Information Week: Should IT Get The Blame in Teacher’s Pornography Case?
Sharon Gaudin talks about the Julie Amero case and ponders whether the IT department was responsible – and culpable – for the situation which resulted in Amero’s trial.
Sophos’ O’Brien agrees. “She was the adult in the room at the time responsible for what the children were exposed to, so she became the scapegoat for what was a lack of responsibility on the part of the people who should have been maintaining that PC,” he said, noting that the computer in the classroom wasn’t running a firewall or antivirus software. “When I look for who is responsible for maintaining that PC, I don’t look to the substitute teacher. There was a tool in the classroom that wasn’t properly maintained.”
And that, added O’Brien, should be a loud warning to CIOs and IT administrators in education, government, and industry. In a corporate setting, pornographic Web sites or pornographic pop-ups on computer screens could lead to office unrest and even create a hostile work environment.
We’ve written on the network monitoring and IT management implications of the Amero case previously.
Dare Obasanjo: Google Gears – Replacing One Problem with Another.
An examination of the problems with the trend of turning online apps into “offline Web apps” via mechanisms such as Google Gears, Microsoft Silverlight, and Adobe Apollo/AIR, which basically comes down to the classic question: If you make two separate revisions to an old version, how do you merge the changes?
I don’t consider myself some sort of expert on data synchronization protocols but it seems to me that there is a lot more to figuring out a data synchronization strategy than whether it should be done based on user action or automatically in the background without user intervention. It seems that there would be all sorts of decisions around consistency models and single vs. multi-master designs that developers would have to make as well. And that’s just for a fairly straightforward application like Google Reader. Can you imagine what it would be like to use Google Gears to replicate the functionality of Outlook in the offline mode of Gmail or to make Google Docs & Spreadsheets behave properly when presented with conflicting versions of a document or spreadsheet because the user updated it from the Web and in offline mode?
Don’t get me wrong – the “use it even without a net connection” aspect of these projects is great, but I’m concerned that this will inspire app developers to be lazier about how much information they send over the network – it could increase the chattiness of apps. On the other hand, if apps can be used offline, they can also theoretically be used offline when there’s too much traffic on the network and update to the online database when traffic lightens. The end-users can keep working during this time without annoying lags in the software. Makes me wish we had more offline apps back when I was entering shopping codes into RETEK for a major east-coast supermarket chain.
WinBeta: Microsoft Study – Vista improves networking.
Taken with the requisite grain of salt, a Microsoft-funded study says that Microsoft’s Vista and Longhorn products, used in combination, increase network performance threefold.
In a 38-page white paper titled “Enhanced Network Performance with Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008,” the Tolly Group compares the networking performance for file access on WANs and LANs using various configurations of Windows Server 2003 R2 or 2008 on the backend and XP SP2 or Vista on the frontend.
Not surprisingly, the combination of the newest operating systems brings the best gains in network performance in large part, Tolly concludes, because of an upgraded TCP/IP stack and updates to thefile-sharing Server Message Block (SMB ) protocol.
We’ve covered the more-aggressive Compound TCP stack in Vista previously (here and here) and we’re not surprised that Longhorn-to-Vista connections would be optimized for one another. But here’s the big question: will we need Longhorn to run a Halo 2 server?
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