Security / Reviews

Monitoring services from Boundary, Circonus, and Librato combine simple setup and richly different capabilities

Network and Internet Content Filtering (ICF) is a technology tied to controversy. The technology itself is extremely interesting and evolving rapidly, but it is the debate around how this technology should be implemented that evokes passionate argument. Be it teenagers at home or employees in the workplace, the scenarios and ethical implications are still to be unravelled.

Just a few short years ago, all a PC needed for protection was a basic antivirus program to guard against any malware that arrived via an e-mail attachment, embedded in a shareware application or piggy-backed on a floppy disk.

WatchGuard's Firebox Peak X5500e is a strong, manageable firewall and the fastest in our test, but complexity and weak attack protection hold it back

Symantec bills Norton Utilities as a way to keep Windows PCs running longer by sprucing up their performance.

The mind can accurately recall pre-selected areas on an image, even quite a complex image, more reliably than it can a sequence of numbers and characters, or so it is said by the makers of a new password management application, PicturePIN-XP.

Ten years ago, computer security guru Fred Cohen made a revolutionary suggestion, one that inverted the roles of hardware and software. In traditional IS architectures, hardware persists while software is transient; the same processor executes instructions from many programs. This is why we say that software runs on hardware. Cohen suggested building an architecture around mobile programs, applications that would move around a network, recruiting and organizing hardware as needed. In this vision, the programs would endure while the hardware would come and go. In effect, the hardware would run on the software.