks the launch of Sys Admin of the Year – a contest co-sponsored by Splunk, digg.com, Bawls (soda), LOPSA (League of Professional System Administrators, NaSPA (Network and Systems Professionals Association) and USENIX/SAGE (the Advanced Computing Systems Association).

Sysadmin of the Year is a 3-month program inviting business professionals to nominate their company’s system administrator to receive recognition and a prize for their outstanding achievements.

What achievements are those, you ask? Well, you're reading this, aren't you? That means s/he has managed to keep the systems you need to do your job running yet another day. In any data center, that's quite an achievement, given the complexity of the systems involved. If you aren't impressed by that, consider just how many routers, switches, and machines your request went through to get this page and then think about the number of sysadmins involved in making sure each of those touch-points is operational 24x7.

You can nominate your system administrator for their achievements here.

That's right - freebies for your Friday. You know you missed them.

Today's freebies are all about anti-spyware and online storage...

Here's a computer that the King would have stepped on a dozen blue suede shoes to get to. Computer designer Jeffrey Stephenson created a casemod in the shape of a classic Shure 55 Unidyne microphone, also known by many as "The Elvis Mic." Constructed out of basswood, this baby sports a mini-ITX board and a real cast-iron mic stand that modified as a desktop stand.

More of Jeff's impressive designs can be found here.

Think of VoIP and you think primarily of Vonage and Skype. But quietly in the background, Comcast has been signing up VoIP customers, and may become king of VoIP.

Now you can reduce costs with an open source router. Heck you can probably get enough money by selling your Cisco routers on eBay for a company picnic this year. Doing the happy dance yet?

When Vonage looks at the competition, Skype isn't even on its radar, but Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T are directly in its cross-hairs. Vonage has targeted online buys directed at the phone companies, but not at Skype.

Usually, I hold down the number of news items that I include in the newsletter, as do all of my colleagues--we figure that skimming the cream for you is the best use of your valuable time, and you can always get more headlines at the Server Pipeline news page. But this week was hard: There was a ton of stuff going on, so I tossed in a few more than usual this week.

Vyatta officially launched its open source routing platform this week. The routing software, called Open Flexible Router (OFR), is available for a free download.

Rumors were flying last week about the possibility of HP acquiring Mercury Interactive and yesterday those rumors proved to be true when HP laid out $4.5b in cash for the troubled company.

Skype has gotten a reputation for being a big-time security headache for networks. But, in fact, if you're willing to spend the time, there are ways get the rogue application under control.

Rebuilding a datacenter at a new location is... painful.

The fact that we lost it all in a flood is bad, the process to restore it all is worse.

Insurance works at whatever speed they work at, and we're trying to work on publishing deadlines. Tough balancing act.

But my story today is about phone companies.

Beyond Print 08 Podcast - Beyond PR (download here) - This week's show is an interview with media analyst Sam Whitmore. We talk about the media, full disclosure, bloggers, getting slammed in the blogosphere and how to deal with bad publicity. This show is catered a bit towards the public relations professional, however there is good stuff in there for everyone to know. If you would like to subscribe to the NWC podcasts, please subscribe to our podcast RSS feed. It'll let you get all the new episodes automatically.

Verizon's chief flack, in an interview with Business Week, claims the telco is a leader in innovation, an "insurgent" deploying technology to change the world. What a joke! This company couldn't innovate its way out of a paper bag.

Everything you've ever suspected about AT&T and other telcos is true: They're backwards-looking, technology-averse dinosaurs whose idea of progress is to fight innovation and try to dominate markets with monopoly power. That's essentially the conclusion of a superb investigative piece in BusinessWeek.

Two developments in the last day show why Skype can't make a profit. First, in an eBay earnings conference call, eBay execs clearly were trying to hide Skype's real performance. And then today, the Gizmo Project announced that all VoIP calls to landlines throughout most of the world will be free -- forever.

I always find it interesting to see how standards bodies work. A group is attempting to form within the IETF, though it’s probably more accurate to say the people are talking about forming a working group, called Network Endpoint Assessment (NEA) which from it’s proposed charter aims to standardize protocols, either existing elsewhere or developing new one, for exchanging posture information between a client, a broker, and a server.

The problems this group is addressing is fundamental and while it seems from the meeting notes at a recent Birds of a Feather meeting that a large number of participants are vendors, a few participants were from companies that will ultimately consume the products the vendors will put forth. That’s a huge advantage of a truly open standards process. This group, if it gets started, may have a significant impact on core network access control interoperability and tangentially the feature sets. Without input from stake holders, critical features may be left out weakening the usefulness of the resulting work. I remember watching the activity in the IPSec working group and the decision to not work on NAPT and user authentication resulted in years of non-standardized solutions to remote access VPN which let’s face it, was the driver in that market.

I would like to see this group form and bring some sanity to the network access control space. I think it would benefit everyone involved.

We're at war – again. No kidding. It seems that life in Israel is the stuff that happens between battles and bombings. Only what's so strange about the Lebanon war, at least for this Jerusalem-based journalist, is how normal it all seems.

