Internet Turns 35, Still Work in Progress

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Programmers are trying to imbue Web pages with intelligence.

And work is underway to re-engineer the network to reduce spam and security troubles.

Stephen Crocker and Vinton Cerf were among the graduate students who joined UCLA professor Len Kleinrock in an engineering lab on Sept. 2, 1969, as bits of meaningless test data flowed silently between the two computers. By January, three other “nodes” joined the fledgling network.

Then came e-mail a few years later, a core communications protocol called TCP/IP in the late 70s, the domain name system in the 80s and the World Wide Web — now the second most popular application behind e-mail — in 1990.

Today, Crocker continues work on the Internet, designing better tools for collaboration. And as security chairman for the Internet’s key oversight body, he is trying to defend the core addressing system from outside threats, including an attempt last year by a private search engine to grab Web surfers who mistype addresses.

Network providers now make only “best efforts” at delivering data packets, and Crocker said better guarantees are needed to prevent the skips and stutters now common with video.

Working with NASA, Cerf is also trying to extend the network into outer space to better communicate with spacecraft. But many features being developed today wouldn’t have been possible at birth given the slower computing speeds and narrower Internet pipes, or bandwidth, Cerf said.

While engineers tinker with the Internet’s core framework, some university researchers looking for more speed are developing separate systems that parallel the Internet. Think information highway with an express lane.

Semantic Web is a next-generation Web designed to make more kinds of data easier for computers to locate and process.

http://networks.org/?src=ap:internets-birthday

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Outsourcing’s next big thing–Malaysia?

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Besides sending to Malaysia jobs in areas such as manufacturing and call centers, companies are using the country as a base for shared services like marketing and IT functions to support their operations in other countries.

India took the top spot in AT Kearney’s 2004 offshoring index because of its cost advantages, as well as its depth and breadth of offshoring experience and the availability of skilled labor.

Still, Malaysia’s well-developed infrastructure, attractive business environment and strong government support makes it a “rising alternative to India and China,” said Ooi Joon Leong, managing director of AT Kearney’s Malaysia unit.

To meet the demand for skilled IT labor, the report said, the educational system in India produces an estimated 2 million English-speaking graduates with strong technical backgrounds yearly. In contrast, the pool of IT and engineering graduates in Malaysia totals 75,000 annually, said Ooi, who spoke at a business conference here Wednesday.

During his keynote address at the same event, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi spoke of the importance of the offshoring and shared services market to the country’s Multimedia Super Corridor project, an attempt to develop a high-tech industrial zone like Silicon Valley.

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5344618.html

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Slack users blamed for virus longevity

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The IT security firm notes that the Zafi-B virus continues to wreak havoc on global email. “Although we have seen a small, 10 per cent decline in reports of Zafi-B since last month, this email-aware worm doesn’t look like it’s going to fade into obscurity anytime soon,” said Carole Theriault, security consultant at Sophos. “Protection against Zafi-B has been available for a couple of months now, and computer users need to get into the habit of updating their systems in a much more timely manner, or this nuisance will continue to dominate reports.”

In spite of the arrest of the Netsky virus author, a number of variants are still affecting businesses, and Netsky.P was number two in Sophos’s top 10 chart in August. Rounding off Sophos’s top 10 list are four more variants of the Netsky virus, the MyDoom-O, Bagle-AA and Lovgate-V. Despite more than 1,200 new viruses being detected in August, not one has made it into the chart this month.

In fact, the entire top 10 is made up of viruses which have been doing the rounds for weeks, if not months,” said Theriault.

August was a particularly bad month for virus attacks. Sophos analysed and protected against 1,230 viruses in the month, which the company says “is the highest number of new viruses seen in one single month since December 2001.”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/02/virus_life/

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Spam-seeding viruses dominate August charts

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In their virus reports for August, software and Internet security companies said that viruses such as Netsky, Zafi and MyDoom, together with their variants, continued to dominate the charts.

“Although we have seen a small, 10 percent, decline in reports of Zafi-B since last month, this email-aware worm doesn’t look like it’s going to fade into obscurity anytime soon,” said Carole Theriault, security consultant at antivirus firm Sophos. “Protection against Zafi-B has been available for a couple of months now, and computer users need to get into the habit of updating their systems in a much more timely manner, or this nuisance will continue to dominate reports.”

Email security outsourcing firm MessageLabs said the ratio of viruses to emails passing through its servers was 1 in 14 — about the same as for July. The rate for June was one in 11.

Spam interceptions meanwhile spiralled to 100 million for August, accounting for 70 percent of all email flowing through the company’s servers. Mark Sunner, chief technical officer at MessageLabs, said the trend for viruses to be linked to spam had continued. July and August were relatively quiet for viruses, suggesting that September will be more active.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39165257,00.htm

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Sendmail searches for antispam testers

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The company released a module for its Sendmail e-mail server software that attempts to verify the source of messages to help Internet users block mail from unwanted senders. The technique is part of a developing Internet standard known as Sender ID.

“What authenticating does is allow you to rely on who sent the message,” said David Anderson, CEO of Sendmail, a maker of e-mail software. “We believe people will stop filtering out bad messages based on bad content and instead allow good messages with good senders.”

The majority of e-mail carried across the Internet uses the open-source Sendmail program, which runs on the Linux and Unix operating systems.

The new module for the program allows e-mail administrators to modify their systems and add the authentication technology.

Sender ID is a hybrid specification created from the Caller ID for E-mail system proposed by Microsoft and another antispam technology known as Sender Policy Framework that was developed by Meng Wong, the founder of e-mail service Pobox.com. The specification has not been finalized by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the technical group that sets Net standards.

“We want to get this thing accepted, because it has the best functionality and shortest deployment time of any of the choices right now,” Anderson said.

Sendmail is distributing a test version of the software to get enough companies onboard and gauge a computer’s ability to authenticate e-mail messages in real time. Adding the authentication to an e-mail server slowed processing down by 8 percent for outbound traffic and 15 percent for inbound traffic, according to the Sendmail’s testing site.

“The current focus is to try these authentication systems with real mail on real systems to determine if the approaches proposed are robust enough to survive in the current infrastructure,” the company stated in a white paper on the topic.

The new modules can be downloaded from the Sendmail testing site.

http://news.com.com/Sendmail+searches+for+antispam+testers/2100-1032_3-5330638.html?part=rss&tag=5330638&subj=news.1032.5

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Security vendor directory to aid responsible disclosure

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“The function of the [directory] is merely a foundation for how OSVDB intends to revolutionize the way vulnerabilities are disclosed to the vendor,” Brandon Shilling, a member of the OSVDB development team, said in a statement.

“[It’s] the first phase for additional upcoming services including assisting researchers with ethically disclosing vulnerabilities, helping to verify vulnerabilities and the OSVDB vulnerability portal.

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid14_gci1003346,00.html

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