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• Best solution to anti-spam in PHP?

  - by user198729

  How to distinguish robots from normal user? How does SO do this job? Currently I'm met with a robot which post once every 1 hour...

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• Implementing a "flag as spam/offensive" system

  - by UltraVi01

  I am looking for a community moderated way of managing/eliminating spam and offensive content. Functionality similar to StackOverflow and many other sites seems like a good way to go. Although I'm sure this could greatly vary based on specific needs, I am curious about the backend mechanism/algorithm --that is, has anyone had success using something like "3 strikes and you're out" -- the flagged post is automatically closed/deleted after 3 reports by users with the required credentials. Would something like this likely be effective or would it require a more complex solution to ensure honesty and effectiveness. Any thoughts / experiences would be great

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• How to stop spam in PHPBB3 ?

  - by newbie

  I'm getting awful lot of spam to my forums where only registered users can post and captcha is in use. What could we best solution to stop spammers registering to my forums?

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• PHP Security checklist (injection, sessions etc)

  - by NoviceCoding

  So what kind of things should a person using PHP and MySql be focused on to maximize security. Things I have done: -mysql_real_escape_string all inputs -validate all inputs after escaping em -Placed random alpha numerics before my table names -50character salt + Ripemd passwords Heres where I think I am slacking: -I know know nothing about sessions and securing them. How unsafe/safe is it if all you are doing is: session_start(); $_SESSION['login']= $login; and checking it with: session_start(); if(isset($_SESSION['login'])){ -I heard something about other forms of injection like cross site injection and what not... -And probably many other things I dont know about. Is there a "checklist"/Quicktut on making php secure? I dont even know what I should be worried about.I kinda regret now not building off cakephp since I am not a pro.

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• Getting on mediawiki spammers list? [closed]

  - by Dave

  hi ther - this is a "strange question"... :) I WANT to get on a wiki spammers list for a test project i'm trying to do with some folks - how do i go about doing that?? :)

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• Preventing decompilation of C# application

  - by Kalpak

  Hi, We are planning to develop a client server application using C# and MySQL. We plan to sell the product on the shelf like any other software utility. We are worried about the decompilation of our product which does have some sort of edge over our competitors in terms of usability and bundled functionality. How can we prevent our software from decompilation, so the business logic of the product remains intact? We have heard about Reflector and other decompilers which makes our code very much vulnerable for copying. Our customer base is not Corporates by medical practitioners who themselves may not do it but our competitors may want to copy/disable licensing so value of our software goes down. Any suggestion to prevent this is most welcome. regards.. Obelisk

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• Imposing email limits on web page

  - by Martin

  To avoid spammers, what's a good strategy for imposing limits on users when sending email from our site? A count limit per day on individual IPs? Sender emails? Domains? In general terms, but recommended figures will also be helpful. Our users can send emails through our web page. They can register and log in but are also allowed to do this without logging in, but with a captcha and with a field for the senders email. Certainly, there is a header, "The user has sent you the following message.", limiting the use for spammers, so perhaps it's not a big problem. Any comments on what I'm doing will be greatly appreciated.

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• How can I cut down on this spam, and what is the point of it anyway?

  - by Steven

  I run a small, niche personal ads site. People post ads and then other people reply to them, which sends an email to the original creator of the ad telling them that someone is interested and giving them contact information for that interested person. Lately there's been some weird spam. People are receiving nonsense replies to their ads. Here is an example of one: Name: xkauwvyr Reply: vRYmbI <a href="http://rypmoxdkfblf.com/">rypmoxdkfblf</a>, url=http://pnjlwvhizwbq.com/]pnjlwvhizwbq[/url], [link=http://hmenwoujxrfv.com/]hmenwoujxrfv[/link], http://ogsekuhoyeud.com/ They vary in length and composition but they all look roughly like that. The first idea I had was to simply throw out any reply that contained the string " Also, is this spam just some ass playing a trick on my website, or is it something more malicious?

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• What the difference between deadlock avoidance and deadlock prevention?

  - by skydoor

  I met two terms and are they the same thing or different thing?

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• How can QA prevent defects?

  - by user970696

  Also according to Software Testing By Srinisvasan Desikan, Gopalaswamy Ramesh or ISTQB text books. Quality assurance is e.g. reviewing products, inspections, walkthroughs to see if all standards are being followed. This is preventive activity. I cannot see how this can be preventive? For the references: defect prevention (Quality Assurance) Software Testing By Srinisvasan Desikan, Gopalaswamy Ramesh Quality Assurance (QA) tries to go one step further. Instead of concentrating on post- facto defect detection and correction, it focusses on the prevention of defects from the very start. Managing Global Software Projects - Page 110 QA deals with prevention of defects in the product being developed. Software Testing and Quality Assurance

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• Is it legal to ask photo ID and credit card copy in the U.S

  - by selim

  I regularly order from online shops around the world and I have not see any case where the company asks for photo ID or credit card copy. Yesterday I make an order from linode.com and my order is on hold because of their "fraud check system". Is it common to ask those info in U.S. where I have never asked such info in here (Istanbul, Turkey). And I already asked what is their motive and legal stand and the reason my order is hold by their fraud system. And I also added whether is because I live in Istanbul, Turkey. Their answer was as following: "We would not be able to disclose specific information related to our fraud system." And I'm asked repeatedly whether I want to cancel my order or not. I dont questioning reputation of linode.com if I think so, I did not make an order. I think asking for photo ID is neither legal nor provide any security.

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• Quand les lois américaines scellent l'avenir des experts en sécurité, la loi CFAA freinerait la traque et la découverte des failles de sécurité

  Quand la loi américaine scelle l'avenir des experts en sécurité le computer fraud and abuse act freinerait la traque et la découverte des failles de sécuritéEntériné en 1986 pour sanctionner juridiquement les cybercriminels, le projet de loi américaine CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) est de plus en plus décrié par les experts en sécurité. En cause : le flou entourant la loi en matière d'abus informatiques et la non-distinction entre les chercheurs en sécurité qui traquent les failles et les...

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• OWB/ODI Users: Last Chance to Submit and Vote On Sessions for OpenWorld 2010

  - by antonio romero

  Now is the last chance for OWB and ODI users to propose new ETL/DW/DI sessions for OpenWorld! Oracle OpenWorld 2010 "Suggest a Session" lets members of the Oracle Mix community submit and vote on papers/talks for OpenWorld. The most popular session proposals will be included in the conference program. One promising OWB-related topic has already been submitted: Case Study: Real-Time Data Warehousing and Fraud Detection with Oracle 11gR2 Dr. Holger Friedrich and consultants from sumIT AG in Switzerland built a real-time data warehouse and accompanying BI system for real-time online fraud detection with very limited resources and a short schedule. His presentation will cover: How sumIT AG efficiently loads complex data feeds in real time in Oracle 11gR2 using, among others, Advanced Queues and XML DB How they lowered costs and sped up development, by leveraging the DBs development features including Oracle Warehouse Builder How they delivered a production-ready solution in a few short months using only three part-time developers Come vote for this proposal, on Oracle Mix: https://mix.oracle.com/oow10/proposals/10566-case-study-real-time-data-warehousing-and-fraud-detection-with-oracle-11gr2  I have already invited members of the OWB/ODI Linkedin group (with over 1400 members) to come vote on topics like this one and propose their own. If enough of us vote on a few topics, we are sure to get some on the agenda!  And if you have your own topics, using the Suggest-a-Session instructions here: http://wiki.oracle.com/page/Oracle+OpenWorld+2010+Suggest-a-Session If you propose a topic, don't forget to come to Linkedin and promote it! I have already sent the members of the Linkedin group an email announcement about this, and I will send another in a week, with links to all topics submitted. Thanks, all!

