Happy New Year! Welcome to the first edition of 2010 (the year we make contact). There’s been a lot of news since I posted last 3 present and party filled weeks ago so I cannot hope to cover it all. Here’s a few that I thought were worth noting.
Has anyone been following the keynote speakers from the Consumer Electronics Show currently going on in Las Vegas? The CES web site has them transcribed for you if you want to have a look. See the Keynotes page for all the goodies. CNet also has lots of space devoted to CES reports, and you can see them on their [email protected] page.
Networking
Sean Michael Kerner at Enterprise Networking Planet writes of the dreaded 2010 exhaustion of IPv4. There is reportedly about 10% of IP space remaining but some large coportations have been releasing unused IP blocks which has helped the situation, hopefully more will get on board with that. I know I have seen many organizations, including the Canadian government, using publicly routable IP addresses as internal IPs instead of making use of the IP ranges reserved for such use. Read the full story in IPv4 Not Dead Yet: 625 Days of IPv4 Addresses Remain.
Internet
Hotmailers Hawking Hoax Hunan Half-Offs is an interesting article for more than just alliteration. It’s an in depth look at how spammers are making use of Hotmail‘s auto-reply feature to send advertisements for Chinese discount electronics sites. I honestly don’t know why anyone uses Hotmail which seems to be the biggest source of spam since AOL. My teenagers think Hotmail is the best thing ever, so they must be offering something of use to them. For my money Gmail or Yahoo are a much better choice.
A tip o’ the hat to Chrome, which according to the Market Share section of the Net Applications site has surpassed Safari as the 3rd most popular browser on the ‘net last month. See Browser Market Share for the full list.
Business
Are you an IT professional who is unhappy in your job? You may not be alone. The Computerworld careers site had an in depth look at the effects of the recent (current, ongoing) financial cruch and it’s affect on IT workers. See Surveys: IT job satisfaction plummets to all-time low for more.
On a similar topic to the above, see what Channel Insider thinks will be the top issues facing IT workers in 2010. Check out Careers: 2010 Employer Outlook: 10 Top Trends.
Security
Kelly Jackson Higgins at the security site Dark Reading has a good write-up of a recent test of how well email filters really work. In the test some spoofed Linked In were sent, apparently from Bill Gates himself. It’s surprising how many of them actually made it through. Spear-Phishing Experiment Evades Big-Name Email Products has the full story. My guess is that the Microsoft products that failed did so because they have a whitelist for any communications from their Imperious Leader so they will know when to rise up against their human oppressors.
That’ll be all for this week folks. Tune in next week for more of the wackiness that is the world of IT.
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