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I am forever amazed at the creativity of human beings. Look at all the companies we have produced. The trillions of dollars of wealth we have created. It is amazing that our combined genius has dramatically raised the standard of living worldwide over the last 100 years. We should be proud.

But any tool can be used for good as well as bad and the human brain has also been incredible in its ability to perpetrate crimes. In my early computer classes I was amazed to learn of a computer crime which involved bank programmers who were skimming non-rounded interest into a separate account. In other words taking the fraction of a cent of interest that didn't get added to bank accounts and diverting them to another account which the programmers owned.

In the above case the programmers were foiled when the computer system went down and manual systems had to be used. An account with millions of dollars was found as a result.

It seems other early computer crimes like hacking a password files on a UNIX systems to insert a malicious program made famous by the book Cookoo's Egg are now quaint in comparison to the varied computer crimes of today.

Let's explore some recent areas where the human mind has been used to either bend or break the law.

There are also millions of spam sites which fool users into clicking on ads disguised as content. Then there is the problem of competitors clicking on the ads of one another to drive up the marketing cost of the respective competitor.

Social Network Click Fraud

Now the latest trend in the world of click fraud is targeted at Facebook where malicious users create thousands of Facebook accounts (you can hire companies to get these for you at 10 cents per account). The example in this article cites India as a place where such companies exist and coincidentally this is the same country where the Craigslist scam discussed above originated from.

With the global economy being in the toughest shape it has been in for many years and the proliferation of internet connectivity there has never been more opportunity for the human brain to come up with money-making schemes which either bend the rules or break the law.

This of course drives up the cost for everyone else and sadly in many cases means people who aren't aware of the pitfalls on the web are duped out of their money.

In order to help reduce these problems we need much tougher international laws policing malicious users. It is so easy to perpetrate a crime against a person in a different country while remaining anonymous. We need to really have stricter laws in every country and serious enforcement must take place when people are caught. Let's set better examples of the malicious users who are caught so the next scammer or spammer thinks twice before going out and committing that computer crime.

While I do admire the ingenuity of the human brain, it is time for law enforcement to step it up so these users can be locked away forever. Where do we put them all? Well, from what I hear, there should be some space opening up in Guantanamo Bay very soon.

Among the many problems we have to deal with in the world of technology such as hackers, scammers, predators, phishers, script kiddies, etc - there is something new to worry about. What if your electronic photos are hijacked from your social networking accounts and used for commercial purposes in other countries? What is your recourse?

I spent much of Sunday in Manhattan with the family and while there stopped by one of our favorite restaurants for lunch. A bit later in the day my wife realized her iPhone had gone missing. The last place she knew she had it was the restaurant so we placed a call only to learn it wasn't there. We then walked back to the restaurant and conducted an exhaustive search with the help of the manager and still nothing.

On our way to the restaurant I sent an SMS to the lost phone asking for someone to call me to return it. There was no response to the SMS or the 10 phone calls I placed - the phone was on vibrate by the way. At dinner my wife began to tell me all of the personal and confidential information this phone had on it and my jaw dropped. It occurred to me that the financial damage to an individual from the loss of a smartphone is equivalent to the damage inflicted on a business. It was at this point I realized the distinction between personal and business smartphone has eroded. These miniature computers we walk around with can sink us if they get into the wrong hands.

It was at dinner where I decided to send another SMS but this time I included the offer "$200 reward." Still nothing but I got to thinking it would make sense to at least change my wife's email password so the new owner of her phone couldn't send messages on her behalf. There was no security on the phone so existing messages could not be safeguarded and Apple has no way to remotely wipe a device like RIM and Microsoft do.

Still, my wife couldn't rest till she found out what happened and she was convinced her phone got thrown away with a bunch of napkins and subsequently wanted to visit the restaurant again. I was thinking to myself, is she going to dig through the napkins to find the phone? I just couldn't see this happening - besides who would confuse an iPhone in a pink protective case with napkins anyway?

When we got to the restaurant we realized it was very busy and I thought the odds of finding it now was basically zero. Then I realized that my wife has a Bluetooth headset that she occasionally uses. I asked her to take it out and turn it on. I called her phone. Her headset rang. Bingo - the phone was in the restaurant. We told the manager who started to take the matter more seriously when he realized the headset was working.

The manager and my wife started to walk around the restaurant to determine where the phone was based on the strength of the bluetooth signal. Thankfully the signal died when they got near the dirty napkins.

The manager then went to the table where we had eaten and started moving customers around as he searched the ground. Minutes later a busboy asked what they were looking for. Once told, the busboy went to a drawer and voila - my wife's phone appeared. Thankfully we hadn't cancelled the service - we were imagining someone racking up huge international calling bills on the phone - thankfully it seemed no one touched it.