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• Leaving SQL Management open on the internet

  - by Tim Fraud

  I am a developer, but every so often need access to our production database -- yeah, poor practice, but anyway... My boss doesn't want me directly on the box using RDP, and so we decided to just permit MS SQL Management Console access so that I can do my tasks. So right now we have the SQL box somewhat accessible on the internet (on port 1433 if I am not mistaken), which opens a security hole. But I am wondering, how much of an uncommon practice is this, and what defaults should I be concerned about? We use MSSQL2008 and I created an account that has Read-Only access, because my production tasks only need that. I didn't see any unusual default accounts with default passwords on the system, so I would be interested to hear your take. (And of-course, is there a better way?)

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• Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

  - by raul.goycoolea

  @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Abstract   Reference architecture provides needed architectural information that can be provided in advance to an enterprise to enable consistent architectural best practices. Enterprise Reference Architecture helps business owners to actualize their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. It evaluates the IT systems, based on Reference Architecture goals, principles, and standards. It helps to reduce IT costs by increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc. Telecom Reference Architecture provides customers with the flexibility to view bundled service bills online with the provision of multiple services. It provides real-time, flexible billing and charging systems, to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Enterprises. It lays the foundation for a Telecom Reference Architecture by articulating the requirements, drivers, and pitfalls for telecom service providers. It describes generic reference architecture for telecom enterprises and moves on to explain how to achieve Enterprise Reference Architecture by using SOA.   Introduction   A Reference Architecture provides a methodology, set of practices, template, and standards based on a set of successful solutions implemented earlier. These solutions have been generalized and structured for the depiction of both a logical and a physical architecture, based on the harvesting of a set of patterns that describe observations in a number of successful implementations. It helps as a reference for the various architectures that an enterprise can implement to solve various problems. It can be used as the starting point or the point of comparisons for various departments/business entities of a company, or for the various companies for an enterprise. It provides multiple views for multiple stakeholders.   Major artifacts of the Enterprise Reference Architecture are methodologies, standards, metadata, documents, design patterns, etc.   Purpose of Reference Architecture   In most cases, architects spend a lot of time researching, investigating, defining, and re-arguing architectural decisions. It is like reinventing the wheel as their peers in other organizations or even the same organization have already spent a lot of time and effort defining their own architectural practices. This prevents an organization from learning from its own experiences and applying that knowledge for increased effectiveness.   Reference architecture provides missing architectural information that can be provided in advance to project team members to enable consistent architectural best practices.   Enterprise Reference Architecture helps an enterprise to achieve the following at the abstract level:   ·       Reference architecture is more of a communication channel to an enterprise ·       Helps the business owners to accommodate to their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. ·       Evaluates the IT systems based on Reference Architecture Principles ·       Reduces IT spending through increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc ·       A Real-time Integration Model helps to reduce the latency of the data updates Is used to define a single source of Information ·       Provides a clear view on how to manage information and security ·       Defines the policy around the data ownership, product boundaries, etc. ·       Helps with cost optimization across project and solution portfolios by eliminating unused or duplicate investments and assets ·       Has a shorter implementation time and cost   Once the reference architecture is in place, the set of architectural principles, standards, reference models, and best practices ensure that the aligned investments have the greatest possible likelihood of success in both the near term and the long term (TCO).     Common pitfalls for Telecom Service Providers   Telecom Reference Architecture serves as the first step towards maturity for a telecom service provider. During the course of our assignments/experiences with telecom players, we have come across the following observations – Some of these indicate a lack of maturity of the telecom service provider:   ·       In markets that are growing and not so mature, it has been observed that telcos have a significant amount of in-house or home-grown applications. In some of these markets, the growth has been so rapid that IT has been unable to cope with business demands. Telcos have shown a tendency to come up with workarounds in their IT applications so as to meet business needs. ·       Even for core functions like provisioning or mediation, some telcos have tried to manage with home-grown applications. ·       Most of the applications do not have the required scalability or maintainability to sustain growth in volumes or functionality. ·       Applications face interoperability issues with other applications in the operator's landscape. Integrating a new application or network element requires considerable effort on the part of the other applications. ·       Application boundaries are not clear, and functionality that is not in the initial scope of that application gets pushed onto it. This results in the development of the multiple, small applications without proper boundaries. ·       Usage of Legacy OSS/BSS systems, poor Integration across Multiple COTS Products and Internal Systems. Most of the Integrations are developed on ad-hoc basis and Point-to-Point Integration. ·       Redundancy of the business functions in different applications • Fragmented data across the different applications and no integrated view of the strategic data • Lot of performance Issues due to the usage of the complex integration across OSS and BSS systems   However, this is where the maturity of the telecom industry as a whole can be of help. The collaborative efforts of telcos to overcome some of these problems have resulted in bodies like the TM Forum. They have come up with frameworks for business processes, data, applications, and technology for telecom service providers. These could be a good starting point for telcos to clean up their enterprise landscape.   Industry Trends in Telecom Reference Architecture   Telecom reference architectures are evolving rapidly because telcos are facing business and IT challenges.   “The reality is that there probably is no killer application, no silver bullet that the telcos can latch onto to carry them into a 21st Century.... Instead, there are probably hundreds – perhaps thousands – of niche applications.... And the only way to find which of these works for you is to try out lots of them, ramp up the ones that work, and discontinue the ones that fail.” – Martin Creaner President & CTO TM Forum.   The following trends have been observed in telecom reference architecture:   ·       Transformation of business structures to align with customer requirements ·       Adoption of more Internet-like technical architectures. The Web 2.0 concept is increasingly being used. ·       Virtualization of the traditional operations support system (OSS) ·       Adoption of SOA to support development of IP-based services ·       Adoption of frameworks like Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) and IP Multimedia Subsystem ·       (IMS) to enable seamless deployment of various services over fixed and mobile networks ·       Replacement of in-house, customized, and stove-piped OSS/BSS with standards-based COTS products ·       Compliance with industry standards and frameworks like eTOM, SID, and TAM to enable seamless integration with other standards-based products   Drivers of Reference Architecture   The drivers of the Reference Architecture are Reference Architecture Goals, Principles, and Enterprise Vision and Telecom Transformation. The details are depicted below diagram. @font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Figure 1. Drivers for Reference Architecture @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Today’s telecom reference architectures should seamlessly integrate traditional legacy-based applications and transition to next-generation network technologies (e.g., IP multimedia subsystems). This has resulted in new requirements for flexible, real-time billing and OSS/BSS systems and implications on the service provider’s organizational requirements and structure.   Telecom reference architectures are today expected to:   ·       Integrate voice, messaging, email and other VAS over fixed and mobile networks, back end systems ·       Be able to provision multiple services and service bundles • Deliver converged voice, video and data services ·       Leverage the existing Network Infrastructure ·       Provide real-time, flexible billing and charging systems to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. ·       Support charging of advanced data services such as VoIP, On-Demand, Services (e.g.  Video), IMS/SIP Services, Mobile Money, Content Services and IPTV. ·       Help in faster deployment of new services • Serve as an effective platform for collaboration between network IT and business organizations ·       Harness the potential of converging technology, networks, devices and content to develop multimedia services and solutions of ever-increasing sophistication on a single Internet Protocol (IP) ·       Ensure better service delivery and zero revenue leakage through real-time balance and credit management ·       Lower operating costs to drive profitability   Enterprise Reference Architecture   The Enterprise Reference Architecture (RA) fills the gap between the concepts and vocabulary defined by the reference model and the implementation. Reference architecture provides detailed architectural information in a common format such that solutions can be repeatedly designed and deployed in a consistent, high-quality, supportable fashion. