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 COLUMN
Santa Claus is coming GIVEN THAT IT'S holiday time, I ought to hand out some lumps of coal to misbehaving folks, and oranges to the good boys and girls. So while I hunt through my attic for the Santa drag, and check my list once or twice, dream of those sugarplums.
An orange goes to the National Security Agency for releasing tools to harden Linux and Windows. The gang from Fort Meade has done such a good job that NSA Security-Enhanced Linux may become the Chinese government's OS of choice. Someone should have told the Department of the Interior about this, but hindsight is 20/20. Novell gets a lump of coal for sitting on the details of a GroupWise exploit for more than three months after releasing the "Padlock" fix, thereby preventing any test of the patch's effectiveness. Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit U.S Court of Appeals receives an orange for pointing out that computer monitoring and privacy rights always conflict. A lump of coal goes to Symantec for raising the cost of virus definition subscriptions for individual consumers by 150 percent. Kevin Poulsen of SecurityFocus, who has morphed from hacker poster boy to computer security journalist rather well, gets an orange for demonstrating the value of street credibility to computer security journalists. John Pescatore of Gartner earns two oranges for recommending that companies investigate alternatives to Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Server) Web server software -- and by extension, the Windows platform -- and for telling software vendors that if they can't fix their software's security flaws in two weeks, they should get into another line of work. Earthlink gets an orange for being one of the few ISPs to encourage customers to install and use firewall software. Unfortunately, too many ISPs get a dump truck of coal for discouraging firewall use or refusing to support customers who install them. Finally, security guru Winn Schwartau gets an orange for writing one of the few coherent and polite dissents to my position vis-à-vis the value of protecting against electromagnetic pulse attacks. I'm not convinced yet, but I'm keeping an open mind. On that note, happy holidays and I'll see you next year. P.J. Connolly (pj_connolly@infoworld.com) covers collaboration, networking, operating systems, and security for the InfoWorld Test Center. Get this column free via e-mail each week. Sign up at www.iwsubscribe.com/newsletters .  RELATED SUBJECTS  SecurityMORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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