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Technology Stocks : MRV Communications (MRVC) opinions? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Regis McConnell who wrote (11026)	10/29/1998 3:18:00 PM
From: Terence Kennedy	Respond to of 42804

> Terence, you are one of the guys that genuinely worries me, a real 'fly in the > ointment', a 'pain in the butt', a 'squeeky wheel looking to get greased', & in > hindsight, the source for 'pinkies cloud of accounting disinformation'. I wish I'd of > known of the extent of your promulgation of the 'backdoor problem' on the internet > bulliten boards b4 last August & the subsequent collapse of MRV share prices. > The FUD created by 'the problem' is at least partially responsible for any product > sales slowdown in Nbase switches. Personally, it has been a most costly lesson. First, the posts to Bugtraq, etc (the security mailing lists) well- predate the drop in share prices. It doesn't appear that analysts read those lists, anyway. It looks like the bottom fell out when MRVC announced the lower earnings estimates. Certainly it has cost N Base some sales (at the very least, I dumped my NH208's and replaced them with Cisco switches). However, every now and then I get mail saying "thank you for pointing this out - I never heard of it before now" so it's new news to various people as time moves along. I agree with you that it's strange that the company is behaving the way it is WRT this problem. I doubt that there's any actual conspir- acy there. However, the other explanation (incompetence and lack of communication within the company) is even scarier. Regarding testing the various products - I don't own most of the different models, but it's possible to examine the code to see if the fix has been added. I'd be willing to do that, except: 1) N Base occasionally ships products with newer code than they have available for download. So saying there isn't any fix may not be true - it may only be available in new switches. 2) N Base has two FTP servers, one in the US and one in Israel. They are not synchronized (some code is newer on the US server, and some is newer on the Israel server). Further, some files on the FTP servers are not accessable for some reason. You can look for yourself at: ftp://ftp.nbase.com/pub/snmp_agent ftp://ftp.nbase.co.il/support/ethernet/standalone Anyway, it's informative to consider the way other vendors like 3Com and Cisco have handled their security problems - with pro-active cus- tomer notifications and detailed information. It's not the fact that there is a bug, it's the way it's apparently being kept secret (even the N Base products that have been fixed have no information posted about how to enable the security fix - if a user hasn't read one of the security lists, they don't know about the bug, that a fix is avail- able, or how to enable it once they load the fixed software). Terry