Timothy Dyck

Security always comes down to securing applications. The whole point of firewalls is to hide internally deployed network applications—assumed to have exploitable vulnerabilities somewhere—from the outside world. The main weakness of firewalls is that they are based on a one-application/one-IP-port model, something that worked in the pre-Web days but is completely inadequate now. These days, […]

Integrating a far-flung organizations technology products and strategies is one of the toughest, messiest and most failure-prone jobs in IT. Making sure that integration projects result in success takes business knowledge, clearly defined goals, realistic expectations and the right technology. In this Special Report, well outline the major challenges and directions in the integration space, […]

Questioned under a slowly swinging light, Web services wouldnt confess to being anything special or even anything we havent seen before. Bruce Nelson and Andrew Birrell, two researchers at Xerox Corp. subsidiary Palo Alto Research Center Inc., formalized the idea of the remote procedure call in a series of publications in the early 1980s. Sun […]

The next version of Linux suffered a major setback in mid-August with the sudden announcement that the head IDE developer, Marcin Dalecki, was leaving the development effort and that all his IDE code was being thrown out. Theres still mystery around the reasons for this, although Dalecki had been under steady criticism by some other […]

Databases are the place where many different client data access technologies need to intersect, making the repositories natural candidates for Web services. Database vendors have seen this convergence coming, and a number of them have already released first-generation Web services features for their databases. Microsoft Corp.s SQL Server 2000 has the simplest and easiest-to-deploy Web […]

Last month, the W3C published the first public working draft of the next generation of HTML, XHTML 2.0. (Never mind that XHTML 1.0 hasnt caught on yet.) XHTML 2.0 uses the same modular structure defined in XHTML Modularization 1.0, so small devices can support just a subset of XHTML, but it introduces big changes in […]

Cloudmark Inc.s approach to blocking spam relies on its entire user base. The companys Cloudmark SpamNet plug-in adds a small tool bar to Microsoft Corp.s Outlook that includes a button users can click to identify a selected e-mail message as spam. A message signature is then added to Cloudmarks spam database, and other users in […]

Organizations developing applications that summarize key business metrics will find a capable tool set in the upgrade to Crystal Decisions Inc.s database reporting tool, Crystal Reports. However, Version 9 is still oriented around desktop and workgroup reporting tasks. The Version 9 release of the well-established report writer started shipping in the middle of last month […]

It looks like the C# language is gaining momentum—Im starting to see interesting, creative third-party applications springing up that are written in C#. One eminently practical example is a little utility called Command Prompt Explorer Bar 1.1, downloadable for free from www.codeproject.com/csharp/CommandBar.asp. Its an application written entirely in C# and so requires that .Net Framework […]

HTML is probably the worlds most important data format, and so changes come very slowly. But the World Wide Web Consortiums HTML Working Group has big plans for HTML. The current HTML standard is actually now XHTML 1.0 Second Edition, which is a set of minor changes to HTML to turn it into valid XML […]

Usenix security has latest in security research. The 11th Usenix Security Symposium, held early last month in San Francisco, provided insights into future commercial security work. The conference is largely an academic one, with refereed papers and invited talks. The paper ìSecurity in Plan 9î was honored with the conferenceís Best Paper award for its […]

The next version of the JSP Web page scripting language is undergoing major changes for its 2.0 release. The proposed final specification for JavaServer Pages 2.0 was published Aug. 16. Before Version 2.0 can be finalized, however, reference implementation and compatibility test suites must be developed. Specification changes could still occur, but they will be […]