ShadowRAM: October 17, 2005

Groklaw.net, the virtual stomping ground for the open-source crowd (and their IBM patron) has weighed in. Poor Marten.

Varun Nagaraj, who left his post as vice president of product management at Extreme Networks a few months ago, has resurfaced as president and CEO of NetContinuum, which has been shipping application firewalls since 2002. The company this week is unveiling $15 million in funding, spearheaded by VC firms Menlo Ventures and Palomar Ventures.

As Nagaraj explains it, application firewalls are the last line of defense against professional hackers trying to snarf out data like credit-card numbers from e-commerce sites. NetContinuum is prepping its first channel program, which should be ready next month, he said.

Google appears to be stockpiling smarty pantses. The latest: Shirley Tilghman, Princeton prez and prof of molecular biology, has joined the board. Tilghman, with her history of work at the National Institutes of Health (she was an early cloner) and the Human Genome Project, is not only sharp but a woman—a fact not lost on Google.

No sooner was the ink dry on last week&s release espousing MSN-Yahoo IM interop—come to think of it, even before the release—and IM security companies were blast-mailing helpful hints that such interop could lead to bigger, faster, scarier IM worms. You know who you are, people.

The Microsoft-Yahoo dtente comes as Microsoft is also apparently sweet-talking AOL, still the IM kingpin, over possible alliances. To add another dimension, Google and Comcast (in which Microsoft has a stake) are also reportedly wooing AOL over some sort of content deal. Talk about confusing.

David Duffield, Mr. Nice Guy and former top PeopleSoft dog, wants to build a 72,000-square-foot home in Alamo, Calif. That would dwarf edifices built by Oracle chief Larry Ellison and Microsoft honcho Bill Gates. In fact, the 60,645-square-foot Hearst Castle in San Simeon, Calif., and the more plebean 55,000-square-foot White House would pale in comparison.

Meanwhile, Challenger, Gray and Christmas reports that a near-record 121 CEOs quit in September, almost double the year-ago period. With the economy on an ostensible uptick, one might wonder why. Maybe it&s all those pain-in-the-butt compliance regs. Or maybe they just want to go build castles.