CIO Essentials: Vista, BBC iPlayer, BlackBerrys and spam

Ever wondered what CIOs are reading on silicon.com? Our CIO Essentials feature puts you in the picture. Each week a leading IT chief picks his or her top stories from the past week and explains why they matter.

This week we hear from Christopher Linfoot, IT director at LDV Group.

Anti-spam measures fail business test
Whether companies choose open source or proprietary filtering, or outsource anti-spam to a third party, it appears more and more spam continues to get through. The underlying issue here is the widespread acceptance of the inevitability of spam and the received wisdom that best practice is therefore to deal with it after the fact, when it has already been created and queued for delivery somewhere, and not to fix it at source. In fact, only two things are necessary to deal with spam at source and make post delivery filtering utterly redundant:

1. Network operators should be responsible for implementing and policing effective acceptable use policies on their own networks. Where network operators are unable or unwilling to do this, other network operators should simply refuse to carry their traffic until they do.
2. A simple means of identifying systems legitimately delivering email was proposed by Spamhaus over three years ago. This was the only truly innovative proposal for a new sponsored top-level domain (TLD) - dot-mail - but it has made no progress while other proposed TLDs have - for example dot-jobs and dot-mobi. The dot-mail TLD was meant to be 'the bus lane for trusted mail servers' - exactly what businesses need if business-to-business email is to remain a viable tool.

Five questions to ask before moving to Vista
All appear to follow from the basic assumption that moving to Vista is inevitable - that it is simply a matter of time. The very first of those five questions is does your business need Vista yet? The bigger question for me, and one that is not asked here, is does my business need Vista at all?

BBC to meet open sourcers over iPlayer
The BBC seems to be struggling with the issue of Microsoft's dominance of the consumer desktop. This article notes the uncomfortable position in which the BBC finds itself with its Microsoft-centric iPlayer. The BBC is the latest in a long line of broadcasters internationally to have announced a Microsoft-centric on-demand service. While the BBC is committed to platform neutrality, it remains unclear quite how this might now be achieved without essentially creating an entirely separate and parallel service for delivery to non-Windows desktops. Interestingly, YouTube has succeeded where others have failed in creating a platform neutral service for delivery of video content - it even works on the kids' Wii. What is missing from YouTube, of course, is any form of rights management but it surely can't be beyond the wit of the BBC to build this - or to buy it.

Missing email tops business-travel worry list
In this article Steve Ranger notes the top worry of business travellers is, apparently, missing vital emails. We've had a perfectly good solution to this problem for years of course - the BlackBerry. But…

BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance
…Unfortunately the silicon.com CIO Jury appears to have concluded that BlackBerrys can cause more problems than they solve. It seems that we want to have our cake and eat it where mobile email is concerned.

If you are a UK-based IT director or CIO and would like to take part in the CIO Essentials series by choosing your top five stories of the week, send us an email here at silicon.com.