On the screen were various messages about missed calls and of course the reward. Boy was my wife happy. A subject of lively debate on the way home was whether the phone was going to end up on eBay that night had we not gone back and whether the busboy still had a job.

iPhones can track their position and if only there was a way to run background applications on the device we could have tracked the phone's location through a service like Google Latitude - which by the way is slated to be included in the next iPhone.

Determining the location of important assets will only become more important in my opinion and already there are devices which give you NSA-like security at affordable prices. Case in point is the GSM Handheld Tracker by GADGET.BRANDO.COM.HK. This pocket-sized device gives you the ability to track a car, person or any other object while allowing you to receive speed alerts, movement alerts, setting up a geofence and it can communicate via SMS.

Handheld Tracker Components

I consider this incredible functionality for $133 and I would imagine some parents would consider it a perfect stealthy addition to their teenage kid's cars.

It is worth pointing out that virtually all other phones besides the iPhone do allow multitasking so you should explore installing geolocation software in case your device goes missing. In addition you may want to take a moment and think about whether it makes sense to store social security and credit card numbers on your device. One last precaution - set security on your phone if you think it is important to protect your phone, email and other details. I would opt for a password to pop onscreen after an hour of inactivity - it will be annoying but give you added peace of mind if you and your phone do ever get permanently separated.

You have no doubt noticed how traditional information technology vendors have embraced communications in response to customers who are looking for integrated and cost-effective solutions which span both markets. This thought occurred to me during a conversation with Mark Goodman, VP of Marketing for Ecessa a company focusing on "Uptime for IP networks," according to Goodman.

Last year the company quietly changed its name from Astrocom and even if you haven't heard of either company it is worth looking at their products as they solve real-world corporate problems such as security through their ShieldLink family which takes the company's PowerLink line of load balancing WAN optimization controllers and adds VPN gateway and firewall capabilities.

More recently the company announced ClariLink which takes ShieldLink and adds a SIP proxy, registrar and SBC allowing real-time failover for SIP sessions going over IP networks. Goodman explains you don't need service provider peering relationships or BGP with this solution and this saves you money.

Instead, the company uses NAT to traverse the network and their SIP proxy alleviates the double NATing problem which plagued enterprise VoIP in the good old days.

It is worth clarifying that one benefit of using this solution is there is no session loss if a WAN link goes down.

The product line is peripherally competitive to Acme Packet but there is more of a focus on smaller companies which correspond to the company's recent Covergence acquisition. Ingate would be another competitor to the product family as well. A recent announcement at Interop is that these appliances are getting scaled up to a 500 model which joins the family of 50 and 25. Higher model numbers allow a larger number of supported simultaneous sessions and capacity and the 500 model can support one million concurrent sessions and has gigabit throughput.

As IP communications gains even more traction in the enterprise we can expect more products which are aimed at helping companies consolidate multiple disparate functions into single-appliance, single-server or single-vendor solutions.

See Also: Ixia's IxNetwork and Juniper's Router Successfully Validate LST

The drive for more bandwidth does not slow - even in a global recession some reports show bandwidth needs increasing at rates higher than 100% per year on carrier and enterprise networks. The trend towards more collaborative applications, video, VoIP and cloud-based services are no doubt just a few factors in what seems to be just the beginning of a global bandwidth binge showing no sign of slowing.

Enter Expand a company focusing on application acceleration over WANs who is looking to help solve the branch office bandwidth drought. The company makes its living selling a variety of appliances which they say will increase ROI and stretch IT budgets further. These devices are optimized for datacenters, branch offices and regional offices.

The company counts Fidelity National Insurance, Piconol, Antarctica NZ, Targus, DISA and Evans Fruit Company as some of its customers and has partnered with Vision Solutions to provide more efficient disaster recovery services.

At Interop 2009 in Las Vegas, the company unveiled a new solution they hope will become widely deployed on global networks. Simply put they have unveiled a free Mobile Accelerator Client which gives some of the benefits of an appliance but at a much lower cost. Well actually it is free so you don't get much cheaper. The catch? There is always a catch right? Well not really - you just pay for maximal concurrent users.

How is the performance you wonder? The graph below was provided to me to give an indication. Freestyle means you are alone, Collective means you are sharing a virtual cache and Slipstream means you are utilizing an appliance.

In order to get an idea how the mobile client works you need to better understand Expand Networks and their approach to WAN optimization. They have developed a technology called HIVE which is a clever acronym which stands for Heterogeneous Intelligent Virtual Environment.

