Webawocky

Spam: Annoying and, in Virginia, a felony. The Virginia Supreme Court made history recently by upholding the conviction of Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, N.C. on three counts of violating Virginia's  Anti-Spam Act.

Here's what I find interesting:

• Jaynes is believed to have made $750,000 a month between July and August 2003.
• Some security experts don't think this will do much to put the fear of God in spammers. "I don't think it's going to do much to deter (criminals). If anyone's a little concerned, all it will do is push people to move spam's origination offshore. A lot of it already is," said Anthony James, vice president of products for Fortinet.

Virginia Supreme Court Upholds First U.S. Spam Conviction

Intel completed an internal research paper and survey that looked at five alternatives to the desktop computer model: terminal services, VDI (virtual hosted desktop), PC blades, and operating system and application streaming models. However, it found no clear winner among them.

Intel favors the OS or application streaming model because "it's a more incremental way to centralize the management of a computer fleet while creating the least amount of disruption for workers". (And of course, of the five, it sells the most individual PC units).

Intel: No Dominant Computer Model for Enterprises

For those of you that have installed Drupal 6, Drupal strongly recommends an upgrade to Drupal 6.1. This maintenance release fixes cross-scripting vulnerabilities described in Security Announcement SA-2008-018.

VMWare announced agreements yesterday (Feb 26) to embed its VMware ESX 3i hypervisor in servers from Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM. The hypervisor is OS-independent and claimed to be the industry's smallest at 32MB.

XenSource (recently acquired by Citrix) announced its embedded hypervisor in 2007 (XenSource Announces Market’s First Embedded Hypervisor).

VMware Announces Agreements to Embed VMware ESX 3i Hypervisor Across Broad Lines of Servers from Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM.

In an earlier blog post, 'Our System is Not Responding'. I agree., I described an irritating adventure on the American Express web site. Their response:

Dear Stanley C. Baptista:

Thank you for your e-mail.

You recently e-mailed us regarding an error message that was being displayed on our website.

I have read your blog and agree that the right error message should have been displayed. This would have saved you time and energy as the problem would have been properly diagnosed and we would have given you a prompter resolution.

I appreciate you taking your valuable time to contact us about this matter. We are continuously seeking ways to improve our website content and security features that would make it user friendly and I have forwarded your comments to our technical team for their review. During this review, we may contact you if additional information is required.

We are grateful that you have shared your thoughts with us. Be assured that the feedback we receive from Cardmembers plays an important role in enhancing your customer experience.

We sincerely value your association with American Express since 1983.

Sincerely,

/E. D'cruz
Email Servicing Team
American Express Interactive Services

I tried to log into American Express this morning to pay a bill. Without realizing it, I entered the wrong password, another one I use that contains special characters. I think the system should have responded with something like this:

Your user id and/or password are incorrect. Please try again.

Instead, this is what I got:

Our System is Not Responding

You may experience intermittent delays. We apologize for this inconvenience.

While we are working to correct the problem, you can:

• Try again by hitting the Back, Refresh or Reload buttons on your web browser
• Try your request again later today

If you are trying to make a payment, you can pay via telephone by calling [number]

Thank you

Ok, sometimes systems go down. I waited an hour and tried again. Same message. Then I went to work figuring those poor schmucks were having real problems...think of all the angry customers..I was feeling their pain. But when I got home from work, tried one more time, and got the same message, well, enough is enough.

So I called up customer support and a very pleasant man answered. I asked him if the system was down.

"Oh not at all sir!", he said, "How can I be of help?"

I described my problem. Expressing great sympathy, he told me it's not a problem at all and he'll get me fixed right up.

"What browser do you use?", he asked.

"Firefox 2.0.0.12.", I answered.

The government plans to approve a 28-mile virtual fence along the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has inspected the "fence". His comment: "I think it looks good".

Check out the article to get an idea of what is meant by a virtual fence. Well...I'd LIKE to believe such a thing will work. But, skeptics abound. In particular the comments are rather amusing (in a sad sort of way).

DHS chief says virtual fence on Southwest border will get government's okay

The federal government is embracing new forms of encryption technology to safeguard private and other sensitive information stored on laptops and thumb drives. This is particularly interesting since my group just had discussions with our security team about creating policies for a whole range of devices including thumb drives.

Also of interest is the fact that the feds are willing to let state and local governments buy through their "very aggressive" purchasing agreements.

Defense, GSA lead way on encryption technology

Drupal 6 was released yesterday (Feb 13). Hmmm...the Webawocky site is currently at Drupal 5.1. Remind me to do some major upgrading. According to the documentation, I should be able to jump from 5.1 directly to 6.

These were mentioned in an article from eWeek:

• Mobile and wireless solutions
• Consolidation/virtualization
• Unified communication (VOIP, IM, e-mail, cell phones, PDAs)
• Collaboration, specifically wikis and e-mail.
• e-Learning

I was a bit surprised that unified communication was mentioned not because it isn't a great time saver but because I didn't think it had a lot traction yet.

The Best Time-Saving Technologies of 2008.