Here's an interesting video that was making the rounds this week: over 1500 inmates at the Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in Cebu City, Philippines performing Michael Jackson's "Thriller" in their courtyard.

Web 2.0 ventures have discovered a simple formula for success: encourage users' conceit that what they say, do and think is interesting enough to share with others. This is how Twitter, a hot startup, turns a stream of drivel into cold hard cash.

Andy Dornan and Andrew Braunberg of Current Analysis joins Alan Shimel and Mitchell Ashley from StillSecure, on a podcast discussing NAC. Much of the discussion is based on a user survey Network Computing and Current Analysis recently completed. There is a good discussion about the role of standards and where Cisco, Microsoft, the TCG are heading. Both Dornan and Braunberg discuss other results of the survey.

Listen to this Podcast Now

We have to kill the firewall in order to save it. That's the essential message from startup Palo Alto Networks (PAN).

Right on the heals of Congress investigating P2P file sharing that I discussed in P2P a National Threat: Your tax dollars at waste, comes this news from tech.blorge.com about how back-up tapes containing over 800,000 social security numbers of Ohio state employees were stolen from an intern's car.

I received this email the other day:
"I went through your article regarding NAC, and would like to ask you one question more to the part of the topic, which was not mentioned. When we internally discussed the possibility of implementing VLANs, we found out that we cannot find suitable solution for 802.1X authentication."

Can someone with a clue run down to Capital Hill and talk some sense to our Congress People, please? There is apparently a bru-ha-ha rising about P2P file sharing and how it is a National Security Threat and congress recently held a hearing on the matter.

Earlier this week I had the chance to catch an HP briefing on data center efficiency. It's a hot area with surprisingly little groundbreaking technology. But that doesn't stop old rivals from taking a good jab at each other.

Momma always said every time you point a finger, three more are pointing back at you. Well, there was a lot of finger pointing going on the last few weeks between IE and Firefox over a vulnerability in url handlers, and a recent twist continue to stir things up.

A couple of guys sparring/training in the middle of Central Park are completely oblivious to the group that has begun to surround them. Little do they know that the troupe is actually DeCadence, an A Cappella group from the University of California, Berkeley. As the realization that they have spectators becomes all too obvious to the karate kickers, nothing can prepare them for what happens next.

In this podcast interview with Network Computing's Michael Biddick, Opalis' CTO Charles Crouchman discusses Opalis' software's scalability in enterprise environments as well as comments on recent acquisitions in the IT Process Automation market.

Listen Now

Whenever a new technology hits the streets, the question of whether it can keep up with network traffic quickly follows and with good reason. If a product becomes a network bottle neck or fails to process everything it should be processing, the product has failed. That fear of failure, or perception of being slow, often drives vendors to make optimistic performance claims about their products and drives reviewers like myself put vendors products to the test.

The next leader of the free world may have stood on stage at The Citadel last night, but the real power in the room was YouTube.

You have to admire the chutzpah of startup Palo Alto Networks. The company has raised $28 million to sell a "next-generation" firewall based on ideas that are 20 years old.

We're just hours away from the release of the final Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." There's been a great deal of speculation as to whether Harry will be shuffling off the mortal coil (author J.K. Rowling has alluded to Potter going prone since right after the last book was released).

Think you're too smart to get duped by a phishing scam? Are you absolutely certain you'd be able to recognize an authentic site from a scam? The Anti-virus experts at McAfee aren't as convinced and so they've set up an extremely interesting interactive quiz. The test consists of ten questions, eight of which include screenshots of both a real version of a website and a phisher's dupe. All you have to do is click on which one you believe is the valid site. At the end of the test you'll get your score.

Yesterday, I spent about four hours yesterday configuring a Cisco Aironet 1240AG access point, a Cisco 3750 switch, and an HP Procurve switch to authenticate hosts using 802.1X against a Windows 2003 Enterprise Server AD deployment. During the deployment I was reading the docs for the switches (yeah, yeah, shocking), and noted that the 802.1X configurations could be set with default actions like putting the port into a default VLAN, if an 802.1X authentication failed or there was no supplicant on the host (there are some other features I will dive into at a later date). So I have to wonder, if you can run 802.1X and you simply want to keep outsiders on a guest VLAN with limited resources, do you really need a NAC system?

Arguably, you can say that RIM has had Wi-Fi in its portfolio since 2004 when it introduced the Wi-Fi only 7270 into the market. However, where the real rubber meets the road for Wi-Fi and handheld devices is in the "dual mode" category that incorporates both Wi-Fi and cellular technology in the same device. Competitors like Nokia and HTC have offered dual mode devices for some time; today, RIM has finally provided its answer: the BlackBerry 8820

An appellate court ruling is expected today on whether temporary logs kept in RAM should eligible for e-discovery. See Eweek's story here.

From writing and sending e-mail to watching videos (and of course making calls), the iPhone seems capable of doing just about anything. But will it blend?

No, this isn't a trick question and I'm not using some fancy new techno-jargon. In what has to be one of the strangest -- and most expensive -- experiments I've seen to date, the folks at commercial and home blender maker Blendtec pop an iPhone into one of their high-end home blenders, just to see what would happen to the $500 device.

Everyone knows baseball is a game of numbers, and here's an interesting one: According to researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the average shelf life for a major league ballplayer is just 5.6 years. One in five will last only a single year.

Dell is taking aim at the SMB market with its new Vostro line, announced today. The Vostros come in notebook and desktop models, starting at $449 and $319, respectively.

What caught our eye is what is not on these systems: No trialware, though there is pre-installed tune-up and backup software that is free for the first year only. Dell also announced a dedicated sales and support team for the new systems.

Welcome to the NAC Immersion Center. The goal of this site is to cover the pertinent information about NAC technology, products, and practices. We will conduct product reviews, writing tutorials about the technology that drives NAC, and discuss trends to help you plan for the future. Think of this as your one stop shop for NAC information.

In setting up the test bed for a series of NAC reviews, I ran into some interesting issues some of which I want to lay out here and some I will explore more in depth later (at some point, I have to get some testing done). So in preparation for upcoming tests, I created my test bed.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water...this great mashup takes Jaws -- the action-packed, heart stopping blockbuster that made a generation afraid to go swimming -- and turns it into a feel good, 'Free-Willy' -esque love-fest. It's hysterical!

As the wireless industry plays an ever larger role in the global communications infrastructure, the level of development effort going into the evolution of different wireless technologies is remarkable. On June 12 in Dallas, I chaired a Portable Computer and Communications Association (PCCA) meeting on HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) sponsored by 3G Americas. On June 13, AT&T hosted an HSPA workshop under an NDA arrangement where attendees were able to get hands-on time with forthcoming services and devices. The meeting provided the perfect crystal ball experience to see how wireless networks will be able to deliver speeds almost one hundred times faster than current 3G systems by early next decade. That's remarkable when you consider that current 3G systems are a hundred times faster than the first wireless IP systems such as CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data).

iRobot, based in Burlington, Ma., announced last week that it's teaming with Taser International to develop robots armed with the Taser X26, which sports an integrated laser sight and internal USB data port. The new bots, tagged with the deceptively cute name "PackBot Explorer," will allow military and law enforcement to take out "dangerous suspects while keeping personnel, the suspect and bystanders out of harm's way." Brother PackBots are currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. iRobot and Taser will exhibit the new bot at annual Taser Tactical Conference next month in Chicago.

What I want to know is, when will the upgrade for my Roomba become available?