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Application Usage and how to achieve the Enterprise Level Reference Architecture using SOA.   • Telecom Reference Architecture • Enterprise SOA based Reference Architecture   Telecom Reference Architecture   Tele Management Forum’s New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) is an architectural framework for organizing, integrating, and implementing telecom systems. NGOSS is a component-based framework consisting of the following elements:   ·       The enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) is a business process framework. ·       The Shared Information Data (SID) model provides a comprehensive information framework that may be specialized for the needs of a particular organization. ·       The Telecom Application Map (TAM) is an application framework to depict the functional footprint of applications, relative to the horizontal processes within eTOM. ·       The Technology Neutral Architecture (TNA) is an integrated framework. TNA is an architecture that is sustainable through technology changes.   NGOSS Architecture Standards are:   ·       Centralized data ·       Loosely coupled distributed systems ·       Application components/re-use  ·       A technology-neutral system framework with technology specific implementations ·       Interoperability to service provider data/processes ·       Allows more re-use of business components across multiple business scenarios ·       Workflow automation   The traditional operator systems architecture consists of four layers,   ·       Business Support System (BSS) layer, with focus toward customers and business partners. Manages order, subscriber, pricing, rating, and billing information. ·       Operations Support System (OSS) layer, built around product, service, and resource inventories. ·       Networks layer – consists of Network elements and 3rd Party Systems. ·       Integration Layer – to maximize application communication and overall solution flexibility.   Reference architecture for telecom enterprises is depicted below. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 2. Telecom Reference Architecture   The major building blocks of any Telecom Service Provider architecture are as follows:   1. Customer Relationship Management   CRM encompasses the end-to-end lifecycle of the customer: customer initiation/acquisition, sales, ordering, and service activation, customer care and support, proactive campaigns, cross sell/up sell, and retention/loyalty.   CRM also includes the collection of customer information and its application to personalize, customize, and integrate delivery of service to a customer, as well as to identify opportunities for increasing the value of the customer to the enterprise.   The key functionalities related to Customer Relationship Management are   ·       Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a customer request for products. ·       Create and manage customer profiles. ·       Manage all interactions with customers – inquiries, requests, and responses. ·       Provide updates to Billing and other south bound systems on customer/account related updates such as customer/ account creation, deletion, modification, request bills, final bill, duplicate bills, credit limits through Middleware. ·       Work with Order Management System, Product, and Service Management components within CRM. ·       Manage customer preferences – Involve all the touch points and channels to the customer, including contact center, retail stores, dealers, self service, and field service, as well as via any media (phone, face to face, web, mobile device, chat, email, SMS, mail, the customer's bill, etc.). ·       Support single interface for customer contact details, preferences, account details, offers, customer premise equipment, bill details, bill cycle details, and customer interactions.   CRM applications interact with customers through customer touch points like portals, point-of-sale terminals, interactive voice response systems, etc. The requests by customers are sent via fulfillment/provisioning to billing system for ordering processing.   2. Billing and Revenue Management   Billing and Revenue Management handles the collection of appropriate usage records and production of timely and accurate bills – for providing pre-bill usage information and billing to customers; for processing their payments; and for performing payment collections. In addition, it handles customer inquiries about bills, provides billing inquiry status, and is responsible for resolving billing problems to the customer's satisfaction in a timely manner. This process grouping also supports prepayment for services.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       To ensure that enterprise revenue is billed and invoices delivered appropriately to customers. ·       To manage customers’ billing accounts, process their payments, perform payment collections, and monitor the status of the account balance. ·       To ensure the timely and effective fulfillment of all customer bill inquiries and complaints. ·       Collect the usage records from mediation and ensure appropriate rating and discounting of all usage and pricing. ·       Support revenue sharing; split charging where usage is guided to an account different from the service consumer. ·       Support prepaid and post-paid rating. ·       Send notification on approach / exceeding the usage thresholds as enforced by the subscribed offer, and / or as setup by the customer. ·       Support prepaid, post paid, and hybrid (where some services are prepaid and the rest of the services post paid) customers and conversion from post paid to prepaid, and vice versa. ·       Support different billing function requirements like charge prorating, promotion, discount, adjustment, waiver, write-off, account receivable, GL Interface, late payment fee, credit control, dunning, account or service suspension, re-activation, expiry, termination, contract violation penalty, etc. ·       Initiate direct debit to collect payment against an invoice outstanding. ·       Send notification to Middleware on different events; for example, payment receipt, pre-suspension, threshold exceed, etc.   Billing systems typically get usage data from mediation systems for rating and billing. They get provisioning requests from order management systems and inquiries from CRM systems. Convergent and real-time billing systems can directly get usage details from network elements.   3. Mediation   Mediation systems transform/translate the Raw or Native Usage Data Records into a general format that is acceptable to billing for their rating purposes.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Mediation system in the end-to-end solution.   ·       Collect Usage Data Records from different data sources – like network elements, routers, servers – via different protocol and interfaces. ·       Process Usage Data Records – Mediation will process Usage Data Records as per the source format. ·       Validate Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Segregates Usage Data Records coming from each source to multiple, based on the segregation requirement of end Application. ·       Aggregates Usage Data Records based on the aggregation rule if any from different sources. ·       Consolidates multiple Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Delivers formatted Usage Data Records to different end application like Billing, Interconnect, Fraud Management, etc. ·       Generates audit trail for incoming Usage Data Records and keeps track of all the Usage Data Records at various stages of mediation process. ·       Checks duplicate Usage Data Records across files for a given time window.   4. Fulfillment   This area is responsible for providing customers with their requested products in a timely and correct manner. It translates the customer's business or personal need into a solution that can be delivered using the specific products in the enterprise's portfolio. This process informs the customers of the status of their purchase order, and ensures completion on time, as well as ensuring a delighted customer. These processes are responsible for accepting and issuing orders. They deal with pre-order feasibility determination, credit authorization, order issuance, order status and tracking, customer update on customer order activities, and customer notification on order completion. Order management and provisioning applications fall into this category.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       Issuing new customer orders, modifying open customer orders, or canceling open customer orders; ·       Verifying whether specific non-standard offerings sought by customers are feasible and supportable; ·       Checking the credit worthiness of customers as part of the customer order process; ·       Testing the completed offering to ensure it is working correctly; ·       Updating of the Customer Inventory Database to reflect that the specific product offering has been allocated, modified, or cancelled; ·       Assigning and tracking customer provisioning activities; ·       Managing customer provisioning jeopardy conditions; and ·       Reporting progress on customer orders and other processes to customer.   These applications typically get orders from CRM systems. They interact with network elements and billing systems for fulfillment of orders.   5. Enterprise Management   This process area includes those processes that manage enterprise-wide activities and needs, or have application within the enterprise as a whole. They encompass all business management processes that   ·       Are necessary to support the whole of the enterprise, including processes for financial management, legal management, regulatory management, process, cost, and quality management, etc.;   ·       Are responsible for setting corporate policies, strategies, and directions, and for providing guidelines and targets for the whole of the business, including strategy development and planning for areas, such as Enterprise Architecture, that are integral to the direction and development of the business;   ·       Occur throughout the enterprise, including processes for project management, performance assessments, cost assessments, etc.     (i) Enterprise Risk Management:   Enterprise Risk Management focuses on assuring that risks and threats to the enterprise value and/or reputation are identified, and appropriate controls are in place to minimize or eliminate the identified risks. The identified risks may be physical or logical/virtual. Successful risk management ensures that the enterprise can support its mission critical operations, processes, applications, and communications in the face of serious incidents such as security threats/violations and fraud attempts. Two key areas covered in Risk Management by telecom operators are:   ·       Revenue Assurance: Revenue assurance system will be responsible for identifying revenue loss scenarios across components/systems, and will help in rectifying the problems. