We have been hearing little bits about the DNS bug that could end the world (oh alright have some dire consequences for the usage of the internet). Dan Kaminsky had found a way to poison DNS caches so that clients could be sent to incorrect servers. This was clearly a serious flaw and now there is patches out for this. Please help keep it safe for the less knowledgeable and patch your systems. This is not a difficult thing to do and will save you a lot of grief. It seems Dan took a path that many did not understand in dealing with his finding and has copped a bit if flack, I will say that I feel his approach was correct and he will likely be vindicated with this issue now quietly sliding off the radar for most internet users.

It all slipped out when a security person was speculating on a companies blog or forum and then someone in teh company spilled the beans by confirming the speculation. I guess there will be a bit of discussion on at the next staff meeting about the issues with such online discussions. It can sure have ramifications for a listed company in many places and could amount to an insider trading scare.

http://www.doxpara.com/?p=1164 to reads Dan’s own take on events It seems Big Pond here in Australia has done its thing and patched. Dan’s testing tool has shown clean for my ISP DNS server.

Lets hope that this is the end of such an issue.

See ya round

Peter

Scribefire now has the ability to place adds on a site that may or may not use the Scribefire blogging tool Read the rest of this entry »

Companies in Australia are slowly awakening to the possible benefits of social networking. I yesterday read an article in a local Brisbane newspaper that said 1 in 4 Australian businesses were allowing employees access to Facebook and other social networking sites Read the rest of this entry »

I have been looking through some older technical books in my bookshelf and there is one “A Beginners Guide to Oracle” which is based around Oracle 8.1.7. I was amused about a paragraph in the first chapter “what is Oracle”, it goes on to talk about the database, doesn’t mention any other products and in some ways that is pretty much correct. There was Forms and Reports and Oracle Applications, but Application Server was a little way off when the book was published and, Applications was still primarily the Financials components, although a number of the other modules such as inventory and maintenance where there.

If I was to put the same paragraph in a book now, it would no longer be a paragraph, it would have to be a chapter at least to make any sense and it would be possible to write a full book on the topic. Since then Application Server has sprung to life, there has been 4 major acquisitions Peoplesoft, Siebel, Hyperion, BEA, and numerous smaller ones since then. Smaller may not always be an apt description, but for a lot of people maybe just not as well known, Sleepycat, Retek, and of course in Peoplesoft they also acquired JD Edwards, which Peoplesoft had acquired not long before the purchase. In fact the list of acquired products on Oracle’s home page is 30 long. BEA is not on that list and I suspect there is one or two other smaller players not there also that Oracle has recently acquired to fill gaps in there portfolio. The only thing Oracle doesn’t have is hardware, and quite frankly if they were to move to acquiring a hardware vendor, I suspect that Oracle would suffer. All hardware except at the big end, like HP Superdomes and Sun M9000 series type machines have very tight margins and they would find it tough going selling product in that small end market for an organisation that clearly has strong margins on its products.

Oracle on the published figures still has a formidable margin in the database market, that although Oracle’s product has a premium list price is still a preferred choice among many customers. The database also powers some big e-commerce sites such as EBay and Amazon, giving it a formidable position in the marketing space.

So in just 8 short years the Oracle database has been joined by a plethora of products that enhance Oracle the company’s ability to deliver for its customers.

See ya round

Peter

I have been using Scribefire an extension for Firefox for a while with varying degrees of success. Lately there seems to have been a pus to improve the product and now I am trying it here. So what is Scribefire, its a remote blog editor. I can write entries in Scribefire and then connect to my blog here and load them up. It ahs a lot of features such as embedded images, lists formatting and youtube links. Recently the team added the ability to write to a Windows Live account. For me its an added bonus as there is a short supply of blogging tools around that work in Linux, this is one of them and it is the most versatile.

So if this will help you to blog, then its good

See ya round

Peter