Welcome to the IT Week Insider
Here we are, locked up in IT Week Towers, staring down at the flaming oil moat and thinking about how best to deliver the pick of the news to you. Every week we walk around the exercise yard letting articles fall from our pockets like tunnelled-out soil, hoping that people will see that it's not just a pile of old dirt.
But we are in the dark (and that has nothing to do with the monkeys having kidnapped the meter reader). Is our toil in vain? If you think not, get your fingers out and get clicking, send us mail to tell us what you want and, most of all, climb every mountain and shout it from the rooftops: "We love IT Week!"
Editor's choice: Even the best security needs a plan B
You remember Bruce Lee? He didn't wear a yellow jumpsuit because he liked it, he wore it because - even though he was capable of sending a man's face to the other side of his neck - he knew that people don't mess with you when you wear skin-tight yellow. People steer clear of us when we wear it, anyway. Most IT departments, like Bruce, know to keep something in reserve. It's called contingency planning. Okay, so IT security is not quite the same as delivering a dragon's headstand flying donkey kick to avenge the death of your teacher, but it's similar. Kind of.
IT Week Podcast
News Editor Madeline Bennett chairs a lively discussion dissecting the
key events of the week. This week the team chats about the latest developments
in the business intelligence market, gets the details of the forthcoming
Microsoft Office 2007 releases from Dan Robinson, discusses a new IT security
accreditation scheme with David Neal and doesn’t ask listeners to send in any
“shout outs” to loved ones.
Comment: Ruby on Rails shows
developers the way
Ruby on Rails might sound like a taciturn admission from the Rolling Stones that
a certain Miss Tuesday now needs some assistance getting up stairs, but it is
not. Rather it is two things, a language and a framework that can be used for
creating online applications. In a short space of time it has become as popular
in geek circles as "that bloke that does Buffy's laundry". However, does a
lightweight open-source framework have a place in the enterprise? Don't ask us,
we thought monkeys had a place in the enterprise. Boy, were we wrong.
News: Tool combats peripheral
threats
Security firm GFI has been busy updating its management tool for locking
down portable storage devices. GFI's newly rechristened EndPointSecurity
offering looks after end point security (someone give GFI's naming expert a
raise), and lets IT mangers lock-down systems with the same kind of cast-iron
control that medieval husbands applied to their wives' nether regions. It looks
like a pretty good system, but we probably won't invest. Portable storage
devices don't last long in this office before being eaten, beaten or used as a
scent-marking post.
Poor email controls cost bank
dear
Firms have been advised to check that their email management systems are running
at levels approaching "tickety-boo" because otherwise they might find themselves
in court or - worse - buying soap on a rope. These warnings arise after
investment bank Morgan Stanley was forced into paying a $15m dollar fine for
failing to preserve emails. Oh no, a bank paying a fee? Where's the world's
smallest violin?
Report: Changing of the network
guards
Do you like these headlines? They are not randomly spewed out by some computer
program but are hand-crafted by our infinite army of monkeys bashing away at
their infinite number of typewriters... OK, fifteen capuchins fighting over
eleven keyboards, but then we don't have an infinite banana budget. We like this
headline, but does it really get across the fact that McAfee, Nortel and 3Com
are now offering a range of different approaches to network access control? Of
course it doesn't, but what did you expect? Monkeys can't read you know.
