ZDNet: Net phone customers brace for 'VoIP spam'

Spam is one of the most intrusive forms of advertising because, unlike telemarketing and direct-mail, spam pushes the primary cost of delivering the advertisement onto the recipient and not the sender. A sender can send out millions of e-mails, the receiver must bear the bandwidth cost in receiving them.

Image Spam has increased the bandwidth costs of spam, and VoIP spam seems to go to the next step.

Like e-mail, VoIP calls find their way by locating an IP (Internet Protocol) address, a unique set of numbers assigned to each device connected to the Web. By contrast, calls made over the traditional phone network are routed by instructions taken from a 10-digit telephone number. Using VoIP, telemarketers can send messages to thousands of addresses at a time, rather than tying up a single phone line to make one call.

The biggest likely impact of VoIP spam will be on voice mail boxes. They'll dutifully record every message they receive, while a human answering the phone will likely hang up within a few seconds. That could have a tremendous effect on VoIP providers that offer free voice mail; they would have to expand their storage capabilities to handle the additional spam messages.

Image spam - which seeks to get around spam filters by including images with text instead of just text - uses incredible amounts of bandwidth. VoIP uses even larger amounts of bandwidth and is harder to search for specific words (never mind the "wiretap" issues inherent in doing so.) Because of the nature of a VoIP conversation, which sacrifices bandwidth efficiency for eliminating latency, VoIP messages can often be deceptively large.

Microsoft TechNet: Windows Server 2003 & Windows XP x64 Service Pack 2

Microsoft finally released Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP 64-bit edition.

The enhancements to Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 include:

• Windows Deployment Services (WDS)
• Enabling 'Firewall Per Port' Authentication
• Microsoft Management Console 3.0 (MMC 3.0)
• Wireless Protected Access 2 (WPA2)
• iCACLS tool
• Expanded Windows Server 2003 Datacenter SKUs
• Release of MUI Packs to insure greater compatibility between base and MUI language
• Performance Improvements for SQL Servers
• Enhanced discoverability options in MSConfig
• Improved IPsec filter management
• Performance Improvements under Windows Virtualization
• Increased default storage for Message Queuing
• Improvements to DCDIAG Domain Name Service tests
• New Events for Cluster Service Accounts

Particularly important (for this blog, anyway) are performance improvements for SQL servers and windows virtualization; while you need to test before deployment, if these improvements work as advertised they may very well be able to improve the efficiency of the servers, decreasing load and improving overall end-to-end performance for apps that use an SQL server or run on a virtualized OS.

New York Times TechTalk Podcast for March 14, 2007 [MP3]

Okay, I'll admit it - this has relatively little to do with network performance. However, it does have everything to do with my [editor Brian Boyko's] favorite subject, which is Network Performance Daily Editor, Brian Boyko.
In short, I did a freelance article for HardOCP.com where I looked at Linux for 30 days. That story got on Slashdot and Digg, and the New York Times asked me to comment on their TechTalk podcast. This is shameless self-promotion, I know, but I'm still proud of it. They start talking about Linux about 16 minutes in and I come in at the 19 minute mark. (You'll recognize me because I sound like a 16 year old with a lisp - despite the fact that I turn 28 in two weeks.)