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Revenue Assurance system in the end-to-end solution. o   Identify all usage information dropped when networks are being upgraded. o   Interconnect bill verification. o   Identify where services are routinely provisioned but never billed. o   Identify poor sales policies that are intensifying collections problems. o   Find leakage where usage is sent to error bucket and never billed for. o   Find leakage where field service, CRM, and network build-out are not optimized.   ·       Fraud Management: Involves collecting data from different systems to identify abnormalities in traffic patterns, usage patterns, and subscription patterns to report suspicious activity that might suggest fraudulent usage of resources, resulting in revenue losses to the operator.   The key roles and responsibilities of the system component are as follows:   o   Fraud management system will capture and monitor high usage (over a certain threshold) in terms of duration, value, and number of calls for each subscriber. The threshold for each subscriber is decided by the system and fixed automatically. o   Fraud management will be able to detect the unauthorized access to services for certain subscribers. These subscribers may have been provided unauthorized services by employees. The component will raise the alert to the operator the very first time of such illegal calls or calls which are not billed. o   The solution will be to have an alarm management system that will deliver alarms to the operator/provider whenever it detects a fraud, thus minimizing fraud by catching it the first time it occurs. o   The Fraud Management system will be capable of interfacing with switches, mediation systems, and billing systems   (ii) Knowledge Management   This process focuses on knowledge management, technology research within the enterprise, and the evaluation of potential technology acquisitions.   Key responsibilities of knowledge base management are to   ·       Maintain knowledge base – Creation and updating of knowledge base on ongoing basis. ·       Search knowledge base – Search of knowledge base on keywords or category browse ·       Maintain metadata – Management of metadata on knowledge base to ensure effective management and search. ·       Run report generator. ·       Provide content – Add content to the knowledge base, e.g., user guides, operational manual, etc.   (iii) Document Management   It focuses on maintaining a repository of all electronic documents or images of paper documents relevant to the enterprise using a system.   (iv) Data Management   It manages data as a valuable resource for any enterprise. For telecom enterprises, the typical areas covered are Master Data Management, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence. It is also responsible for data governance, security, quality, and database management.   Key responsibilities of Data Management are   ·       Using ETL, extract the data from CRM, Billing, web content, ERP, campaign management, financial, network operations, asset management info, customer contact data, customer measures, benchmarks, process data, e.g., process inputs, outputs, and measures, into Enterprise Data Warehouse. ·       Management of data traceability with source, data related business rules/decisions, data quality, data cleansing data reconciliation, competitors data – storage for all the enterprise data (customer profiles, products, offers, revenues, etc.) ·       Get online update through night time replication or physical backup process at regular frequency. ·       Provide the data access to business intelligence and other systems for their analysis, report generation, and use.   (v) Business Intelligence   It uses the Enterprise Data to provide the various analysis and reports that contain prospects and analytics for customer retention, acquisition of new customers due to the offers, and SLAs. It will generate right and optimized plans – bolt-ons for the customers.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Business Intelligence system at the Enterprise Level:   ·       It will do Pattern analysis and reports problem. ·       It will do Data Analysis – Statistical analysis, data profiling, affinity analysis of data, customer segment wise usage patterns on offers, products, service and revenue generation against services and customer segments. ·       It will do Performance (business, system, and forecast) analysis, churn propensity, response time, and SLAs analysis. ·       It will support for online and offline analysis, and report drill down capability. ·       It will collect, store, and report various SLA data. ·       It will provide the necessary intelligence for marketing and working on campaigns, etc., with cost benefit analysis and predictions.   It will advise on customer promotions with additional services based on loyalty and credit history of customer   ·       It will Interface with Enterprise Data Management system for data to run reports and analysis tasks. It will interface with the campaign schedules, based on historical success evidence.   (vi) Stakeholder and External Relations Management   It manages the enterprise's relationship with stakeholders and outside entities. Stakeholders include shareholders, employee organizations, etc. Outside entities include regulators, local community, and unions. Some of the processes within this grouping are Shareholder Relations, External Affairs, Labor Relations, and Public Relations.   (vii) Enterprise Resource Planning   It is used to manage internal and external resources, including tangible assets, financial resources, materials, and human resources. Its purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the enterprise and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. ERP systems consolidate all business operations into a uniform and enterprise wide system environment.   The key roles and responsibilities for Enterprise System are given below:   ·        It will handle responsibilities such as core accounting, financial, and management reporting. ·       It will interface with CRM for capturing customer account and details. ·       It will interface with billing to capture the billing revenue and other financial data. ·       It will be responsible for executing the dunning process. Billing will send the required feed to ERP for execution of dunning. ·       It will interface with the CRM and Billing through batch interfaces. Enterprise management systems are like horizontals in the enterprise and typically interact with all major telecom systems. E.g., an ERP system interacts with CRM, Fulfillment, and Billing systems for different kinds of data exchanges.   6. External Interfaces/Touch Points   The typical external parties are customers, suppliers/partners, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders. External interactions from/to a Service Provider to other parties can be achieved by a variety of mechanisms, including:   ·       Exchange of emails or faxes ·       Call Centers ·       Web Portals ·       Business-to-Business (B2B) automated transactions   These applications provide an Internet technology driven interface to external parties to undertake a variety of business functions directly for themselves. These can provide fully or partially automated service to external parties through various touch points.   Typical characteristics of these touch points are   ·       Pre-integrated self-service system, including stand-alone web framework or integration front end with a portal engine ·       Self services layer exposing atomic web services/APIs for reuse by multiple systems across the architectural environment ·       Portlets driven connectivity exposing data and services interoperability through a portal engine or web application   These touch points mostly interact with the CRM systems for requests, inquiries, and responses.   7. Middleware   The component will be primarily responsible for integrating the different systems components under a common platform. It should provide a Standards-Based Platform for building Service Oriented Architecture and Composite Applications. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Middleware component in the end-to-end solution.   ·       As an integration framework, covering to and fro interfaces ·       Provide a web service framework with service registry. ·       Support SOA framework with SOA service registry. ·       Each of the interfaces from / to Middleware to other components would handle data transformation, translation, and mapping of data points. ·       Receive data from the caller / activate and/or forward the data to the recipient system in XML format. ·       Use standard XML for data exchange. ·       Provide the response back to the service/call initiator. ·       Provide a tracking until the response completion. ·       Keep a store transitional data against each call/transaction. ·       Interface through Middleware to get any information that is possible and allowed from the existing systems to enterprise systems; e.g., customer profile and customer history, etc. ·       Provide the data in a common unified format to the SOA calls across systems, and follow the Enterprise Architecture directive. ·       Provide an audit trail for all transactions being handled by the component.   8. Network Elements   The term Network Element means a facility or equipment used in the provision of a telecommunications service. Such terms also includes features, functions, and capabilities that are provided by means of such facility or equipment, including subscriber numbers, databases, signaling systems, and information sufficient for billing and collection or used in the transmission, routing, or other provision of a telecommunications service.   Typical network elements in a GSM network are Home Location Register (HLR), Intelligent Network (IN), Mobile Switching Center (MSC), SMS Center (SMSC), and network elements for other value added services like Push-to-talk (PTT), Ring Back Tone (RBT), etc.   Network elements are invoked when subscribers use their telecom devices for any kind of usage. These elements generate usage data and pass it on to downstream systems like mediation and billing system for rating and billing. They also integrate with provisioning systems for order/service fulfillment.   9. 