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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PJ Strifas who wrote (30283)	2/12/2000 4:46:00 PM
From: PJ Strifas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

<OT> MS moves to mandatory registration By Lisa M. Bowman, ZDNN February 10, 2000 7:15 AM PT URL: zdnet.com New users of Office 2000 will get a taste of Microsoft Corp.?s latest anti-piracy measure: forced registration. The company is inserting a new feature into an upcoming release of its word processing software that will cause the product to malfunction if a person doesn?t register after launching it 50 times. Users of volume licenses, such as those working at big companies, won?t have to register. The so-called Registration Wizard doesn?t require users to give any more information than their country of origin, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) said. And they can register anonymously through fax, phone, e-mail or snail mail. The company clashed with privacy experts over Office 97 last spring, when it was discovered that some Word and Excel documents contained code numbers that could identify the source of the document. Microsoft quickly issued a patch and now says Office 2000 documents will not have a similar identifier. The Registration Wizard has been part of a two-year-long pilot program, which was designed as an aggressive move to combat software piracy. ?Counterfeiting is a big problem. What makes it even more difficult is the Internet,? said Jackie Carriker, who works on Microsoft?s anti-piracy efforts. The Web makes it easy for pirates to buy and sell software, sometimes to unsuspecting consumers. In January, the company succeeded in taking down 100 sites that distributed counterfeit copies of Windows 2000, a product that isn?t scheduled to launch until next week. The number of counterfeit distribution sites has grown to 2 million in 1999 from 100,000 in 1997, according to industry trade groups. Microsoft also is adding new anti-piracy features to Windows 2000, including a hologram that covers the entire CD-ROM and a new certificate of authenticity.

To: PJ Strifas who wrote (30283)	2/13/2000 1:03:00 PM
From: Scott C. Lemon	Respond to of 42771

Hello PJ, > So basically we're talking about "self-regulation" in terms of > packet addressing to remove the ability of spoofed packets from > traversing from one network to another. This sounds like it could > become a very "do-able" solution. I wonder which alliance (IETF, > W3C, ISO, ???) would be able to bring all the participants > together.... So what we are really doing is bring the principals of the "physical world" to the Internet. If you think about how our society has evolved, we are now a point that if a country (or a community) does things which are unacceptable to the rest of the countries, then we issue sanctions against that country and cut off trade. In the Internet world, if an ISP is found to be a source of spoofed packets, or refuses to turn over a customer who has committed a crime, they will find themselves isolated from the rest of the Internet by sanctions. (I wanted to point out that we can't say they will be prosecuted, since they might exist in another country which is more tolerant of such behavior ...) And so "communities" will be born which allow/disallow various types of behavior, and the communications between them will be based on these behaviors and the netMorals and netValues that each have. ;-) > Still, is there nothing that can be done in terms of the IP stack > to add "checks/balances" so that tampered packets can be identified > and then dropped? There are a number of products out there which start to try and address this area ... I've been doing a bunch of research on this lately ... I believe that all machines will soon be running more sophisticated "personal firewall" software before long ... > Not to force this into a NETWARE discussion but in a NetWare > environment (using the Novell Client to log into a Novel network) a > user's session has unique identifiers that are used to create and > check packets exchanged between a workstation and the network. In > this way, packets can be verified in terms of whether or not they > have been modified (tampered with) during transmission. Yes ... there are some "rules" that can be adhered to to help verify valid traffic ... use TCP, packet signitures, etc. > Could it be possible that this type of functionality can be worked > into the current TCP/IP protocol? There are there already and available for use ... most of the problems start to come about with UDP ... so avoidance of this would stop a lot of the problems. And then improvement of the network configuration to help track offenders ... > Can we add additional layers such as (PKI or) digital certificates > to authenticate online sessions at the network, session and/or > transport level? (a way to create packet checksums as we have in > NetWare?) The best thing that I could see Novell doing would be to get the client connection to use SSL ... this would be a big step that is fairly simple to do. (And fix the client installation! ;-) The problem is that this has nothing to do with hackers that decide to flood a network with UDP packets ... these are the "connectionless" packets that don't require two way communications. As long as these can be sent, and spoofed, and ISPs do not implement "egress" filtering ... then we are going to have troubles. Again, relating it to the real "physical" world ... what you are suggesting is "Can't the government just stop the flow of drugs, illegal immigration, and terrorism?" ... I mean heck, they are spending enough money trying ... what's the deal? ;-) > I am not as fully versed in this topic as I would like to be > therefore it may hamper my understanding of what is possible and > what is not in the IP world. It's a cool subject area ... and I think that Novell could offer a lot in this space ... The problems that arise are due to the "fault-tolerant" nature, and "free form" of the Internet. There are going to be more and more "border checks" that will be done between ISPs, etc. in the future ... IMHO. > I surely understand this problem can be "attacked" from more than > one angle - perhaps that will be what enables us to find an > acceptable solution that balances performance and security. The biggest success, IMHO, will be in identifying sources of "bad" traffic and sanctioning them ... just like in the real world ... Scott C. Lemon