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While not a programmers’ tool, per se, Oslo, Norway-based ObjectPlanet’s
Network Probe is nonetheless a very competent and intuitive way to see what’s
going on across your network. First, you configure Network Probe’s server
to collect the details. Then you can use its Java-based client application
with any Java-enabled Web browser to view the results in real time. In our
tests, Network Probe captured a tremendous amount of data and displayed it
in what seemed like an endless variety of ways. Generating real-time views
of protocols in use, Internet conversations and filtered traffic reports was
easy. There are tables and graphs, and all the sorting and searching capabilities
you would expect, as well as the ability to do simple exports. You can also
automatically configure Network Probe to save its statistics daily so that
reporting on a past period or comparing your metrics is straightforward. We
were glad to see that the company thoughtfully includes an automatic (and configurable)
cleanout tool, too, as this is the kind of data that can grow rapidly. For
network monitoring or tracking down errant traffic, Network Probe is a winner.
—Robert
A. DelRossi
“We’re very honored with this Jolt
Award. It’s great to see that a development team of only two
people can create something that 250,000 people have downloaded and
found useful.”
Who knows what evil lurks in your SOAP payload? Belmont, Calif.-based Reactivity’s
firewall does. Use the hardware appliance as a front-end XML proxy, living
in the “public” part of your network, and let it screen the SOAP
calls, XML data and metadata before they hit your apps—or leave your
secure network. While you’ll want to add authentication testing to your
apps, the Reactivity box acts as a front line of defense. It also handles encryption
and decryption of the payload, digital signature verification and other security
checks. While you could add those functions to your own apps, it’s easier
(and less computationally expensive) to outsource the crypto to a dedicated
system. Full logging, traffic prioritization, fail-over and load balancing
will help endear the firewall to sys admins, while the built-in crypto algorithms
and support for .NET and J2EE will simplify your project requirements.
Computers were promised to be labor-saving. Then came spam, viruses, spyware
and blended threats of all three. Fortunately, Arlington Heights, Ill.-based
Aladdin offers eSafe, a corporate gateway that filters out all these nuisances,
restoring the promise of productivity. As well, it hunts for the demons of
instant messages, peer-to-peer file transfer nets, HTTP tunneling, adware,
malicious URLs and potentially unpatched Windows OS exploits.
While many competitive solutions rely on predefined “signatures” to
detect malicious packet streams, eSafe has a heuristic mechanism that literally
executes a suspicious object in a virtual machine and notes the effects. Should
they be less than salubrious, eSafe sends the object to that great bit bucket
in the sky. Handling up to 108,000 e-mails per hour per scalable box, that’s
good riddance.
OrangeSpam isn’t an application, but a sophisticated software development
kit for adding spam detection to your programs. That assumes, of course, that
you’re building things like antivirus software, firewalls or messaging
systems.
OrangeSpam, which builds on Burlington, Mass.-based Cobion’s OrangeFilter
technology, works to detect spam rather holistically; it’s not one test,
but a battery of static and dynamic approaches that can incorporate the company’s
extensive online database of known spam techniques and offenders. OrangeSpam
can work at advanced levels, analyzing text in graphics, scanning for logos,
and even performing what it calls “recognition of nakedness” in
its search for spam. During my tests, I found that OrangeSpam did a very good
job at content analysis, finding spam that other filters did not.
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This month,
Dr. Dobb's Journal is devoted to mobile programming. We introduce you to Apple's new Swift programming language, discuss the perils of being the third-most-popular mobile platform, revisit SQLite on Android
, and much more!