3rd Party Applications   3rd Party systems are applications like content providers, payment gateways, point of sale terminals, and databases/applications maintained by the Government.   Depending on applicability and the type of functionality provided by 3rd party applications, the integration with different telecom systems like CRM, provisioning, and billing will be done.   10. Service Delivery Platform   A service delivery platform (SDP) provides the architecture for the rapid deployment, provisioning, execution, management, and billing of value added telecom services. SDPs are based on the concept of SOA and layered architecture. They support the delivery of voice, data services, and content in network and device-independent fashion. They allow application developers to aggregate network capabilities, services, and sources of content. SDPs typically contain layers for web services exposure, service application development, and network abstraction.   SOA Reference Architecture   SOA concept is based on the principle of developing reusable business service and building applications by composing those services, instead of building monolithic applications in silos. It’s about bridging the gap between business and IT through a set of business-aligned IT services, using a set of design principles, patterns, and techniques.   In an SOA, resources are made available to participants in a value net, enterprise, line of business (typically spanning multiple applications within an enterprise or across multiple enterprises). It consists of a set of business-aligned IT services that collectively fulfill an organization’s business processes and goals. We can choreograph these services into composite applications and invoke them through standard protocols. SOA, apart from agility and reusability, enables:   ·       The business to specify processes as orchestrations of reusable services ·       Technology agnostic business design, with technology hidden behind service interface ·       A contractual-like interaction between business and IT, based on service SLAs ·       Accountability and governance, better aligned to business services ·       Applications interconnections untangling by allowing access only through service interfaces, reducing the daunting side effects of change ·       Reduced pressure to replace legacy and extended lifetime for legacy applications, through encapsulation in services   ·       A Cloud Computing paradigm, using web services technologies, that makes possible service outsourcing on an on-demand, utility-like, pay-per-usage basis   The following section represents the Reference Architecture of logical view for the Telecom Solution. The new custom built application needs to align with this logical architecture in the long run to achieve EA benefits.   Packaged implementation applications, such as ERP billing applications, need to expose their functions as service providers (as other applications consume) and interact with other applications as service consumers.   COT applications need to expose services through wrappers such as adapters to utilize existing resources and at the same time achieve Enterprise Architecture goal and objectives.   The following are the various layers for Enterprise level deployment of SOA. This diagram captures the abstract view of Enterprise SOA layers and important components of each layer. Layered architecture means decomposition of services such that most interactions occur between adjacent layers. However, there is no strict rule that top layers should not directly communicate with bottom layers.   The diagram below represents the important logical pieces that would result from overall SOA transformation. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 3. Enterprise SOA Reference Architecture 1.          Operational System Layer: This layer consists of all packaged applications like CRM, ERP, custom built applications, COTS based applications like Billing, Revenue Management, Fulfilment, and the Enterprise databases that are essential and contribute directly or indirectly to the Enterprise OSS/BSS Transformation.   ERP holds the data of Asset Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain, and Advanced Procurement and Human Capital Management, etc.   CRM holds the data related to Order, Sales, and Marketing, Customer Care, Partner Relationship Management, Loyalty, etc.   Content Management handles Enterprise Search and Query. Billing application consists of the following components:   ·       Collections Management, Customer Billing Management, Invoices, Real-Time Rating, Discounting, and Applying of Charges ·       Enterprise databases will hold both the application and service data, whether structured or unstructured.   MDM - Master data majorly consists of Customer, Order, Product, and Service Data.     2.          Enterprise Component Layer:   This layer consists of the Application Services and Common Services that are responsible for realizing the functionality and maintaining the QoS of the exposed services. This layer uses container-based technologies such as application servers to implement the components, workload management, high availability, and load balancing.   Application Services: This Service Layer enables application, technology, and database abstraction so that the complex accessing logic is hidden from the other service layers. This is a basic service layer, which exposes application functionalities and data as reusable services. The three types of the Application access services are:   ·       Application Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application level functionalities as a reusable service between BSS to BSS and BSS to OSS integration. This layer is enabled using disparate technology such as Web Service, Integration Servers, and Adaptors, etc.   ·       Data Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application data services as a reusable reference data service. This is done via direct interaction with application data. and provides the federated query.   ·       Network Access Service: This Service Layer exposes provisioning layer as a reusable service from OSS to OSS integration. This integration service emphasizes the need for high performance, stateless process flows, and distributed design.   Common Services encompasses management of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data such as information services, portal services, interaction services, infrastructure services, and security services, etc.   3.          Integration Layer:   This consists of service infrastructure components like service bus, service gateway for partner integration, service registry, service repository, and BPEL processor. Service bus will carry the service invocation payloads/messages between consumers and providers. The other important functions expected from it are itinerary based routing, distributed caching of routing information, transformations, and all qualities of service for messaging-like reliability, scalability, and availability, etc. Service registry will hold all contracts (wsdl) of services, and it helps developers to locate or discover service during design time or runtime.   • BPEL processor would be useful in orchestrating the services to compose a complex business scenario or process. • Workflow and business rules management are also required to support manual triggering of certain activities within business process. based on the rules setup and also the state machine information. Application, data, and service mediation layer typically forms the overall composite application development framework or SOA Framework.   4.          Business Process Layer: These are typically the intermediate services layer and represent Shared Business Process Services. At Enterprise Level, these services are from Customer Management, Order Management, Billing, Finance, and Asset Management application domains.   5.          Access Layer: This layer consists of portals for Enterprise and provides a single view of Enterprise information management and dashboard services.   6.          Channel Layer: This consists of various devices; applications that form part of extended enterprise; browsers through which users access the applications.   7.          Client Layer: This designates the different types of users accessing the enterprise applications. The type of user typically would be an important factor in determining the level of access to applications.   8.          Vertical pieces like management, monitoring, security, and development cut across all horizontal layers Management and monitoring involves all aspects of SOA-like services, SLAs, and other QoS lifecycle processes for both applications and services surrounding SOA governance.     9.          EA Governance, Reference Architecture, Roadmap, Principles, and Best Practices:   EA Governance is important in terms of providing the overall direction to SOA implementation within the enterprise. This involves board-level involvement, in addition to business and IT executives. At a high level, this involves managing the SOA projects implementation, managing SOA infrastructure, and controlling the entire effort through all fine-tuned IT processes in accordance with COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology).   Devising tools and techniques to promote reuse culture, and the SOA way of doing things needs competency centers to be established in addition to training the workforce to take up new roles that are suited to SOA journey.   Conclusions   Reference Architectures can serve as the basis for disparate architecture efforts throughout the organization, even if they use different tools and technologies. Reference architectures provide best practices and approaches in the independent way a vendor deals with technology and standards. Reference Architectures model the abstract architectural elements for an enterprise independent of the technologies, protocols, and products that are used to implement an SOA. Telecom enterprises today are facing significant business and technology challenges due to growing competition, a multitude of services, and convergence. Adopting architectural best practices could go a long way in meeting these challenges. The use of SOA-based architecture for communication to each of the external systems like Billing, CRM, etc., in OSS/BSS system has made the architecture very loosely coupled, with greater flexibility. Any change in the external systems would be absorbed at the Integration Layer without affecting the rest of the ecosystem. The use of a Business Process Management (BPM) tool makes the management and maintenance of the business processes easy, with better performance in terms of lead time, quality, and cost. Since the Architecture is based on standards, it will lower the cost of deploying and managing OSS/BSS applications over their lifecycles.

