Month: March 2005

Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe, speaking at the Free and Open source Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels on Sunday, said that he knows “a few companies” that have deployed the Firefox browser or Thunderbird mail client across 100,000 seats.

Companies are often reluctant to publicise that they have migrated from Microsoft Internet Explorer or Outlook to the open source browser or email application, as they are concerned that this may damage their relationship with Microsoft, according to Nitot. “I know companies that are deploying Firefox or Thunderbird, but they aren’t talking about it as they don’t want to see an increase in their [Microsoft] Office licence price,” said Nitot.

In the past, senior Microsoft executives have tried to prevent high-profile migrations to desktop open source applications. In 2003 Steve Ballmer met the mayor of Munich to dissuade him from replacing Microsoft Windows and Office with Linux and OpenOffice.org, the open source operating system and productivity application.

“They start talking about it and suddenly Ballmer comes in and twists your arm until you cry.”

Although Nitot was unwilling to reveal the names of any companies that have deployed Firefox, he said the French government is seriously considering deploying the application. The French Ministry of Defence is spending ¬7m (£4.8m) to build its own secure version of Linux, while the French Ministry of Equipment has decided to migrate 1,500 Windows NT servers to Linux.

It is essential that Firefox makes inroads in the enterprise before Microsoft launches the next version of IE, according to Nitot.

Other important issues for companies are the availability of commercial support and the ability to lock down the application to restrict what employees can do.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,2000061733,39182987,00.htm

The company is combining identity and access management tools with its existing eTrust products. This “security management architecture”, as CA calls it, enables employees to keep a single identity when logging into different applications.

“CA is committed to providing security solutions that simplify security management across all platforms — mainframe and distributed,” said Toby Weiss, senior vice-president of eTrust security management at CA, in a press statement.

CA has not released full details of how it will integrate these tools into eTrust products, but said it would provide a “common security backbone” across all network technologies. The company claims eTrust will use open standards such as SAML, Kerberos and SAF to enable interoperability between different platforms, applications and security mechanisms. Currently only two CA products have the identity-tracking capability — eTrust CA-ACF2 r8 and eTrust CA-Top Secret Security r8, but the company said it would be integrated into all eTrust products in the future.

Compliance regulations, such as Sarbanes Oxley, mean that some companies have to be able to produce audit trails for all their employees or be liable for fines and imprisonment. CA said this was a reason for its move.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/0,39020375,39189762,00.htm

The new open-standards framework, dubbed the eTrust Security Management Architecture, will be incorporated into channel-friendly toolkits from CA later this year, said to Bilhar Mann, vice president of product management for identity and access management.

Down the road, CA will extend this security backbone to all of its identity and access management products, Mann said.

By featuring a common security backbone that leverages open standards such as WS-Security, SAML, SPML, ISO-10181, Kerberos, X.509 and SAF, the new architecture enables interoperability between diverse platforms and security mechanisms. The new framework also will provide “intelligent decision processing,” a feature that enables security policies based on point of entry and other variables that may impact the attributes of a specific transaction, as well as “true accountability,” which ensures that a user’s identity is not lost in a transaction by delivering identity mapping across platform boundaries.

This latter technology, spawned from the nascent log management industry, delivers a complete audit of an identity or access transaction as it moves throughout an organization, and enables solution providers to help customers enforce platform-independent security policies.

http://www.crn.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=60404405&flatPage=true

In mid-February, chairman Bill Gates promised a new version of IE before Longhorn ships, and said the new browser — which will concentrate on delivering additional security against such threats as phishing — would roll into beta this summer.

At that time, only Windows XP SP2 was mentioned as a supported OS.

According to the posting on the blog, IE 7 will also work on the 64-bit edition of XP (with the long title of “Windows XP Professional x64 Edition”) and the upcoming Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1).

About Windows 2000 support, Microsoft hasn’t budged from its previous position. “We have heard the requests for support of Windows 2000, but have nothing to announce at this time.”

On a related subject, the blog also made clear that a new version of Outlook Express, Microsoft’s for-free basic e-mail client, would not appear with IE7.

http://www.securitypipeline.com/news/60404527