Jim Rapoza

The following sites are tried-and-true security destinations. Every IT pro should bookmark and visit these sites—often. www.securityfocus.com Home of the Bugtraq mailing list archive, plus a good source of security white papers www.sans.org Includes the SANS Institutes vulnerability list, white papers and port scan statistics from monitors spread around the Internet www.cert.org The CERT Coordination […]

Taken individually, the Cheese Worm is not a good thing. The last thing we need is another invasion by some nameless hacker using up our network resources. But when I first heard about it, I couldnt escape the feeling that this is the right way to fight security holes and malicious hackers. One of the […]

As XML has progressed down the technological road since its introduction in 1996, it has steadily gained momentum, to the point where most other World Wide Web Consortium standards are now based on Extensible Markup Language. But for the last two years, the giant, wide-body truck that has slowed its progress has been the development […]

When XML was introduced, although there were early adopters, it still took about a year before Extensible Markup Language began to be regularly used in enterprise-level applications and deployments. Now that XML Schema is a standard, the waiting period for its adoption should be much shorter. Part of this can be attributed to how long […]

In Shakespeares “Antony and Cleopatra,” Cleopatra commits suicide by holding a poisonous asp to her breast. After the recent collapse of many service providers, companies that decided to embrace an ASP know exactly how she felt. The bite of many fallen application service providers caused, if not death, at least a lot of pain, especially […]

Just about one year ago, the electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act was signed into law by Congress and former President Clinton. The act essentially made digital signatures legal for business, giving them the same weight under law as handwritten signatures. Since then, several companies have put forth products for creating and managing […]

Panel sessions at conferences are usually pretty bland, sparsely attended affairs. But the standing-room-only panel on XML databases that took place at the Tenth International World Wide Web Conference proved to be a lot more interesting than might have been expected. The panel consisted of researchers from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and XYZFind (maker of a […]

With the upcoming death of Clippy, the happy, animated paper clip in Microsoft Office that helped a few and annoyed millions, usability issues are on my mind again. Coming up with tools that help novices use a product or a Web site without becoming a needless bother to most other users is an extremely difficult […]

Someone at Lockstep Systems must have had one of those classic moments when a light bulb clicks on. Lockstep makes the product Webagain, which protects against Web site defacement by maintaining a backup of the site that can replace the live site if it is altered or defaced. Someone must have realized that most of […]

XML schema, released last week as a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation, is the most important new standard from the W3C since XML itself, making it much simpler for applications, data repositories and business partners to exchange and integrate data based on Extensible Markup Language. Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web and director of the […]

Earlier this year, during eWeeks OpenHack III, we stated that the most promising method for beating Argus Systems Group Inc.s PitBull was a direct attack on the operating system kernel. Last week, that is exactly how a group of Polish hackers got around the trusted operating system protection of PitBull and compromised a Solaris x86 […]

The thunderous performance of Zeus Technology Ltd.s namesake Web server may be what attracts the most attention, but Zeus Web Server 3.3.8 also provides a host of other strong features that make it one of the top enterprise-level Web servers eWeek Labs has seen. Zeus 3.3.8, released last month, proved to be a very flexible […]