Brian Prince

At a baseball game, some people boo when they are displeased; at a movie theater, some simply walk out. At ShmooCon, you throw a ball.Throwing the Shmoo ball at a presenter is a time-honored tradition at the annual hacker convention, now in its fourth year. The event was held in Washington, D.C., Feb. 15-17, and […]

Oracle is expanding its user provisioning software to include new capabilities around attestation and reporting. The latest edition of Oracle Identity Manager, the company’s IAM (identity access management) offering, includes additional support to automate the certification of access privileges required by regulatory and industry compliance mandates. “What we’ve done with this release is we’ve made […]

While Microsoft will roll out its SQL Server 2008 at a long planned launch event this month, the actual shipment of the database software has been delayed until the third quarter of this year. Microsoft will officially introduce the updated database server Feb. 27 along with new versions of Visual Studio and Windows Server at […]

Getting around the defense mechanisms that malware writers erect isn’t easy. From packers to run-time obfuscators, software-armoring techniques create problems for reverse engineers and security analysts. Security pros Danny Quist and Val Smith, of Offensive Computing, have a solution-Saffron, a stealthy debugging platform they are developing. Having first presented the tool at the 2007 Black […]

Virtual worlds can have some very real security concerns-something security researchers Charles Miller and Dino Dai Zovi showed Feb. 16 at the ShmooCon 4 conference in Washington, D.C. The duo received press last year when they used a flaw in Apple’s QuickTime movie playback software to craft an exploit for Second Life, an Internet-based virtual […]

Officials at Trend Micro reported a strong end to 2007 in the company’s earnings report Feb. 14. The Tokyo-based security vendor posted a record $231 million in net sales in the fourth quarter, officials said. In yen, that figure represents a 13 percent year-over-year increase, and a 6 percent jump from the third quarter. The […]

Columnar database may be gaining steam in the data warehouse, but makers of row-based databases don’t need to lose sleep over it, analysts said. A column-oriented database in some circumstances can improve performance in large data warehouses. Industry analyst Jasmine Noel gave the example of a database that has a table with 20 columns and […]

Symantec and McAfee are making a play to help mobile operators secure consumer-oriented phones. Both companies have recently made plays around mobile security; McAfee with the release of McAfee VirusScan Mobile, and Symantec with the launch of Norton Smartphone Security, which provides complete protection for both Windows Mobile and Symbian devices in one product. The […]

Sybase is challenging Oracle’s Real Application Clusters feature with some clustering technology of its own. The latest version of the company’s Adaptive Server Enterprise product, ASE Cluster Edition, aims squarely at Oracle RAC by attempting to cut the complexity associated with deploying a database application across a shared-disk server cluster. The product utilizes new technology […]

With the Identity and Access Management market poised to grow, its expansion may be coupled with better integration and controls around role, entitlement and identity lifecycle management. According to a recent report by Forrester Research, the IAM (Identity and Access Management) market will see some explosive growth in the years ahead. The analyst firm estimated […]