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• Web-Access Device 'Fingerprints' Identify the Bad Guys

  Our colleagues at IT Business Edge speak with Scott Waddell, vice president of technology at iovation, about fraud prevention and risk mitigation.

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• Profit's COLLABORATE 10 Session Selections

  - by Aaron Lazenby

  COLLABORATE 2010 is a mere 11 days away (thanks for the reminder @ocp_advisor). Every year I publish my a list of the sessions I think reflect some of the more interesting people/trends in enterprise IT. I should be at all of these sessions, so drop by for a chat--I'll be the guy tapping out emails on my iPad... Monday, April 19 9:15 a.m. - Keynote: Transforming Customer Value, Delivering Highest Customer Service Location: Keynote Hall I never miss Charles Phillips when he speaks--it's one of the best opportunities to get an update on Oracle product developments and strategy. And there's certainly occasion for an update: this will be Phillips' first big presentation since the Oracle + Sun Strategy Update in late January. Phillips is appearing with Oracle Executive Vice President of Development Thomas Kurian which means there should be some excellent information about how customers are using Oracle's complete software and hardware stack to address enterprise IT challenges. The session should provide some excellent context for the rest of the week's session...don't miss it. 10:45 a.m. - Oracle Fusion Applications: Functional Overview Location: South Seas FI met Basheer Khan at COLLABORATE 08 in Denver and have followed his work ever since. He's a former member of the OAUG Board of Directors, an Oracle ACE, and a charismatic enterprise IT expert. Having worked with the Oracle Usability Advisory Board, Basheer should have some fascinating insights to share about the features and interface of Oracle's Fusine Applications. This session, along with Nadia Bendjedou's "10 Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for the Next Generation Applications" (on Tuesday, April 20 8:00 a.m. in room 3662) should give attendees the update they need about Oracle's next-generation applications.   1:15p.m. - E-Business Suite in the Amazon Cloud Location: South Seas HI did my first full-fledged cloud computing coverage at last year's COLLABORATE show (check out my interview with Oracle's Bill Hodak), where I first learned about Amazon's EC2 offering. I've since talked with several people who have provisioned server space on Amazon's cloud with great results. So I'm looking forward to watching the audience configure an instance of the Oracle E-Business Suite release 12 on the cloud while Chuck Edwards from Blue Gecko drives. This session should take some of the mist and vapor out of the cloud conversation.2:30 p.m. - "Zero Sign-on" to EBS - Enabling 96000 Users to Login to EBS Without User Maintenance Location: South Seas HI'll be sitting tight in South Seas H for the next session on Monday where Doug Pepka, a ten-year veteran of communications giant Comcast, will be walking attendees through a massive single sign-on (SSO) project across the enterprise. I'm working on a story about SSO for the August issue of Profit, so this session has real practical value to me. Plus the proliferation of user account logins--both personal and professional--makes this a critical usability/change management issue for IT leaders planning for successful long-term IT implementations.   Tuesday 8:00 am  - Information Architecture for Men in Kilts Location: SURF AGetting to a 8:00 a.m. presentation is a tall order in Las Vegas, but presenter Billy Cripe will make it worth your effort. Not only is the title of this session great, but the content should appeal to any IT strategist looking to push the limits of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. Cripe is a product management director of Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise Content Management at Oracle, author of Reshaping Your Business with Web 2.0, and a prolific blogger--he knows how information architecture is critical to and enterprise 2.0 implementation.    10:30a.m. - Oracle Virtualization: From Desktop to Data Center Location: REEF FData center virtualization is still one of the best ways to reduce the cost of running enterprise IT. With the addition of Sun products, Oracle has the industry's most comprehensive virtualization portfolio. I must admit, I'm no expert in this subject. So I'm looking forward to Monica Kumar's presentation so I can get up to speed.   Wednesday 8:00 a.m. - The Art of the Steal Location: Mandalay Bay Ballroom JMany will know Frank Abagnale from Steven Spielberg's 2002 film "Catch Me if You Can." The one-time con man and international fugitive who swindled $2.5 million in forged checks went on to help U.S. federal officials investigate fraud cases. Now the CEO of Abagnale and Associates, he has become an invaluable source to the business world on the subject of fraud and fraud protection. With identity theft and digital fraud still on the rise, this session should be an entertaining, and sobering, education on the threats facing businesses and customers around the world. A great way to start Wednesday.1:00 p.m. - Google Wave: Will it replace e-mail as we know it today? Location: SURF EBy many assessments (my own included), Google Wave is a bit of an open collaboration failure. It may seem like an odd reason for me to be excited about this session, but I'm looking forward to the chance to revisit the technology. Also, this is a great case study in connecting free, available Internet tools to existing enterprise computing environments--an issue that IT strategists must contend with as workers spreads out and choose their own productivity tools.  

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• McAfee Total Protection

  McAfee's next generation comprehensive Internet security solution provides 12-in-1 prevention and protection for your PC

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• Single hardware unit to protect web servers and implement smart publishing

  - by Maxim V. Pavlov

  Thus far we've been using the combination of Forefront TMG 2010 as an edge firewall + intrusion prevention system + web site publishing mechanism in the data center to work with a few web server machines. Since we develop on ASP.NET, we are IIS and in general - Microsoft crowd. Since TMG is being deprecated, we need to come up with a hardware alternative to protect and serve our data center web cloud. Could you please advise a hardware or virtual appliance solution that can provide routing, flood prevention and smart web-site publishing (one IP - many web sites based on domain name filter) all in one. Even if it is hard to configure, as long as it covers all these features, we will invest to learn and replace TMG eventually.

