Digital Daily » Vint Cerf

What Can I Say, Mr. Zuckerberg? Your Name Just Never Came Up.

John Paczkowski — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 07:01:36 +0000

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, not Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, is the most influential IT personality of the past quarter-century.

This according to a survey of IT professionals conducted by the Computing Technology Industry Association. Asked to list the most influential tech personalities of the last 25 years, 84% of respondents listed Gates, and 73% listed Jobs. Also appearing on the list: Dell CEO Michael Dell (53% of respondents); Linux founder Linus Torvalds (47%); Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (also 47%); Cisco CEO John Chambers (44%); Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (36%); Vint “Father of the Internet” Cerf (35%); Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (also 35%); and eBay CEO Meg Whitman (30%).

It's Not a PayPal Mockery. It's a 'Person-to-Person, Stored-Value Payments Celebration'

John Paczkowski — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 17:39:43 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Better to Have a Botnet in Front of Me Than a Frontal Lobotomy!

John Paczkowski — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 07:06:48 +0000

Vint Cerf wasn’t kidding when he warned attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year that the Internet is at serious risk from botnets. These vast networks of compromised PCs–used by criminals for sending spam and spyware and for launching denial-of-service attacks–are a very real and quickly evolving problem. To wit, the FBI’s announcement yesterday that its OPERATION BOT ROAST initiative has identified some 1 million compromised PCs.

Unsettling, isn’t it? The thought of a million machines sitting in homes, schools and businesses around the country just waiting to spew out some nasty piece of malware or the latest “pump and dump” stock scheme. Depressing, too. Said Gadi Evron, who coordinates an international volunteer effort to fight botnets, “The war to make the Internet safe was lost long ago, and we need to figure out what to do now.”