DCGI is the personal consulting corporation of David & Susan Donahue.

Based in Half Moon Bay, California we serve the Silicon valley and San Francisco Bay Area.

David Donahue, CISSP
Is a leading Internet Security and Infrastructure Architect
His accomplishments include:

• Invented the 1st free stock market quote server on the Internet for the CBS Marketwatch / DBC
• Invented 4 Patented designs relating to Firewalls, DHCP, Parental Control and Networking.
• Was the Sr. Network and Security Architect for DirecTV Broadband / Telocity
• Worked with numerous startups & Venture Capitol firms.
• Has been an IT Manager, a Telecom / Datacom tech and Manager, a Mainframe programmer and field repair engineer and countless other positions in all areas of Technology

Susan Donahue
Is an industry recognized leader in voice and voice/data Integration with an extensive history of successes in the financial and technology sectors.
She is currently under extended contract to Charles Schwab.

Marus J. Ranum posted an interesting article on the Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security. Where he goes though many of the management fallacies that I've spent the last decade fighting against.

For the most part I agree with him except where he listed some "minor dumbs" where Marcus states that firewalls should always be used.

I think that there could be a better way if the fundamental protocols (DNS, ARP, etc.)of the Internet could be rewritten to not be based on implicitly trusting others.

On Bruce Schneier's weblog posting regarding this article, I posted a comment under "David D" and Marcus responded, for the most part, agreeing with me.

It should be also noted that the idea I'm proposing here is based on some of my recent conversations with folks at Sun and mirror concepts previously stated in Marcus's 1998 Black Hat keynote: re-code the Internet and blame it on Y2K and discussed in Abe Singer's "Security Without Firewalls" approach to distributed system security (neither of which I was familiar with).

I just ran across this nifty trick to help reduce spam.
Check out this site

Susan recently took some photos at a celebratory cruise for the Natural Language Prompter Project.

Click here to see the NLP Cruise photos.

Older photos from our Paris 2005 trip are available here.

AT DCGI we have a data center and lab at our headquarters and a lot of people want to know what we're running.

We have 7 active servers, 3 Idle servers and 3 notebooks on a wireless lan. A 2 Firewalls (Checkpoint and Smoothwall) and 2 also remote Servers that process our public facing web and email services (pSek and Commonhouse)

I get a lot of SPAM and by that I mean a whole lot.

I'm not sure what causes this, it might be that my email address is so old that I've finally gotten onto every spammers lists or maybe that gave up trying to limit the damage and now just give it to anybody but somehow I'm on the short list for every dammed thing that comes out.

Here is a graph of the file that shows how many spam I get per day and the monthly trend. As you can see its about 600-700 a day by viewing the graph here - frightening

In today's modern Internet, Anti-Virus software alone is no longer sufficient to protect you fully. Today's threats are much worse than they were even one year ago. During 2003, Viruses, Spyware and automated hacking / exploit programs have merged together and become more dangerous than ever before.

This is one of my favorite quotes and it's commonly attributed to Edmund Burke, a late 17th century politician in England, but is apparently a terrible misquote that has been popularized so much it is part of the body of common knowledge.