The H in Hive tells us that the solution works on various platforms. If you are hoping one of the platforms supported is Apple, keep waiting as XP, Vista and Windows 7 are the only ones on the list so far.

The I standsfor intelligent and of course the software is smart - butone could argue in fact that all software is smart. Except perhaps for applications that let you turn your mobile phone into a virtual beer.

The V standsfor virtual and in this case is actually a solid descriptive word - not just marketing as the mobile client uses p2p technology to enable a branch office with multiple clients to take advantage of a pooled virtual cache. So if Donny in HR downloads a 10 gigabyte video file which five other users need later in the week, you can all tap into the file from Donny's computer rather that all wasting network bandwidth by downloading the file again and again. And you thought Donny had nothing to offer.

I almost forgot - the E stands for environment meaning the software knows if it is in a branch office without a nearby appliance or in the home office where there is an appliance or alone by its lonesome. In each case it adapts and utilizes a byte and object level cache to maximize performance.

As you might imagine, the system knows how to allocate bandwidth according to your QoS policies - it is Intelligent after all.

I spent some time with company representatives David White, Efi Gatmor and Adam Davison as they told me about their product and shared the benefits of their HIVE technology for information technology decision-makers worldwide and mentioned that the software can be rolled our via silent install using an MSI package if desired.

One point the trio made which is important to repeat is that in a typical branch office which does not have technology to take advantage of a shared cache, you can have clients competing with each other for bandwidth as they are utterly blind to the needs and presence of the other clients. When you think about it, a shared cache is infinitely logical and as the need for more bandwidth increases we can expect this sort of technology to be deployed in more and more corporate branches.

As companies roll out more cloud computing applications and install IP communications solutions, focus on compliance and centralized backups, we can only expect the opportunity for Expand Networks dare I say - to Expand?

ADTRAN is a networking company which has transformed a great deal over the past decades. In the nineties, the company held a virtual monopoly in the CSU/DSU market and most every network had the company's standalone boxes in their network (including TMC). In fact the company was once synonymous with the term CSU/DSU in my mind. As this functionality was added into other boxes, the company saw its identity erode and in the process took the opportunity to grow into a major networking force selling over 1,700 products to enterprise and carrier customers. Total sales last year exceeded $500 million and the company employs 1,700 worldwide and is located in scenic Huntsville, Al.

One of the company's primary competitors is Cisco and to fight off this networking "monopoly" the company has focused on building quality products at lower prices. ADTRAN doesn't have the Cisco name but it has been around since 1985 and while so many competitors have left the space, the company keeps chugging along, identifying new market segments and rolling out multiple products to fill them.

Case in point is the NetVanta 1544 series of layer 3, Gigabit aggregation switches allowing customers to aggregate up to four 2.5 Gbps SFP ports in order to allow low-cost 10 Gbps switching in a product priced in the range of typical switches offering less aggregate throughput. All three varieties of the products have 24 fixed 10/100/1000Base-T ports and depending on your needs, there is a traditional Ethernet switch... The 1544P has PoE support and the 1544F provides support for fiber - perfect for campus and similar environments.

List prices are $2,795 for the base model while PoE support brings the price up to $3,795. Fiber support via the 1544F costs $3,995 and this is the only model which is not currently shipping - expect it mid/late-summer.

ADTRAN's Todd Lattanzi brought me up to speed on the new product line and explained these new solutions are great for a company that may need 10 Gbps support in the future but doesn't want to forklift upgrade later. He also mentioned these products are ideal for VoIP.

Latanzi went on to explain the benefits of this product line to customers are the ability to rely on a single vendor for their networking needs [as his company has such a broad product line], a 40% savings over other providers, a single OS on all switches and a built-in WiFi access controller in this product line.

My thoughts are that this economic environment seems to be one where companies like ADTRAN can differentiate themselves by pushing value. Yes Cisco costs more but Cisco spends a great deal of money on marketing which helps cement the networking giant as a very safe choice. But as many vendors and buyers have told me this year, customers are more open to new vendors who can provide them better value. On an upcoming trip to Huntsville I will be following up with ADTRAN to see how the market is reacting to their new offerings and the company's positioning as the quality and value focused networking equipment provider.

• ADTRAN NetVanta Certified for Deployment with Covad
• ADTRAN Helping SMBs with New IP Communications Alliance Program
• ADTRAN Intros Layer 3 GbE Switch Series
• Deploying VoIP on the LAN: Cross-Training In-house Teams Saves Time, Support Costs
• VoIP Provider Voxitas Expands to Colorado, Mountain Region

Last week at Interop my team conducted over 100 interviews with thought leaders at the show. Topics discussed include green switching, testing, Ethernet, cloud computing and more. So far, half a dozen of the videos have been posted and more are being added continually. I hope you find them helpful.

