Charney is probably a smart and decent man, but he has an awful lot of questions to answer. For instance, just how will he boost the security of Microsoft products? Will they go back and rearchitect, or will security be an add-on to existing tools?

Is this a publicity stunt, or will Charney have real authority over managers of such products as IE, ISS, Outlook, Word, the various and sundry flavors of Windows, and .Net?

It's a strange message Microsoft is sending. If the company already had real security expertise, why did it need to hire an outsider?

Cyber Terrorism Is Back

Under Bill Clinton's administration, warnings about cyber terrorism were released about every three months -- and no one paid any attention. Now Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has issued a similar warning, and people are taking notice. According to Rumsfeld, terrorists may take aim at our vital commercial and military networks and attached computer systems -- waging a cyber war so to speak. This is the same exact thing Clinton's boys said. And like the Clinton-ites, Rumsfeld advocates will be tightening our nation's digital security and increasing the link ups between the various branches of the armed forces.

IBM Takes It on the Chin

IBM has had a lot of black eyes in its history. The term FUD was pretty much invented to describe IBM sales tactics. It also faced an insulting antitrust suit and lost a very public OS war with Microsoft. But the most damaging allegations to date are that IBM knew that Nazis were using its punch card systems to help organize its program of genocide.

IBM is already facing a suit filed by Jewish victims. Now a group of Gypsies is filing a suit, seeking a little over $10,000 per victim. This may seem like only so much history, but it has total relevance. Today there are just as many evil people in power, and these people have access to far more sophisticated technology. Who has the responsibility to check out customers here and abroad and track them over time? And what is the responsibility of technical support and other follow-up personnel to report suspicious activity? It's a whole new world.

Downsizing, Take Two

Remember the '80s, when the birth of the PC was supposed to be the death of the mainframe, all thanks to a little thing called downsizing? It never happened. All those new PCs and LANs and servers only served to feed data into bigger and bigger centralized mainframes.

Now Larry Ellison is predicting the demise of big Unix boxes, like those sold by Sun. His forecast is that they will be replaced by Intel-based Linux machines. Ellison is leading the charge, replacing his old HP boxes with a Linux cluster. Linux boxes may be all the rage, but it is not a foregone conclusion that they will kill off Solaris and HP-UX.

Now That Rots!

Hack attacks are clearly a nuisance, definitely cost money, and often result in stolen or destroyed data. But an ISP in England was hacked so hard it went clean out of business. A distributed denial of service attack on CloudNine Communications cost the company so much uptime that it simply could not recover financially.

This should be a real wake up call: Hackers are not just clever kids testing their skills -- they are the worst kind of vandals, the kind that are willing to destroy the lives of people they have never met. I'm sure a handful of knuckleheads will blame CloudNine for not doing enough top protect its network. I've two answers for that, bunk and bunk. First DOS and DDOS attacks are vicious. Second, CloudNine did not attack itself, some jerk did it for them.

Some Good News