Scoff not at scofflaws
It always is easy to tell when my kids arrive home from college. The first clue comes when I trip over the pile of laundry bags, backpacks, guitar cases, sneakers, video-game consoles and video-game cases that pops up just a step or two inside the front door of my home. The next comes when it takes me twice as long to unload the week’s groceries from the trunk of my car. But the truly tell-tale sign occurs when our personal computer’s processor slows to a snail’s pace.
Despite my constant pleadings to the contrary, my progeny continue to download all sorts of things from the Internet, in the process unleashing untold viruses, ad ware and spyware. The last time they were home, our PC had become so unstable that the image on the screen actually was wavering so much I started to get a little sea sick. I got sicker still when I had to fork out 30 bucks for cleansing software that uncovered and eradicated more than 400 types of monitoring software. The kids still aren’t heeding my requests, but at least now I can conduct a nightly system purge.
I thought of my two scofflaws as I read Doug Mohney’s account of the efforts being made by enterprises to thwart employees who are introducing rogue Wi-Fi access points into their corporate local area networks, usually without the permission of the company’s information technology gurus (page 30). While I only have to worry about the collapse of a lone desktop, enterprise IT managers have to fret about entire networks, and the implications of a meltdown on the company’s customers, business, profitability and standing in the financial community. No wonder they are clamoring for solutions that will help them ferret out such intrusions and, as Mohney reports, vendors are rushing to provide them.
The theme is repeated in Jim Barthold’s story regarding efforts by the Food and Drug Administration and pharmaceutical companies to combat theft and counterfeiting in the nation’s drug supply through the use of radio frequency identification technologies (page 20). As Barthold reports, the need to secure America’s pharmaceutical distribution channels should provide plenty of boost to quicken the development of much-needed RFID standards.
While scofflaws often create myriad headaches and have a tendency to drive unsuspecting victims crazy, they do serve a useful purpose: They give all of us something to do.