I have embedded some of these for your immediate viewing pleasure. Here is the page which will store all of these videos.

Chris Loeffler, Global Applications Manager and Lennart Jonsson, Vice President Technology, Eaton

Kevin Goulet, Senior Marketing Director, Enterprise WLAN, Motorola Enterprise Mobility Solutions, Motorola

Kevin Ryan, Director, Data Center Solutions, Extreme Networks

For nearly 13 years, Greg Galitzine has been a tremendously valuable part of the TMC team. His career started as an editor for CTI Magazine in 1996. Where he reported on the collision of the computer and communications spaces including what we called IP telephony back in the day. In 1997 we convened a meeting with Greg to explore whether it made sense to launch a publication in the IP telephony space. The outcome of the meeting was to launch what we hoped would become a cornerstone of what we hoped would be a new industry - Internet Telephony Magazine.

Greg became the editor of this publication and had the vision to see this is where the industry was going. Many companies in the communications space told us we were nuts for launching this publication as at the time there was no industry, just a few nerds calling each other on softphones.

Lo and behold, over the past decade this nerdy, niche technology revolutionized telecom to the point where business models have changed, new entrants have come into the telecom market and entire industries were transformed through international outsourcing made possible by inexpensive VoIP-based telephony.

In the last few years, Greg did a great job helping transform TMCnet into a major web force in communications and technology news. We are grateful to him for the years he has put in.

I am very happy for Greg as recently he has been given a great opportunity which involves a move to a new industry altogether. Galitzine has accepted a position with ISA, Inc., a prime contractor to the National Nuclear Security Administration and working in about 18 countries through Central and Eastern Europe to identify and interdict the illegal movement of materials for weapons of mass destruction. Greg will be taking his analytical and editorial skills to a higher level, contributing to national-level policy and operational support analysis for these major international nonproliferation undertakings.

While we all selfishly wish Greg wouldn't move on, we are happy for him and are sure he will make a tremendous impact in his new position.

It looks like Nortel could be gone as a standalone company in the next few weeks according to published reports. The news is sad but true. It looks like Avaya or Siemens could pick up the enterprise pieces. The optical division could go to Fujitsu, Huaweii, Alcatel-Lucent or potentially a private equity firm. The wireless unit could go to NSN.

What is terrible about the situation from my perspective is the communications and tech spaces are doing well relative to most other markets. In other words, this downturn for these markets has not been terrible. And there is a chance we could see these spaces bounce back faster than other industries.

This IMHO makes the Nortel assets very valuable as they are going for bargain-basement prices and their upside potential is probably good.

I should mention that some of the companies on the list above are not known for their customer facing marketing... If you are one of those companies you will likely not see the value from the assets you pick up.

The real value here is to put a better sales and marketing engine in front of some of the best engineering around. If that is done it will be the best possible outcome for employees, customers and the acquirers.

If you look at TMC from the outside and find yourself asking how you can get a job as an intern at this global integrated media company which builds communities online, in print and in person while gaining marketshare regardless of economic climate, I have some great news to share. We are looking for a small army of interns who want to learn what it's like to take on major multibillion dollar media companies with infinite resources and consistently win.

We will teach you how to sell collaboratively - how to listen and to be loved by your customers (well most of them anyway).

We will teach you integrated marketing and online marketing - not theory but ever-evolving practice.

If you love media and want to work at the company that is light years ahead online, contact us ASAP. We are very picky so if you aren't a super-hard worker and collaboration and hat-wearing are not your middle names, let's end our relationship now as friends (it's not you it's me).

One last thought about TMC - our culture is unusual - we have the financial stability of a 37 year-old company with the energy and enthusiasm of a start-up.

Let's just say if you're thinking of contacting us, please don't delay


Here's more:

The Sales & Marketing internship position at TMC is designed to provide hands-on experience that will be mutually beneficial for both the intern and the organization. The internship position is designed to challenge students and provide them with practical experience in the advertising and media industry.

TMC is looking for a dynamic, creative, enthusiastic, high energy professional to support the Sales organization, to help build advertising and marketing presentations for prospects and clients.

• Work with sales & marketing team to assist in the implementation of various campaigns
• Contribute to the creative input in building campaigns and support the campaigns
• Copyediting and proofreading
• Communicate with customers and peers
• Minimum Qualifications:
• Working towards completion of a college degree program in business, marketing or communication
• Excellent communication skills verbal and written
• Proficient in Microsoft Office suite, specifically PowerPoint and Excel
• Excellent communication skills
• Detail Oriented
• Initiative and proactive thinking
• Team player
• Ability to multi-task and work in a fast paced environment meeting deadlines