Stephen J. Schueler of DSHI Systems in Florida wrote yesterday, asking that I check out their latest venture. FreeMD. It purports to be a virtual physician, but it’s more like the ELIZA program from back in the 1960s. ELIZA was, in the end, more a satire than anything else, a program that would mainly ask you what was wrong with you until you found out yourself. Trouble is, my ADHD hates that kind of psychology. Once I was told what was wrong, I wanted actions I could take to deal with it. And when it comes to what is physically wrong with us, I think we’re all that way. I entered a fairly simple, and typical problem into the search box,…

Countries across the Middle East are sans Internet connections due to a cable break on Wednesday. Two lessons: The Internet in some areas lack redundancy and telecommunications infrastructure is weak. And companies that outsource customer service operations offshore need to plan ahead. Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology on Wednesday formed an emergency task force to fix a cable that cut off Internet services and international communications in the Middle East. In the U.S., this outage abroad wouldn’t be a big deal–until your customer service operations mostly housed offshore go down. Dr. Tarek Kamel, Egypt’s minister of communications and IT, said his group is working on finding “alternative communication channels” and rerouting call centers to other undersea cables. According…

Let’s get a conversation going here about the relative costs and merits of server-based unified communications in the enterprise vs. hosted unified communications solutions. Both types of solutions involve capability of PC to PC voice communications within an enterprise, and often, beyond the enterprise as well. Let’s look at the cost issue. As reader and vp-marketing for hosted unified communications solutions provider Rurik Bradbury wrote me yesterday, a cost breakdown of a 20-user setup of Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office Communications Server crunches down like this: 2 servers hardware $2400 E2007 Standard Server (incl 5 CALs) $1229 E2007 15 CALs $1050 ($70*15) Outlook 20 users $2000 Windows 2003 *2 $1400 Backup server hardware $800 Backup software (CA ARCserve) $1000Subtotal: $9879…

Longterm readers of Threatchaos will recall the attempted Sumitomo Bank heist in London. In that incident a gang connected to an Israeli crime syndicate infiltrated the London branch of Sumitomo Mitsui and installed hardware key stroke loggers on desktop machines within the bank. With stolen credentials they attempted to transfer a reported 220 million pounds to bank accounts around the world. There are still many questions that remain unanswered in the Sumitomo case. I have maintained a Google alert on Sumitomo for the last two years and there has not been a whisper about any arrests, prosecutions or actions in that case. For all we know the entire gang is still on the loose. Now we have a fresh incident…

Verizon Wireless and BlackBerry announced today that a red-colored BlackBerry 8830 World Edition will be available online Friday at www.verizonwireless.com for $299.99 after a $100 rebate with a new two-year customer agreement. If customers sign up for qualifying voice and data plans, they will receive an additional $100 credit at the time of purchase. The units wil be available in Verizon Wireless Communications Stores beginning a week from tomorrow, February 8. They are also available to Verizon Wireless Enterprise customers who call their sales rep at  1-800-VZW-4BIZ .

Mr. Buzzword for February appears to be proprietary open source. This is an open source project which is owned or controlled by one company. Even though it may have a GPL license, you have no more power over it than a single voter in a political system. The definition has changed since I first wrote the Open Source Incline back in 2006. It’s now a development model, not a licensing model. But the intent is still the same, and the impact similar, as Savio Rodrigues notes. In the proprietary model your own features and bug fixes may be ignored by the project’s “owner” so what’s the use? You have even less control over the project’s business model. If the “owner”…

The majority of Internet and international telephone traffic travels goes under the sea. When two submarine cables in the Mediterranean Sea were cut (most likely by ship anchors) on Wednesday, Internet connectivity in the Middle East and in parts of Asia cratered. According to reports, as much as 70 percent of Egypt’s Internet connectivity was down, and India’s bandwidth has been severely impacted. U.S. Internet traffic has been affected as well by the cable break. It will likely take a few weeks to fix the underground cables, which will mean traffic congestion and latency problems during that period. The Internet has a great deal of resilience and redundancy, but there are still major arteries that can significantly bleed the…

OK green list fans, here’s another one for you. This week, the Environmental Protection Agency released its list of companies who are leading the way when it comes to buying “green power.” The list came about as a result of a challenge made by the Green Power Partnership in December 2006 encouraging members of the Fortune 500 to switch as much of their energy purchases as possible to green sources. (The EPA considers “green power” as that subset of alternative energy that will have the biggest environmental benefits, including solar, wind, geothermal, biogas, biomass, and low-impact small hydroelectric sources.) The 53 companies that show up on the list are collectively buying more than 6 billion kilowatt-hours of green power, which…

Billed as a kids’ game, the fun, colorful ‘Ten Amazing Fruits’ has the ingredients for developing fertile and creative young minds.