Is it Friday yet?
Looks like we got a few copies of the W32.Gibe virus floating in last night. All of the attachments were stripped at the email gateway (Our ISP finally did something right!), but I was impressed with this one. It seems like most of the attachments disguised as something else have stuff in the email that totally gives it away. They’re not written very well, and maybe it’s because the virus writers aren’t native English speakers in most cases, or they are just not interested in spelling and grammer. Either way it’s usually a dead give away. But this one came in disguised as a Microsoft Security Alert and was actually written like an MS Security alert. The only give away is that MS would have you go download it, they would never send an attachment, at least I hope not!
Jevon, here’s the thing about Web Services: the web designers and other folks ned to keep in mind business realities. In some areas web services can be a huge help, but in some others, the ‘net is still too new and too unreliable for my business processes to be on it. You want to use web services to feed me news in RSS feeds, or security alerts, fine. You want me to use Access online to get at my customer data? No freakin’ way! If I can’t access my customer database because 1) Our ISP is having problems, 2) Your ISP is having problems 3) your servers are having problems 4) Some unknown entity between my network and your web server is having problems 5)Your network got hacked and the data is gone, etc., I’m going to have huge problems. Right now it sits on a server that is literally right behind my head as I type this, the data and the software used to access it are completely under my control. I’m not giving control of that to anyone but me.
I am not a web designer or web programmer by vocation. It’s a hobby and it’s something I’m still learning about as I go along. I am a PC/Network guy by vocation so I come at the web from a slightly different, perhaps more cynical, perspective. Yes, web services could open up some new opportunities but it could also introduce a heck of a lot more problems. Most of the problems I have now are not business critical, unless there’s a network outage, but that’s my problem that I can fix and I have built-in procedures to make sure that people can still get large parts of their jobs done, no matter what happens. I move things online, with a rental software plan and suddenly the web services company has control of everything. I haven’t yet found any company I would trust that much. Now if you could let me do my own web services over the intranet, we might have a common ground, but, thus far, there hasn’t been anything in that area that’s a big improvement over what I can do now.
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