Overheard: NBAR is a powerful application-layer firewall

NBAR is a very powerful application-layer firewall that you may already have installed on your Cisco router. While traditional firewalls can only recognize traffic based on IOS Layers 3 or 4, Cisco’s NBAR can go all the way to Layer 7. David Davis, What can Cisco’s Network-Based Application Recognition (NBAR) do for you?

Overheard: Chrome is Window’s fork?

Take a look at the Terms and Conditions for the “Chromium” project up on Google Code. There are 24 different bits of third party software involved in making Chrome work, and one of them is WTL, the Windows Template Library, which was released as Open Source in 2004. Scott Hanselman, The Weekly Source Code 33 – Microsoft Open Source inside Google Chrome

Overheard: Berkeley software development

“There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence.” Jeremy S. Anderson

Be sure to read our three-part series: The future of Unix.

Overheard: Open source forks

A benefit of open source software is the ability to take the code base of an application and develop it in a new direction. This is, as most of you probably know, called forking, and is very common in the open source community. Sam Nurmi, 10 interesting open source software forks and why they happened

Interesting list! One of the commenters, Dingo Jones, said that Mac OS X is an Open BSD fork.  That’s the second time I’ve read that.  I guess it makes sense — especially now that we know Google Chrome has Microsoft as one of its ancestors.

Overheard: Explaining IT to the business side – marketecture

It seems that every presentation has that one attractively drawn diagram that purports to illustrate how the vendor’s product fits into their customers’ IT environments. Such diagrams, however, rarely have any technical detail since they are not intended for consumption by developers or architects. Rather, they are typically created by marketing people to communicate to analysts, prospective customers, investors and the press. Yes, I’m talking about marketecture. Jason Bloomberg, What is the shape of a service-oriented architecture?

Ok. So marketecture is the basically a buzzword for explaining things to the business side.  Jason does a good job analyzing the use of diagrams in SOA marchitecture. All of them look sufficiently confusing to me.

 Now, marketecture (“marketing” plus “architecture,” in case you haven’t figured that out yet) serves an important purpose. We’re talking about fairly complex concepts such as distributed computing architectures, and no matter how you cut it, such architectures have a lot of different pieces that talk to each other in numerous different ways. Every vendor must come up with effective approaches for simplifying their message so that people other than hardcore techies can understand it.

Overheard: Hadron and F-BS

I believe that much of the public reaction to the Large Hadron Collider is grounded in a kind of ignorance that might be called ‘Faith-Based Science,’ or F-BS for short. Charles King, as quoted in Excitement and Fear Abound Over Super Collider

Overheard: Moving from a culture of “need to know” to one of “need to share”

ECM is about software. But is also about knowing the workflow of your people, where the information is being stored and how people are using the information. Doug Cornelius, Enterprise Content Management

I am trying to shift the firm from “ask for permission” to “ask for forgiveness.” At the same time, moving it from a “need to know culture” to a “need to share culture.” I do not think that enterprise content management fits into my approach of collecting my firm’s knowledge.

Doug hit the nail on the head. Part of the problem with Enterprise Content Mangement software is that it’s so permission-driven that the software itself builds up walls and isolates groups from each other. I’m not sure how to get around that though — except to say that good ECM is not just about the software.

Overheard: WEP and weak IVs

The problem arises when you have duplicate IV values. If an attacker knows the content of one of the packets he has the IV for, he can use the collision to extract the contents of the other packet. In other words, an attacker can decrypt data without ever knowing the password. Assuming an attacker can collect enough known IV-data matches, they can comprise the entire network. Seth Fogie, WPA Part 2: Weak IV’s

Overheard: CEBP is same thing as PBX features

Communications-Enabled Business Processes, or CEBP, is one of the hot buzzwords in enterprise communications. Many people see CEBP as the Holy Grail of communications technology, something that may be attained years from now. But, in fact, you have CEBP in your enterprise now. It’s called PBX features. Eric Krapf, You’ve Already Got Communications-Enabled Business Processes

Overheard: Why Sarah Palin became a hacker

The technician “said it looked like he tried to delete this, but she knew a way to go around and get some of the deleted stuff,” Palin said in an interview. “I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I was there.” Palin explains her actions in Ruedrich case (2004)

Lots of buzz about how Sarah Palin once hacked into Republican boss Randy Ruedrich’s computer back in 2004 at the request of Alaska’s Attorney General. (She was looking for evidence that he’d broken a state ethics law while he was a member of the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission.)

As a mom with two daughters, I’m proud that we finally have a woman VP candidate again — but I’m even more proud that the technician was a woman.  ;- )