27-09-2004 • VOLUME 7 • NUMBER 36 • £2.60
WWW.ITWEEK.CO.UK
15 ENTERPRISE Sun’s
UltraSparc IV servers
22 INTERNET Macromedia’s
new Web Publishing System
36 NETWORK Voice over IP
drives 10 Gigabit adoption
CONTENTS
ENTERPRISEWEEK
Storage giants show latest lines
JBoss app server backs J2EE 1.4
Suse Linux Enterprise Server 9
INTERNETWEEK
Web conferencing options grow
Ask Jeeves personalises searches
CLIENTWEEK
Better tools to protect access
AMD adds to 64bit laptop chips
Policing remote-client security
NETWORKWEEK
Suite manages the wireless LAN
Broadband crosses power lines
EtherPeek NX 3 packet analyser
MANAGEMENTWEEK
DTI pushes for more IT females
Are regulations stifling e-trade?
A new generation of IT dangers
EC blow to
PeopleSoft?
Speculation grew late last week that
the EC is set to clear Oracle’s £4.3bn
hostile takeover of rival PeopleSoft by
the end of October, when European
competition commissioner Mario
Monti steps down.
The news came as Oracle
launched a civil action to remove the
poison pill set up by PeopleSoft’s
board, which would force the database
giant to compensate many customers
if it dropped support for existing
products after a takeover.
At its Connect 2004 user conference last week, PeopleSoft announced
a deal with IBM to create close ties
between its products and IBM’s WebSphere middleware.
Barry Wilderman of analyst Meta
Group said the deal could make PeopleSoft less attractive to Oracle by
complicating its takeover plans. But a
quick EC decision could accelerate
Oracle’s bid, making this irrelevant.
Oracle ECM move, p11 Leader, p12
endors are rushing to protect firms
blitzed by security threats as Symantec’s Internet Security Threat report, published last week, indicates that about 30,000
PCs a day are being hijacked to act as zombies relaying attacks; and the first exploit for
Microsoft’s JPEG vulnerability has emerged.
Microsoft is among the vendors lining
up to protect customers, and has announced
plans for its first disk-to-disk data backup
and recovery software. Microsoft storage
chief Yuval Neeman said,“Unlike backing up
to tape, disk-to-disk snapshots take seconds.”
Due in the second half of next year,
Microsoft’s Data Protection Server will
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New rules cut porn risks
David Neal
HOW UK FIRMS TACKLE ILLEGAL PORN
I
T managers worried about the repercussions of discovering paedophile content
on company systems have been advised
by online watchdog the Internet Watch
Foundation (IWF) that they can report such
material without fear of prosecution.
The advice follows a survey by the IWF
which found that most IT managers would
not know how to proceed if they found such
illegal material on company systems.
Under current legislation, it is a criminal offence simply to possess an indecent
image of a child, but malware is increasingly responsible for surreptitiously depositing offensive images on corporate systems.
In a survey of 1,000 IT Week readers,
the IWF found that 87 percent of IT professionals were unaware of the rules on
inadvertent possession of child pornography. The IWF said the regulations have
now been clarified and IT managers are
allowed to identify and secure such images
without suffering legal consequences.
According to an imminent memorandum of understanding [MoU] between the
Vendors plug defences
V
15
15
19
extend the vendor’s role in storage, adding
to Windows Storage Server 2003.
Rival storage management vendors are
offering broader coverage. Veritas last week
completed its purchase of email archiving
firm KVS and added support for IBM’s AIX.
EMC is also moving to be
a broader supplier of systems to help firms stay on
the right side of regulators.
It last week offered its first
Express hardware, software
Neeman: rapid
backup to disk
Internet usage policy
Child porn policy
Monitor internet usage
Notify police
65%
63%
27%
Source: IWF
police and the Crown Prosecution Service
relating to the Sexual Offences Act 2003, IT
managers can preserve suspect images on
company systems, but only if they do so in
order to provide access to a law enforcement agency or other relevant body.
“The law [previously] did not help IT
managers who wanted to report incidents;
they were frightened,” said Peter Robbins,
chief executive of the IWF. “But recent
changes protect those who have been legitimately exposed, meaning that they can
report it to either us or the police. [Before
the MoU] it would have been illegal to look
at those images, even as a systems administrator. Most companies do not want direct
involvement with the police.”
The IWF research found that just 27 percent of respondents said they would report
and services package for email management.
Other vendors are combining to add
scale. TruSecure, Betrusted Holdings and
Ubizen are forming a new entity called
Cybertrust. This follows the example of firms
such as Symantec, which recently agreed to
acquire security consultancy @Stake.
The moves come as analyst Gartner
warns about securing offshore systems.“Service providers and users need to look at risk
and create an information protection framework to identify and spell out each of the
concerns, determine their validity and make
educated decisions about the risks,” said
Partha Iyengar, Gartner India vice-president.
Microsoft, p6 Security leaders, p8
EMC, p11 Storage, p15 Bots, p22
Access guards, pp27, 28 Attacks, p40
incidents of child porn externally.
Robbins added that thanks to the
90%
MoU, companies will not always have
to report suspect images to the police.
Instead firms can ask the IWF to examine the content, and if it deems the
images illegal the IWF will take responsibility for reporting it to the police.
Offensive but not illegal content can be
dealt with internally.
George Gardiner, an IT law expert, said,
“This is good news. There was ambiguity,
leaving people uncertain about whether
they would be prosecuted [and] this has
been removed. But clearly, the IT manager
must not go looking for more evidence –
just one incident will be sufficient.”
IT crime expert Neil Barrett said, “Under current laws when corporates find child
porn they delete it, and the evidence is gone.
The memo aims to encourage corporates to
retain evidence, but the firm must do a risk
assessment first – no company wants its
name associated with child porn.”
Reporting child porn, Leader, p12
Data laws, p39 www.iwf.org.uk
www.itweek.co.uk/comment/1141339
PalmSource
talks phones
PalmSource will this week
announce a new version of
the Palm OS platform at
its European Developer
Conference in Munich. It
will detail its new focus on
smartphones and wireless connectivity, and will Wireless
also showcase future
focus for
devices from licensees.
Palm OS
PalmSource was spun off
from PDA maker PalmOne last year.
Windows smartphone review, p29
NEWS INSIDE: BROADBAND Choice, p4 • VoIP Growth, p4 • HP Blades, p5 • SUN Linux p5 • BACKUP Kit, p6 • MESSAGING Control, p8 • ORACLE ECM, p11