What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting

What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting

Text messaging is a wonderful business to be in: about 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year. The public assumes that the wireless carriers’ costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain. Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin and the chairman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, wanted to look behind the curtain. He was curious about the doubling of prices for text messages charged by the major American carriers from 2005 to 2008, during a time when the industry consolidated from six major companies to four. So, in September, Mr. Kohl sent a letter to Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, inviting them to answer some basic questions about their text messaging costs and pricing.

Full story at the...

Smart Spam Filtering For Forums and Blogs?

Smart Spam Filtering For Forums and Blogs?

"While filtering for spam on email and other related mediums seems to be fairly productive, there is a growing issue with spam on forums, message-boards, blogs, and other such sites. In many cases, sites use prevention methods such as captchas or question-answer values to try and restrict input to human-only visitors. However, even with such safeguards — and especially with most forms of captcha being cracked fairly often these days — it seems that spammers are becoming an increasing nuisance in this regard. While searching for plugins or extensions to spamassassin etc I have had little luck finding anything not tied into the email framework. Google searches for PHP-based spam filtering tends to come up with mostly commercial and/or more email-related filters. Does anyone know of a good system for filtering spam in general messages? Preferably such a system would be FOSS, and something with a daemon...

Tech workers confirm UK skills gap still a problem

Tech workers confirm UK skills gap still a problem

Research by tech jobs site The IT Job Board has found the majority (56 percent) of UK tech workers that responded to its survey are convinced there is a skills shortage in the UK tech sector.

Sector skills body e-skills UK said around 140,000 vacancies a year need to be filled across IT professions, yet pointed out the UK only has around 12,000 computer science grads annually.

A large majority (72 percent) of the survey respondents also believed the skills gap is growing year-on-year. Asked why there is a skills shortage in the UK, more than half (55 percent) of respondents cited rapid changes within the IT sector, with the same proportion blaming a lack of IT pros.

Read the whole story here.

-Ken

Microsoft Office to debut online

Microsoft Office to debut online

Microsoft is preparing web versions of some of its most popular programs.

In 2009 web versions of Word, Excel and other programs in the Microsoft Office suite plus Exchange and Sharepoint will go online.

Users will be able to get at the programs via a web browser rather than install them on a PC.
Some versions of the programs are expected to be free to use provided users are happy to view adverts alongside the software.

Read the whole article here.

-Ken

Certification Courses Should Balance Preparation With Education

Certification Courses Should Balance Preparation With Education

When it comes to certification courses, it’s a delicate balancing act: You need to prepare your students for the exam, but you also want to educate them more broadly. “I am not a fan of teaching to a test,” said Scott Bachrach, vice president of operations for Mobile Training & Education (MT&E), a provider of technical and workforce training. “That takes a class from being about education to being about preparation. “A lot of people who have experience in these fields have gaps in their knowledge, and that’s natural. Taking a course where you have educational value allows you to fill those gaps.” But that doesn’t downplay the importance of certifications. Bachrach believes they give professionals credibility and a leg up.

To read the full story, go to Certification Magazine.

Bonded broadband to compete against new Virgin service

Be fight back with 45Mbps bonded broadband

Be Broadband, the ISP owned by O2's parent company, Telefonica, have announced today the successful completion of their bonded broadband trial which ran on the London Paddington exchange. The trial was mainly aimed at understanding the technical capabilities involved using ADSL2+ over two telephone lines which were bonded together to make one line. Customers reported real-world speeds of between 30Mbps and 45Mbps- just 5Mbps shy of Virgin's headline 50meg speed. Be will be carrying out further trials through 2009.

Read the full story here

Hacker makes costly calls

Hacker makes costly calls

A local business owner is on the hook for a $52,000 phone bill after his voice-mail system was hacked and hundreds of calls were made to Bulgaria.
Alan Davison, who owns HUB Computer Solutions, noticed something was wrong when "feature 36" -- a message unknown to him -- kept popping up on his phone.

He called MTS and found that hundreds of calls were recently made to Bulgaria, racking up $52,321.14 in overseas long distance due Jan. 5.

"If I have to pay that whole bill out of my own pocket, I'm looking at having to lay off one of my employees," Davison said. "It's quite obvious something was right out of whack. There were hundreds of phone calls."

The MTS representative sent Davison an e-mail outlining how to protect his company from theft of long distance.

See here for the rest of the article. Another system we IT professionals need to...

Implementing a Firewall Services Module (FWSM) in a Virtualized Network

Implementing a Firewall Services Module (FWSM) in a Virtualized Network

A context on a Firewall Services Module (FWSM) is analogous to a virtual machine in VMware or to a switch that supports multiple VLANs. Although you are using the same physical hardware, you can logically separate the firewall functionality into unique instances. This is also known as virtualization. Each context has a unique set of interfaces, rules, and/or policies applied.

Rather than install a new firewall every time a new customer, department, agency, application, and so on is added, creating a new context is very simple and does not require any additional rack space. The footprint of a device is a huge concern in locations where customers lease space by the Rack Unit (RU). Multiple contexts do not require additional space. The "green" initiative is concerned with the impact on our environment. Reducing the amount of power consumed by leveraging multiple contexts and...

First steps towards a global ICT profession

To follow on from this news post.

First steps towards a global ICT profession

The International Professional Practice Partnership (IP3) announced today that the Australian Computer Society (ACS) had become the first professional body to be accredited to award the new International IT Professional (IITP) certification. The accreditation covers the members holding the ACS Computer Professional (CP) status.

IP3 is a programme of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), a non-governmental, non-profit umbrella organization created under the auspices of UNESCO for national societies working in the field of information processing.

IITP is the first international certification of ICT professionals under the International Professional Practice Partnership (IP3) and is awarded to professionals who have obtained an approved qualification from an...

Big Blue says No to Microsoft

IBM offers a 'Microsoft-free' desktop

IBM wants corporate customers to cut the cord with Microsoft.

The tech pioneer is launching a Linux-based collection of virtual-desktop applications that run on a server without the need for desktop hardware--or Microsoft software, according to a report on Wednesday evening by The Wall Street Journal. The Linux-based software package, which is available now, runs on a back-office server and is accessible to customers on thin clients, the paper reported.

Read the full story here

- UKDS