Service Provider Journal

SPJ Podcast #3: Scott Chasin on trusted communications

On Monday I will be moderator of a panel in San Francisco, "Smartphone & Wireless Security: Steps to Safeguarding Your Business," at 2:00 p.m. at the Smartphone Summit.

In preparation for this panel, I wandered down to ISPCON on Thursday to see what the ISP industry has done lately to insure that the communications we receive from others can be trusted to really be from those we believe sent them. This led me to have a chat with Scott Chasin of MX Logic, who was a guest on my Opening Move podcast back in 2005. On Friday, Scott and I talked for about 18 minutes about whether DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM -- which we mistakenly referred to as DKAM) and digital signatures, used alone or together, can help improve the state of trusted Internet communication. Among the highlights of our conversation:

• We will still need firewalls on all our mobile devices
• DKIM won't be foolproof
• The days of downloading software from the Web that hasn't been vetted by your trust silo of choice are numbered.

Amazon S3 now has an SLA

Jeffrey McManus reports that Amazon S3 now provides a service-level agreement (SLA) -- with caveats. Still, let's hope it's the start of a greater emphasis on SLAs as generalized grid computing services continue to deploy.