IPOs need even more scrutiny about corporate governance than established public companies. These private companies are often reluctant to put aside the privileges of being private in order to become a public firm. In the long run, the best IPOs have a shareholder-friendly corporate IT governance structure. That is why corporate governance is one of the four factors that go into Renaissance Capital's rating system. In the context of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), governance is an often-misunderstood term. Some people use the term SOA Governance to mean service lifecycle governance—that is, governing the lifecycle of services from creation through deployment. Others take it to mean applying runtime policies to services. But is there more to SOA governance than this? And, without a common understanding of what governance means, are organizations that adopt SOA simply setting themselves up for failure? I believe, that governance with SOA should ultimately be about delivering on ...

In a recent nasty cyber attack by some mean hackers who flooded the Epilepsy Foundation's website with hundreds of pictures and links with rapid flashing images. I would say it is like giving 'Electric shocks' to the priveledged people. Cyber attack leading to severe migraine and near-seizure reactions in some site visitors who viewed those images. People with photosensitive epilepsy can get as near as seizure reactions, when they are exposed to flickering images, a response could be caused by video games and cartoons too. The hackers who infiltrated the Epilepsy Foundation's site didn't appear to care about profit. The harmful pages didn't appear to try to push down code that would allow the hacker to gain control of the victims' computers, for instance. In another recent attack, hackers exploited a simple coding vulnerability in Sen. Barack Obama's Web site to redirect users visiting the community blogs section to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's offi...

Under plans to strengthen checks at European borders laid out by the European Commission, international travelers would also have their stay logged and monitored by an electronic system, which could become operational by 2015. The system would alert authorities to persons overstaying the length of their visa. Biometric data would be submitted by travelers from outside the EU when applying for a visa, while those not needing a permit would be checked on arrival. Automated border-control systems and guards would be able to check visitors' identities using the biometric data, with EU and trusted travelers from outside the EU able to speed up the process by using automated gates. The Commission is also investigating the possibility of requiring electronic authorization for outside travelers as an alternative to requiring a visa. From 2009, all EU passports will feature a digital fingerprint and photograph and, from 2011 , non-EU citizens who apply for a visa will have to give their bi...

ATMs, or automated teller machines, today face the Internet-born threat of worms and denial-of-service attacks, as well as being at risk from malicious applications that can harvest customer data or hijack machines. In fact, most of the ATMs are at risk from these attacks as they rely on desktop PC technology--usually Intel hardware and Windows operating systems--linked to other machines, some connected to the Internet, in the bank's network, according to experts. Security vendor Network Box illustrated this threat by showing that only the personal identification number was encrypted when information was sent from a U.S. ATM to networked bank computers. The card numbers, card expiration dates, transaction amounts, and account balances were clearly readable in plain text to anybody intercepting the data as it traveled through the network. An early warning of this insecurity in modern ATMs came in 2003 when the Nachi Internet worm infiltrated "secure" networks and infect...

Today’s IT organizations are dealing with the consequences of exploding IT infrastructure growth and complexity. While computing resources continue to increase in power, organizations are unable to fully utilize them in single application deployments and cannot change computing resource assignments easily when application or business requirements change. At the root of the problem is uncontrolled server sprawl, servers provisioned to support a single application. Organizations that implemented hardware virtualization have unwittingly created a new problem: OS sprawl. While hardware remains a considerable cost component, software and management continue to be the largest cost considerations. The daily management and operations functions are daunting, and adding in business continuity requirements, the costs and complexity are overwhelming. Moreover, few tools provide the management and automation to ease the burden on IT departments. In order to address these critical challenges, don...

US Streetlight Grid Could Become Affordable Communications Back-Haul Network Other participants in the project included NightHawk to perform remote electric meter disconnect/reconnect, DataMatic remote water meter reading, Graphic Technologies (GTI) to provide geospatial data, and Power Delivery Products, Inc. for its faulted circuit indicators.by Staff WritersBoston MA (SPX) May 02, 2008Sunrise Technologies is teaming with Ember to turn the country's grid of streetlights into a wide-area communications network for a host of new public utility, security, environmental and other applications. Sunrise Technologies' new BrownBetty system creates a mesh network for communications between ground-based sensor and control devices and the Internet, utilizing Ember's ZigBee wireless network technology. By taking advantage of the existing streetlight infrastructure with its high elevation poles and clean line of sight, BrownBetty dramatically lowers the cost of backhaul communication...

Three basic IP VPN technologies are used today to create network architectures: Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), IP Security (IPSec), and Secure Socket Layer (SSL). Many companies are using combinations of these technologies to develop unique solutions for specific business needs. Understanding the options can help network managers make good choices, and design an optimized infrastructure that effectively uses the available technologies. Businesses that want to protect their networks from external attacks have a number of powerful tools at their disposal. Firewalls , for example, do a very good job of filtering and, in many cases, analyzing data packets to ensure that potentially destructive data is caught before it can do any harm. But most companies that are really serious about keeping troublemakers off of their networks also employ a technology that is specifically designed to target the presence of potential attackers: IDPS (Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems).IDP...