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• MySQL Database Query Problem

  - by moustafa

  I need your help!!!. I need to query a table in my database that has record of goods sold. I want the query to detect a particular product and also calculate the quantity sold. The product are 300 now, but it would increase in the future. Below is a sample of my DB Table #---------------------------- # Table structure for litorder #---------------------------- CREATE TABLE `litorder` ( `id` int(10) NOT NULL auto_increment, `name` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `address` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `xdate` date NOT NULL default '0000-00-00', `ref` varchar(20) NOT NULL default '', `code1` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `code2` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `code3` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `code4` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `code5` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `code6` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `code7` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `code8` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `code9` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `code10` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `code11` varchar(50) character set latin1 collate latin1_bin NOT NULL default '', `code12` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `code13` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `code14` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `code15` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '', `product1` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '0', `product2` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '0', `product3` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '0', `product4` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '0', `product5` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '0', `product6` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '0', `product7` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '0', `product8` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '0', `product9` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '0', `product10` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '0', `product11` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '0', `product12` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '0', `product13` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '0', `product14` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '0', `product15` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '0', `price1` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `price2` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `price3` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `price4` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `price5` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `price6` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `price7` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `price8` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `price9` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `price10` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `price11` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `price12` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `price13` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `price14` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `price15` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `quantity1` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `quantity2` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `quantity3` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `quantity4` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `quantity5` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `quantity6` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `quantity7` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `quantity8` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `quantity9` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `quantity10` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `quantity11` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `quantity12` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `quantity13` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `quantity14` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `quantity15` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `amount1` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `amount2` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `amount3` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `amount4` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `amount5` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `amount6` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `amount7` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `amount8` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `amount9` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `amount10` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `amount11` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `amount12` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `amount13` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `amount14` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `amount15` int(10) NOT NULL default '0', `totalNaira` double(20,0) NOT NULL default '0', `totalDollar` int(20) NOT NULL default '0', PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 COMMENT='InnoDB free: 4096 kB; InnoDB free: 4096 kB; InnoDB free: 409'; #---------------------------- # Records for table litorder #---------------------------- insert into litorder values (27, 'Sanyaolu Fisayo', '14 Adegboyega Street Palmgrove Lagos', '2010-05-31', '', 'DL 001', 'DL 002', 'DL 003', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', 'AILMENT & PREVENTION DVD- ENGLISH', 'AILMENT & PREVENTION DVD- HAUSA', 'BEAUTY CD', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', 800, 800, 3000, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 16, 16, 20, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 12800, 12800, 60000, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, '85600', 563), (28, 'Irenonse Esther', 'Lagos,Nigeria', '2010-06-01', '', 'DL 005', 'DL 008', 'FC 004', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', 'GET HEALTHY DVD', 'YOUR FUTURE DVD', 'FOREVER FACE CAP (YELLOW)', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', 1000, 900, 2000, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 2, 3, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2000, 1800, 6000, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, '9800', 64), (29, 'Kalu Lekway', 'Lagos, Nigeria', '2010-06-01', '', 'DL 001', 'DL 003', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', 'AILMENT & PREVENTION DVD- ENGLISH', 'BEAUTY CD', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', 800, 3000, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 3, 6, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2400, 18000, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, '20400', 133), (30, 'Dele', 'Ilupeju', '2010-06-02', '', 'DL 001', 'DL 003', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', 'AILMENT & PREVENTION DVD- ENGLISH', 'BEAUTY CD', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', 800, 3000, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 10, 10, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 8000, 30000, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, '38000', 250);

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• build a Database from Ms Word list information...

  - by Jayron Soares

  Please someone can advise me how to approach a given problem: I have a sequential list of metadata in a document in MS Word. The basic idea is create a python algorithm to iterate over of the information, retrieving just the name of PROCESS, when is made a queue, from a database. for example. Process: Process Walker (1965) Exact reference: Walker Process Equipment., nc. v. Food Machinery Corp.. Link: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=382&invol= Type of procedure: Certiorari To The United States Court of Appeals for the SeventhCircuit. Parties: Walker Process Equipment, Inc. Sector: Systems is … Start Date: October 12-13 Arguedas, 1965 Summary: Food Machinery Company has initiated a process to stop or slow the entry of competitors through the use of a patent obtained by fraud. The case concerned a patenton "knee ction swing diffusers" used in aeration equipment for sewage treatment systems, and the question was whether "the maintenance and enforcement of a patent obtained by fraud before the patent office" may be a basis for antitrust punishment. Report of the evolution process: petitioner, in answer to respond .. Importance: a) First case which established an analysis for the diagnosis of dispute… There are about 200 pages containing the information above. I have in mind the idea of creating an algorithm in python to be able to break this information sequenced and try to store them in a web database[open source application that I’m looking for] in order to allow for free consultations ...

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• What is the best way to build a database from a MS Word document?

  - by Jayron Soares

  Please advise me on how to approach this problem: I have a sequential list of metadata in a document in MS Word. The basic idea is to create a Python algorithm to iterate over the information, retrieving just the name of the PROCESS, when is made a queue, from a database. Example metadata: Process: Process Walker (1965) Exact reference: Walker Process Equipment., Inc. v. Food Machinery Corp. Link: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=382&invol= Type of procedure: Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Parties: Walker Process Equipment, Inc. Sector: Systems is ... Start Date: October 12-13 Arguedas, 1965 Summary: Food Machinery Company has initiated a process to stop or slow the entry of competitors through the use of a patent obtained by fraud. The case concerned a patent on "knee action swing diffusers" used in aeration equipment for sewage treatment systems, and the question was whether "the maintenance and enforcement of a patent obtained by fraud before the patent office" may be a basis for antitrust punishment. Report of the evolution process: petitioner, in answer to respond... Importance: a) First case which established an analysis for the diagnosis of dispute… There are about 200 pages containing the information above. I have in mind the idea of implementing an algorithm in Python to be able to break this information sequence and try to store it in a web database (an open source application that I’m looking for) in order to allow for free consultations.

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• Is browser fingerprinting a viable technique for identifying anonymous users?

  - by SMrF

  Is browser fingerprinting a sufficient method for uniquely identifying anonymous users? What if you incorporate biometric data like mouse gestures or typing patterns? The other day I ran into the Panopticlick experiment EFF is running on browser fingerprints. Of course I immediately thought of the privacy repercussions and how it could be used for evil. But on the other hand, this could be used for great good and, at the very least, it's a tempting problem to work on. While researching the topic I found a few companies using browser fingerprinting to attack fraud. And after sending out a few emails I can confirm at least one major dating site is using browser fingerprinting as but one mechanism to detect fake accounts. (Note: They have found it's not unique enough to act as an identity when scaling up to millions of users. But, my programmer brain doesn't want to believe them). Here is one company using browser fingerprints for fraud detection and prevention: http://www.bluecava.com/ Here is a pretty comprehensive list of stuff you can use as unique identifiers in a browser: http://browserspy.dk/

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• OpenWorld Suggest-a-Session Voting on Oracle Mix now OPEN!

