Liudvikas Bukys

Apple Previews Xgrid Technology at MacWorld Expo.
There’s also the
Apple Xgrid web site.
As one would expect from Apple, beautiful elegant design that somehow attracts the love of developers even when it doesn’t even try to create to open standards or adhere to existing ones.

This might be affecting the University of Rochester (I’m looking into it):
Trouble with Chinese applicants/customers reaching your web site?
Maybe your DNS server is blocked.

See the excellent summary of the situation from Zittrain and Edelman:
Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China.

Caltech, Columbia, MIT, and U.Virginia are known victims. NorthWestern U
is also affected.

Did this problem increase in November?
See notes in interesting-people
and
Politech.

Interestingly, as of today, only one (Columbia) of the five .edu zones listed above has off-site secondary DNS servers.

Simon Byers: ATAC: Abusable Technologies Awareness Center: Hidden data roundup (Microsoft Word in particular).

More aggressive email tokenization and parsing from commercial vendor corvigo;
Purdue
is an early evaluator.

Digital Common Sense: Tribal Wisdom

Andrew Odlyzko: Pricing and architecture of the Internet: Historical perspectives from telecommunications and transportation:

The general conclusion then is that the historical record of the transportation industry does demonstrate the importance and prevalence of disciminatory policies that are incompatible with the basic architecture of the current Internet. This probably accounts for much of the push to build new networks, or modify the current ones so as to provide more control for service providers over what customers do. However, the Internet is special, in its importance as an enabler for the rest of the economy, in its migration of costs and capabilities to the edges, in its primary value being in connectivity and low transaction latency, and in its pervasiveness and frequency of use. Hence in spite of the strong push from the industry, there are good prospects that the open architecture of the Internet will survive.

Take a look at Dana Epp’s succinct exhortation on
The Eight Rules of Security: least privilege, change management, trust, weakest link, separation, three-fold process, preventative action, and immediate and proper response.

Micah Dubinko, author of
XForms Essentials, lists his
XML.com: Ten Favorite XForms Engines

It turned out that progress on XForms technology was happening so rapidly anything in print would have been quickly outdated. An online approach seemed more sensible.

[via Slashdot]

Insights into Information Security: VLAN Insecurity & The Principle of Compartmentalization: pointers to recent SANS and GIAC publications on the topic

IBM: Build a grid application with Python (tutorials):

• Introduction

• Communication

• Security