Brian Prince

Greenplum is banking on new technology to speed the data loading process for companies dealing with large data warehouses. Greenplum’s massively parallel processing (MPP) Scatter/Gather Streaming (SG Streaming) technology is designed to eliminate the bottlenecks associated with other approaches to data loading. At its core, its approach utilizes a parallel-everywhere approach to loading in which […]

Many data breach notifications start with a story like this: An unencrypted CD with customer information has gone missing. But what if the CD were not only encrypted, but for that encryption to be broken, the person had to authenticate and get the encryption keys from the cloud? This is the question data protection vendor […]

MySQL and IBM launched a public beta in the past week for the DB2 for i Storage Engine for MySQL (IBMDB2I), data storage technology IBM says will be a boost for System i shops. The storage engine has been developed for MySQL running in IBM i, V5R4 and V6R1. IBMDB2I allows users to create MySQL […]

Despite taking some criticism, the British Broadcasting Corp. is defending its decision to buy a botnet in an effort to inform the public about the dangers of cyber-crime. In an experiment, the BBC technology program “Click” bought a botnet over the Internet and used it to spam e-mail accounts the program set up to demonstrate […]

Financial information of online campaign donors for Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman has made its way to Wikileaks.org, prompting campaign officials to advise donors to cancel their credit cards. According to the Star Tribune, the U.S. Secret Service has launched an investigation into how the information ended up online. Officials at Wikileaks.org-the site that last year […]

The minds behind BBC’s television program “Click” have inadvertently thrust themselves into an ethical quagmire. Recently, the team at Click purchased a botnet to demonstrate to viewers the power wielded in the cyber-underworld. The team used the roughly 22,000-machine botnet to spam Hotmail and Gmail accounts they controlled, as well as to launch a distributed […]

Cyber-criminals are always on the lookout for new tricks, but they are also sticking with an oldie-but-goodie-abusing search engine results. According to security pros, there has been a significant increase in the tactic since January. On March 10, officials at Symantec noted attackers were using sponsored search results on Yahoo to lure Web surfers to […]

Microsoft got more specific March 10 with its plans to enhance database capabilities in the cloud for users of SQL Data Services. The company announced that later this year, SQL Data Services (SDS) will be fine-tuned to connect to database applications via Tabular Data Stream (TDS). TDS is the network protocol used by SQL Server. […]

Adobe Systems released a patch March 10 for a zero-day vulnerability under attack by hackers. The patch for Version 9 of Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat comes a day earlier than the company had planned. Patches for earlier versions of Reader and Acrobat are still slated for March 18. The vulnerability is the result of […]

Microsoft released three security bulletins March 10 for Patch Tuesday, including a patch for a critical vulnerability in the Windows kernel affecting the graphics device interface. According to Microsoft, the Windows kernel does not properly validate input passed from user mode through the kernel component of GDI. The vulnerability could allow hackers to run arbitrary […]