Having beaten on Microsoft a couple of times lately, for losing its basic business focus in its attacks on Linux and its decision to keep contesting the European Commission judgment against it, I'll now come to praise them as much -- and for keeping its eye on that business focus this time. (Hey, I try to be a fair guy.)

AT&T and other telcos make big promises about the future of IPTV delivering video over IP networks. But in private, these same execs pooh-pooh the technology. In fact, a recent Accenture survey found that not a single telco exec surveyed believes the technology will generate revenue in the next year, and only half say it will bring in money in the next three years.

Beyond Print 07 Podcast - Podcast Formats (download here) - What kind of podcast do you like to listen to? Do you like to hear a host rant for 20 minutes? Do you like debates? In this week's episode, I go over the four major podcast formats: scripted, monologue, debate and interview. I'll talk about the advantages of each, situations that make one more appropriate than the other, pitfalls and potential ways to ruin each format. If you would like to subscribe to the NWC podcasts, please subscribe to our podcast RSS feed. It'll let you get all the new episodes automatically.

Here's bad news for anyone interested in RFID: The Senate now has an "RFID Caucus" focusing on the technology. And any time that happens, it usually means bad regulations, more taxes, and overall inanity.

Reactivity has announced availability of its newest family of XML-SOA products and they're not only looking sexy, but have some great new features designed to assist in speeding up your SOA initiative.

Reports say that the Skype client has been reverse engineered, and that a compatible client using the cracked code will be released some time in August. If true, this is very bad news for eBay, because it'll make it much tougher for the company to make back its multi-billion dollar Skype investment.

Beyond Print 06 Podcast - Blogging On The Sun (download here) - Last week, I talked about blogging with Microsoft. This week we have another blogger interview. Through the magic of PSTN, I conducted an interview with Tim Bray, director of web technologies at Sun. We'll go into syndication, blogging policy, how Sun's policy was created, getting people on the blogging train and a bit on podcasting.

Wi-Fi hacking is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, so much so that the courts are starting to hand down big-time penalties. Just consider the latest -- a federal appeals court has upheld a nine-year sentence for someone who hacked into a Lowe's wireless network.

With competing network access control (NAC) initiatives like the Trusted Computing Group's Trusted Network Connect (TCG TNC), Microsoft's Network Access Protection (NAP), and Cisco's Network Admission Control (CNAC), as well as all the vendor specific NAC products and solutions, one thing is painfully clear. Standardization and conformance is critical. The matrix of security and network infrastructure products that should be included in a NAC solution for either end-point validation, profile authorization, or enforcement, is mind boggling.

The FBI is apparently drafting a law that would require makers of network hardware to sneak backdoor wiretapping capabilities into their gear --- and Cisco couldn't be any happier.

CNET News is reporting that new legislation being drafted by FBI will require ISPs to wiretap conversations and force makers of networking gear to alter their hardware to accommodate that capability.

It's easy for us urban dwellers to forget that most of the Internet world doesn't live pining away for optical-driven packet performance or even broadband. Their more immediate needs are just getting predictable Internet connectivity, the sort that proved darned hard to find on my recent trip to St. Lucia, South Africa

$3.8 million a day?!?!? A DAY?!?!? Do you know what you or I could do with that kind of money?

Is there anything going right for Vonage? Here's the latest bad news: It is being sued by Klausner Technologies for alleged patent infringement, which is asking for $180 million in damages and royalties.

It's official. Merriam-Webster has announced the newest words that will appear in its next dictionary update, including "google," "spyware," and "mouse potato."

As for non-tech words, you can now tell your wife that the soul patch you've been attempting to grow for several weeks now has been validated by the nice Dictionary people.

Want to make a network security specialist cringe? Tell him Skype is rife on the network. The VoIP software has myriad security holes that bedevil enterprise networks. Skype has refused to admit them -- and now it appears that rather than confronting them directly, it's rolling out a PR campaign to deny their existence.

It's always slow in the U.S. around the Independence Day holiday on July 4, and this week was really no different. But in Europe, life trucks on that week as usual.

Google is playing hardball when it comes to net neutrality -- it's now threatening to file anti-trust suits against AT&T and any other telco that abuse their power if no net neutrality law passes Congress.

No, they aren't images of the Packers or cheese. I thought I'd share some of the images of the carnage that was the lab in Green Bay last Friday because as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. I think the only word that really describes the carnage early Friday morning is "horror". There's just something very wrong about wading through 2.5" of water to get to your equipment. Kudos to our Cisco Catalyst 6500, which was still running and routing traffic despite the conditions.

Beyond Print 05 Podcast - Breaker Breaker, Microsoft Blogger (download here) - I've talked about new media in the past four podcasts, now I'll talk to somebody actually using it. In this week's edition, I talk to Jeff Sandquist at Microsoft. We talk about Microsoft evangelism, why Microsoft is trying to be more transparent, blogging policy and the genesis of Channel 9.