Do You Netscape?

Not Quite Yet

Netscape last week put the finishing touches on its much-anticipated "portal" strategy, announcing a free e-mail service and setting the stage for a protracted battle with Yahoo and a handful of other aspiring Net brands. The contracts between Netscape and the search engines expire on April 30, and the companies are in the midst of complex negotiations over just how they might be renewed. Mike Homer, the veteran Netscape marketing VP who recently took the reins of the company's Netcenter Web unit, says Netscape expects its forthcoming search engine to displace Yahoo, Infoseek, Excite and Lycos from their dominant positions on the Netscape Search page. Yahoo CEO Jeff Mallett downplays Homer's claims, saying he has "yet to see what the Netscape search program will look like."

Deborah Radcliff

Don't get blown away

Being prepared for vindictive employees can avert a security disaster.The danger within.  Internal employees - not outside hackers - can be a time bomb waiting to blow. Omega Engineering learned firsthand the dangers of the disgruntled employee after a timed virus, known as a logic bomb, wiped out all of its research, development, and production programs in one fell swoop. (The tape backup also was destroyed.) In January, charges were filed against 31-year-old Timothy Lloyd, an Omega programmer, for placing the bomb on the network, which detonated 10 days after his termination. Omega's costs will likely exceed $10 million as engineers and designers rewrite designs and recode programs in what Jim Ferguson, an Omega representative, says will be "an ongoing process for several years." ...

Hacker Stoppers?

Intrusion-detection (ID) tools are a $65 million industry that will grow as large as the firewall market, which reached about $255 million in 1997, according to the Hurwitz Group. Touted as network burglar alarms, ID systems are programmed to watch for predefined attack "signatures," or predefined bytecode trails of prespecified hacks. IDs also send out real-time alerts of suspicious goings-on inside the network

The Art of Debugging

The primary goal of debugging techniques is to reveal the inner workings of your program code. The solution to 90 percent of programming problems is simply a matter of pinpointing the exact problem itself. Typically, we debug programs by adding or removing code from the original version, which can help expose its workings. Our hope is that this exposure will reveal the flaw, and that once known, the flaw is probably easy to fix.

New morality on 'electronic theft'
could swell the ranks of U.S. felons

The bond between the entertainment industry, the software distribution industry and large publishers has led to a series of laws (and more to come, if the U.S. Congress is so inclined this term) that has translated commercial liability into criminal acts. This series of acts and bills goes far beyond piracy, levying penalties in terms of years in jail for relatively minor actions which could easily happen on anyone's computer in the course of a few days. ...A large segment of our population, if the bills pass, will be felons who just haven't been found, tried and jailed.

Chips Link Enterprises To Future

...the vast majority of remote access and networking gear is constructed of programmable computer chips that enable enterprises to enhance and upgrade hardware without purchasing new equipment. These programmable bits of silicon, the most prominent being digital signal processors (DSPs), are the tools that make it possible for equipment makers to deliver next-generation technology for today's hardware.... DSPs are especially popular in modems and wireless communications devices, such as cellular phones, because they are designed to handle the compute-intensive task of converting analog signals into digital information,

Week

Internet2 has been publicized in different lights, which means there is still lots of confusion about the project's internal goals and its ultimate purpose. Promising to provide access and transfer rates up to 1,000 times faster than those available today, the project is deserving of attention, but don't expect to be cruising at such high speeds just yet. Currently confined to academia, government research centers and a handful of nonprofit organizations, the new network is separate from the mainstream Internet. As far as access goes, however, Internet2 is not considered a "separate" network. The most significant distinction that can made at this point is that Internet2 will not replace the current Internet. The hope is that the developments and discoveries that emerge from continuing work on the Internet2 project will eventually find their way into all kinds of networks, including the Internet.