ISPs Can Slam Spammer Profits ...

Computerworld - ... with new technology that sits on a service provider's network borders and slows spam progress to a costly, slothlike pace. Called Edge GX and developed by Openwave Systems Inc. in Redwood City, Calif., the Linux- or Solaris-based software is the outgrowth of an ad hoc Internet service provider and vendor organization founded last fall with a decidedly uncatchy name, Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, and an even less melodic acronym, MAAWG. Although short on literary or phonetic style, the group is long on clever ideas to hinder spammers, such as getting ISPs to work together to fight pernicious unsolicited e-mail. "We don't defend against spam the same way carrier to carrier," observes Todd Dean, director of data operations and support at Cox Communications Inc. in Atlanta. But with the frightful costs of unnecessary bandwidth, server and storage capacity to handle spam, ISPs need a coordinated strategy, Dean says. He added that he and his competitors have seen the light and will begin to use common weapons to diminish, if not eliminate, spam. Edge GX is the first tool developed under MAAWG's auspices. According to Richard Wong, general manager of Openwave's messaging group, the software has two key features specifically for service providers. The first is called Receipt-To: Harvester. Again, you can question the less-than-snappy name, but not the cool technology. This feature keeps track of messages bounced back to an IP address, the inevitable result of classic dictionary attacks. If those mail-return numbers are beyond what the ISP deems legitimate, it will slow the rest of the outgoing messages from the spammer, "so much that it will take a decade to get through," claims Wong. The second technique looks at outbound mail traffic from a source: If it's outside normal behavior, it slows down message processing. If the queued messages continue to pile up, the oddly named Rate-Limiting Tarpitting feature drops the spammer connection for as little as a millisecond or as long as an hour, adding costs and hassles to spammers. For once. Edge GX hits the streets today.
• Service providers aren't just your spam-fighting buddies. They can also be your source for call center technology. Using a PC and VoIP, call center agents access an ISP-based infrastructure provided by CosmoCom Inc. for inbound or outbound call activities. The Melville, N.Y.-based company delivers everything from predictive dialing to voice-recognition technology. Currently shipping Version 4.3, the company is working on a 5.0 upgrade that will pump up call capacity, improve e-mail integration and offer better speech recognition. If you're calculating the costs of investing in your call center's systems, consider putting $300 to $500 in one of your spreadsheet's cells. That's what CosmoCom claims it costs per month, per agent to use the call center service.
• With your spam-fighting and call center operations now functioning somewhere on the Internet, you might as well toss your integration work out there as well. At least as far as Web services are concerned, argues Halsey Minor, CEO of Grand Central Communications Inc. He says standards such as the Business Process Execution Language make it possible for his San Francisco company to exist. Grand Central gathered and categorized a variety of business-oriented Web services. It mediates the protocol and data-format variations that inevitably reside in a vendor's implementation of a standard. That makes it safer for you to pick and choose a service to integrate into your application. By summer, Minor says, Grand Central will be able to "empirically determine the reliability" of any public or private Web service, a useful bit of information when creating service-level agreements.
• Today, Teradata, a subsidiary of NCR Corp. in Dayton, Ohio, unveils its Data Warehouse Maturity Assessment service. Teradata consultants have devised a scorecard that shows the six stages and 28 processes involved in how effectively a company uses its data warehouse for business intelligence. Mark Shainman, an analyst at Meta Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn., says many companies deploy "their analytical infrastructure in a quick-and-dirty fashion," which leads to significant inefficiencies in data warehouse usage. Teradata says its consultants "are database-agnostic." Always a good idea to keep religion and technology separate.

Key Code Testing
Software Development Technologies Inc. in San Jose tomorrow will ship Release 7 of its Unified Test Pro, a software analysis and testing tool. Designed for testers who aren't necessarily programmers, the software uses keywords tied to business processes to automatically inspect code. The new release adds a full integrated development environment and templates of business processes. Pricing starts at $6,495 per seat.

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