  - by keith.laker

  Last year the Oracle OpenWorld team decided to use Oracle Mix as a way to select some of the papers for OpenWorld and this year we are following the same process. The majority of papers for this year's conference have already been selected, however, there are some presentation slots still available so the OpenWorld team are giving you the chance to vote on which papers you want to see at this year's OpenWorld conference.The voting process has just opened and will close on June 20. I did a quick search on the list of sessions one paper really caught my eye: Case Study: Real-Time data warehousing and fraud detection with Oracle 11gR2 by Dr. Holger Friedrich. As a data warehouse product manager I would love to see this paper selected. I have attended a number of presentations over the years given by Holger and he is an excellent, knowledgeable and entertaining presenter. The subject area is, for me, very interesting as it covers topics that I know are important to our customers and this case study highlights the innovative use of key database features. I would strongly encourage everyone to please vote for this paper. You can vote for Holger's presentation by going here:https://mix.oracle.com/oow10/proposals/10566-case-study-real-time-data-warehousing-and-fraud-detection-with-oracle-11gr2There are some rules relating to the voting process and these are all explained here: https://mix.oracle.com/oow10/faqA Quick Overview of the voting rules?1) You have to a member of the Oracle Mix communityBut membership is free! To sign up for a Mix account and you are one your way. You can sign-up by clicking on the "Create an Account" link in the top right corner of the Oracle Mix home page: https://mix.oracle.com/2) You have to vote for 3 different papersBased on last year’s voting pattern, the Mix team found that a number of participants were only voting for their own sessions. This year voters are required to vote on at least three sessions. How do I find the list of presentations? The full list of all available presentations is here: https://mix.oracle.com/oow10/proposalsGood luck and happy voting. Look forward to seeing you all at OpenWorld.

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• Oracle Enterprise Data Quality: Ever Integration-ready

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  It is closing in on a year now since Oracle’s acquisition of Datanomic, and the addition of Oracle Enterprise Data Quality (EDQ) to the Oracle software family. The big move has caused some big shifts in emphasis and some very encouraging excitement from the field.  To give an illustration, combined with a shameless promotion of how EDQ can help to give quick insights into your data, I did a quick Phrase Profile of the subject field of emails to the Global EDQ mailing list since it was set up last September. The results revealed a very clear theme:   Integration, Integration, Integration! As well as the important Siebel and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) integrations, we have been asked about integration with a huge variety of Oracle applications, including EBS, Peoplesoft, CRM on Demand, Fusion, DRM, Endeca, RightNow, and more - and we have not stood still! While it would not have been possible to develop specific pre-integrations with all of the above within a year, we have developed a package of feature-rich out-of-the-box web services and batch processes that can be plugged into any application or middleware technology with ease. And with Siebel, they work out of the box. Oracle Enterprise Data Quality version 9.0.4 includes the Customer Data Services (CDS) pack – a ready set of standard processes with standard interfaces, to provide integrated: Address verification and cleansing  Individual matching Organization matching The services can are suitable for either Batch or Real-Time processing, and are enabled for international data, with simple configuration options driving the set of locale-specific dictionaries that are used. For example, large dictionaries are provided to support international name transcription and variant matching, including highly specialized handling for Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Korean data. In total across all locales, CDS includes well over a million dictionary entries.   Excerpt from EDQ’s CDS Individual Name Standardization Dictionary CDS has been developed to replace the OEM of Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR) for attached Data Quality on the Oracle price list, but does this in a way that creates a ‘best of both worlds’ situation for customers, who can harness not only the out-of-the-box functionality of pre-packaged matching and standardization services, but also the flexibility of OEDQ if they want to customize the interfaces or the process logic, without having to learn more than one product. From a competitive point of view, we believe this stands us in good stead against our key competitors, including Informatica, who have separate ‘Identity Resolution’ and general DQ products, and IBM, who provide limited out-of-the-box capabilities (with a steep learning curve) in both their QualityStage data quality and Initiate matching products. Here is a brief guide to the main services provided in the pack: Address Verification and Standardization EDQ’s CDS Address Cleaning Process The Address Verification and Standardization service uses EDQ Address Verification (an OEM of Loqate software) to verify and clean addresses in either real-time or batch. The Address Verification processor is wrapped in an EDQ process – this adds significant capabilities over calling the underlying Address Verification API directly, specifically: Country-specific thresholds to determine when to accept the verification result (and therefore to change the input address) based on the confidence level of the API Optimization of address verification by pre-standardizing data where required Formatting of output addresses into the input address fields normally used by applications Adding descriptions of the address verification and geocoding return codes The process can then be used to provide real-time and batch address cleansing in any application; such as a simple web page calling address cleaning and geocoding as part of a check on individual data.     Duplicate Prevention Unlike Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR), EDQ uses stateless services for duplicate prevention to avoid issues caused by complex replication and synchronization of large volume customer data. When a record is added or updated in an application, the EDQ Cluster Key Generation service is called, and returns a number of key values. These are used to select other records (‘candidates’) that may match in the application data (which has been pre-seeded with keys using the same service). The ‘driving record’ (the new or updated record) is then presented along with all selected candidates to the EDQ Matching Service, which decides which of the candidates are a good match with the driving record, and scores them according to the strength of match. In this model, complex multi-locale EDQ techniques can be used to generate the keys and ensure that the right balance between performance and matching effectiveness is maintained, while ensuring that the application retains control of data integrity and transactional commits. The process is explained below: EDQ Duplicate Prevention Architecture Note that where the integration is with a hub, there may be an additional call to the Cluster Key Generation service if the master record has changed due to merges with other records (and therefore needs to have new key values generated before commit). Batch Matching In order to allow customers to use different match rules in batch to real-time, separate matching templates are provided for batch matching. For example, some customers want to minimize intervention in key user flows (such as adding new customers) in front end applications, but to conduct a more exhaustive match on a regular basis in the back office. The batch matching jobs are also used when migrating data between systems, and in this case normally a more precise (and automated) type of matching is required, in order to minimize the review work performed by Data Stewards.  In batch matching, data is captured into EDQ using its standard interfaces, and records are standardized, clustered and matched in an EDQ job before matches are written out. As with all EDQ jobs, batch matching may be called from Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) if required. When working with Siebel CRM (or master data in Siebel UCM), Siebel’s Data Quality Manager is used to instigate batch jobs, and a shared staging database is used to write records for matching and to consume match results. The CDS batch matching processes automatically adjust to Siebel’s ‘Full Match’ (match all records against each other) and ‘Incremental Match’ (match a subset of records against all of their selected candidates) modes. The Future The Customer Data Services Pack is an important part of the Oracle strategy for EDQ, offering a clear path to making Data Quality Assurance an integral part of enterprise applications, and providing a strong value proposition for adopting EDQ. We are planning various additions and improvements, including: An out-of-the-box Data Quality Dashboard Even more comprehensive international data handling Address search (suggesting multiple results) Integrated address matching The EDQ Customer Data Services Pack is part of the Enterprise Data Quality Media Pack, available for download at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/oedq/downloads/index.html.

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