An Undignified End to an Internet Pioneer I was one of Wingspan Bank's first customers when they opened their online banking system as a division of Bank One back in 1997 or so. Wingspan closed its doors and merged with Bank One probably about 6 years ago now, with (if I remember correctly) only 77,000 customers -- obviously, the world had changed a lot, and online banking no longer required a dedicated online bank. Even after Wingspan closed, I kept my Wingspan-turned-Bank One account, although there wasn't much money in it and I didn't really use it for much of anything. Finally, last week, I decided to close the account -- easy, I figured, since Bank One had merged with Chase, which is where we have our main savings and checking accounts. Well, after three phone calls and one fax, the conclusion was that there was no way to automatically...

You've all heard of the "No Fly List." Did you know that there's a "No-Buy List" as well?

The so-called "Bad Guy List" is hardly a secret. The U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control maintains its "Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List" to be easily accessible on its public Web site.

Wanna see it? Sure you do. Just key OFAC into your Web browser, and you'll find the 224-page document of the names of individuals, organizations, corporations and Web sites the feds suspect of terrorist or criminal activities and associations.

Despite being a scientist, or more likely because of it, I am actually extremely superstitious. In December 2002, I wrote "Blue," or "Why I love EJBs," followed up by "White", or "Why I love Professional Open Source" in April 2003. However, I never got around to writing the third and final installment in the trilogy: "Red." Partly because I got lazy and partly because I always felt it wasn’t time to write it, the future I wanted to write about was still being defined. Red was intended to be a vision of the IT future, along the lines of Morpheus' quote in the Matrix:

FilmLoop creates “looplets.” The primary purpose of these looplets was to show a sample of the loop in order to encourage people to install the loop. However, looplets now have gained significantly more functionality. In essence, they are now...

An April 6 article on SearchDataCenter.com by Rick Cook introduced several misunderstandings about controller based virtualization which I would like to correct.In this article Rick compares three types of storage virtualization, server based, SAN based, and controller based. While he...

Thanks for the comments, pro and con. As you can imagine, I won’t have the bandwidth to reply to all comments, but I want you to know I am reading them, and I suspect others are Novell are, as well, so keep your opinions coming. Needless to say, for those expressing some skepticism about the [...]

“Did I ever tell you the story of my first business?

Lora Cecere at AMR Research has written an article (paid subscription required) entitled "Rethink demand management" talking about the challenges organizations have dealing with demand changes.

A few weeks ago I was looking over some other blog posts here on ITToolbox and got intrigued by a thread that mentioned the benefits of volunteering for "impossible" projects. In other words, taking o

I must say I laughed out loud when I read the recent JavaWorld article entitled "BEA seeks to modularize app server".

I am at the Storage Networking World (SNW) conference, and in an IDC question and answer session, someone in the audience said:I understand why you would encrypt data on tape, but why encrypt data on disk? It's going to be decrypted by the time it gets to the server anyway, so if you can get to the server, you'll be able to steal the data whether it's encrypted on disk or not.The key is whether any people have access to the disks that do not also have access to the server. If so, then encrypting the disks may be useful, because it'll protect against those people.

Swoogle knows how Semantic Web ontologies are used: "

Wikicities gets $4 mill in VC funds, changes name to Wikia: "

Filed under: VCs, wikis

My laptop is still out for repair, and Adobe IT sent me a temporary one so that I could at least connect to VPN and get some work done. Rather than configure Outlook on this temporary machine, I'm just using Outlook Web Access (the Exchange web interface).

At What Price False Positives? As has been covered in many places, including Direct and The Wall Street Journal, Verizon settled a lawsuit yesterday over too aggressive spam filtering, or what we in the business call false positives -- filtering out legitimate, non-spam emails as spam. This is a huge problem that part of our business at Return Path, our Delivery Assurance Solutions group, has been fighting for years. The gist of the settlement is that Verizon is changing the way it filters spam to make sure more legitimate mail gets through, and that it is refunding various small amounts of money or free months of service to customers who complained about the problem. I am NOT a believer in lawsuits like this at all. Also, I think the act of filtering aggressively enough to catch the spam but not so aggressively as to cause false positives is a very...

I played duplicate bridge tonight. Then a stimulating business call with a friend from Vancover (helps with the time zones) so now I am pumped up.SYNNEX has hired a time management/organisation consultant, Alex Revai.

There are some books that are “must reads” for entrepreneurs; some for marketers; some for salespeople; and some for programmers. And then there are a handful that everyone should read. IMHO, one such book is Influence--Science and Practice by...

I've decided to regularly provide "quick info" on the various JBoss projects (new features, numbers, etc.). As this information is usually scattered across various projects, URL or blogs, I hope this unified entry will make it easier for you to find what you were not looking for.

Raindance Communications is putting on another free seminar. This time it's Darcy Rezac, the author of Work the Pond! Use the Power of Positive Networking to Leap Forward in Work and Life. Wednesday, April 12th 12 pm to 1...

Postbank, a large German bank, is one of the first to digitally signed e-mails to counter phishing. This is made possible by the near-ubiquitous support of S/MIME in today's e-mail clients (ad passim, ad nauseam).

I was at a social event the other evening speaking with a friend of mine who works in a consumer-facing business. He told me his company's online business growth had surpassed its brick-and-mortar bus

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On April 3, 2006, HDS announced the Hitachi Global Link Manager (PDF) which enables centralized management for multipath data connections across multiple servers which greatly simplifies alternate storage path management in a complex SAN. HDS also announced the AMS1000 modular...

A Personal OdysseyTransitionsAs the new CTO of a company that is all about openness, I feel it is important to have a dialog with customers and with the industry. I’m launching this CTO blog through the lens of my very personal views and experiences with the Linux desktop. It is a long, complex topic, so [...]

The software engineers in IONA product development have been working nights and weekends lately. The usual build up to a product release. If it isn't one of Murphy's Laws it should be - projects closer to deadline take more of your time than projects farther from deadline.

Here's a really interesting article at Manufacturing Business Technology citing research done by SAP on what executives view as the keys to competitiveness and success for the next several years.

HP engineers are convinced that the XP12000 disk array is in a class by itself. So they tried to think of ways to demonstrate that... and decided to literally show how bulletproof the system really is. This should have been a piece of cake given that the XP12000 is supposed to keep working even after an entire side of the array gets wiped out.

During my trip to the UK two weeks ago I visited Oxford University and had lunch with a number of faculty members at Keble College. In particular, I sat next to Professor Sir Michael Brady with whom I had a...

The Department of Justice released its first report on estimates for Identity Theft in 2004. In terms of on-line forms of identity attacks, the report didn't provide much insight - focusing more on physical forms of theft and fraud. The only comprehensive study that I'm aware of continues to be the FTC report which started to identify the internet as a channel where identity information is stolen and used to perpetrate fraud. Unfortunately, the data is approaching three years old... not that useful.