By the Numbers: September 2003

States vs. Cyberterror:Where is it a Crime?If information security used to be about preventing teenage hackers from breaking into corporate networks, 9/11 changed that. Since 2001, 24 states have considered legislation to address “cyberterrorism.” Ten have passed laws, but there’s no consensus on what, exactly, is illegal—a curious problem for

The Cost of Containment

A “standard” shipping container is 8 feet wide, 8.5 feet high and 20 feet long. It can hold as much as 19 tons of soft and hard goods. Only about 2% of the containers that move through a port get screened. In Oakland, gamma ray scanners are used to boost

Ports of Entry: Fast In, Fast Out

Major U.S. ports, such as the Port of Oakland, are complex transportation systems that serve everything from recreational boats, to passenger ferries, to cruise ships, to giant cargo ships. Ultimately, they are designed to move materials quickly, off the water and into the interior of the nation. Their speed can

Voice of Experience: Dean Barrett, Under Controls

Dean BarrettKansas City Convention & Entertainment Centers Building Operations ManagerKansas City, Mo.www.Kcconvention.comManager’s Profile: Supervises operations and maintenance of 1.6 million-square-foot convention center. The Project: After getting complaints about wildly fluctuating room temperatures and lighting levels in the mid-1990s, Barrett helped sell the city council on a 10-year contract with Johnson

NYBOT: Going Home

In effect, Pat Gambaro began planning for this day in 1993.This month he is coming home, to new offices with a state-of-the-art trading floor for the New York Board of Trade (NYBOT), where Gambaro serves as chief operating officer. The exchange was scheduled to move back to downtown New York

The Future Demands Your Flexibility

I was in charge of technology at Conoco when PCs first came out—and PCs weren’t very good. But they enabled technology to proliferate much faster than it would have. And they gave business people freedom from their centralized computer department, enabling them to do technology work independently. But freedom on

Quashing a Bug Before It Alights

Security is again blowing a hole into Microsoft’s relationships with its customers—both individual and corporate. The Blaster worm and its siblings took down many corporate networks in late August, and cost up to $1 billion in lost productivity and overtime—even though patches that could have prevented the problem were available

A Letter to President Bush

Dear President Bush: You probably don’t know Joel Phagoo. He is a 21-year-old college student who decided to go fishing in New York’s Jamaica Bay with his kid brother and a cousin. They ended up washing up just off Runway 4 Right at JFK International Airport, after the weather turned.

Primer: 64-Bit Processing

This isn’t new. No, it’s not. Digital Equipment Corp. came out with the first 64-bit processor, the Alpha, in 1992, and Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems soon followed. What’s new is the idea that “industry standard” computers, not just Unix boxes, may process information in 64-bit chunks, as well. What

Securing Systems: CyberSecurity for the Masses

The Blaster worm brought businesses worldwide quite literally to a standstill last month. Just ask railroad operator CSX about its trains. Yet it wasn’t a surprise attack: Microsoft knew about the vulnerability and released a patch on July 16. But many information-technology departments missed the threat. So did most individuals—even