The Monthly Newsletter for Web Professionals
Volume 7 Issue 07 - July 2005
Letter from the Executive Editor
By Bill Cullifer
You don't have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things -- to compete. You can be just an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals.
-- Sir Edmund Hillary
As a Web professional, you know what it’s like to be swamped. Well, that’s what it’s like here at WOW headquarters. We have set some important goals for this year, just as we hope you have.
We already have met one of our goals: to present a roadmap for setting and meeting your own personal and business goals. This month’s featured article tells you how to look into your own crystal ball, see what lies ahead and set achievable goals.
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The Latest Industry News
Salaries on the skids
An overall decline in IT salaries in private industry, a ongoing gender gap and the continued decline in wages for contractors and consultants plague the technology sector, according to a study released in February by Dice Inc., a job board for technology, engineering and security-cleared professionals.
Overall, technology salaries in the United States decreased 2.6 percent from an average of $69,600 in 2003 to $67,800 in 2004, partly due to declines in the computer software industry (down 5.7 percent) and a steep decline in the Internet services sector (down 9.8 percent).
Sliding salaries for contractors and consultants also contributed to the overall decline: contract workers in 2004 reported earning an average of $82,000, 9.1 percent less than 2003 salaries and almost 20 percent less than they reported in 2001.
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Full StorySpyware spending to soar
This may be a good year to be an anti-spyware vendor.
Sixty-five percent of businesses--big and small--surveyed by Forrester Research said they plan to put money into protecting their systems from malicious and prying software programs in 2005.
Technology decision makers from 185 North American companies of all sizes participated in the survey. While 69 percent of large enterprises said they would purchase anti-spyware tools this year, only 53 percent of small and medium businesses said they'd go for such protection, it found.
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Alternative browsers lure phishers
A security weakness in a standard for handling special character sets in domain names could let an attacker spoof Web sites on non-Microsoft browsers, a researcher has warned.
The problem arises because certain browsers support a standardized way of representing domain names in the letters or characters of any language, security expert Eric Johanson said at recent the ShmooCon hacker convention. Called Internationalized Domain Names, the standard allows companies to register domain names that appear to be the same in different languages.
That encoding scheme could enable an attacker to create a fake Web site for a phishing scam. A spoofed link would seem to be a legitimate URL in the address bar of affected browsers--Opera, Apple Computer's Safari, and the Mozilla and Firefox browsers from the Mozilla Foundation. But instead of taking the victim to the trusted site, the link would lead to a phony Web site with a domain rendered as the same address under the IDN process.
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