There’s a big showdown for many SaaS based models and it may be coming much sooner than expected. 

Many blogs and articles have put forth the opinion that the best way for SaaS to succeed is to offer free software built on advertising revenues.  There’s no question that the lucrative, double digit growth of digital media is an attractive path to go down for many publishers to pay the cost of expanding their product sets, shoring up their infrastructures, and most important, to compete  by constantly upping the ante.  For those of you contemplating the launch of a SaaS based solutions supported by ad revenues, I’d like to offer a bit of advice.

I recently attended the 2nd GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovation) Engineering conference in Washington DC held at the National Science Foundation. It was a Sunday evening, all day Monday and all day Tuesday event. While primarily evolving to attempt to solve the needs of researchers trying to run experiments much of the work begun here will make its way into the commercial Internet, or whatever is next. For example some of the primary goals for this project are to develop a network built from the ground up with measurement, control and security. Embracing any existing technology is neither encouraged nor discouraged.

On January 25^th, Sony Pictures Entertainment will roll out its new thriller, Untraceable, with Diane Lane.  She plays an FBI cyber crime agent tracking a crazed, tech savvy killer who has a Web site that broadcasts the live torture and killing of his victims.  The catch is that the more people come to his site, the faster he kills his victims. If you haven’t seen the movie trailer, go to (sony.com/untraceable), and you’ll get the idea.

Many of you probably don’t know what WPAD is—I didn’t until just last week. Yet WPAD could be a threat to your network’s security.

Many ISP’s and networks do not allow outbound SMTP traffic to pass over their networks. This presents a bit of a problem when your users take their laptops with them to a new network. How do you get around this?

I have always wondered what greylisting actually is… so I decided to write up a little blog post about it, hopefully you will find it helpful.

I received an email from a customer today on how he uses our tools – rather than paraphrase it,  I thought I’d share its full context with our customers – here you go...

Our WHOIS tool is top of mind lately.

I was recently asked what the top DNS myth is.  That's an easy one for me; it seems that many people still think that when you make a DNS changes it has to 'propagate' (meaning that the change somehow goes from one DNS server to another, until all DNS servers have the updated information).  That just isn't how it works.

With the recent push to get administrators to upgrade to BIND 9, a few of you may have noticed a degradation in performance or sporadic problems resolving certain domain names.  All of a sudden, recursive queries take a lot longer to answer, or you can’t resolve domain names in yahoo.com.  But isn’t BIND 9’s performance supposed to be as good as BIND 8’s?  What’s going on here?