CISCO SYSTEMS (San Jose, Calif.) has announced delivery of its IP Security Protocol (IPSec) security technology, which aims to ensure secure private communications across networks. The company also said it will work with Microsoft Corp. to include IPSec in the coming NT Server 5.0.

In compliance with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)-the Net's standards-body regulator-IPSec provides IP network-layer encryption by defining new packet formats two ways. These are the authentication header (AH), to provide data integrity, and the encapsulating security payload (ESP), to provide confidentiality and data integrity.

"The Internet's growth has been slowed by lack of security," said Cliff Meltzer, vice president of engineering operations for Cisco. "The goal of IPSec is to address threats in the network infrastructure itself." More info can be found at the site.

JOHN COOLEY'S ESNUG e-mail group is buzzing over the ramifications implied in a recent article on "genetic programming." Check it out yourself.

EES WHO NEED a quick Web reference to the industry should see Australian engineer Troy Thompson's "Short Circuit" site . Links galore and no fodder.

"855 MILLION INDIANS are denied access to computers only because they do not speak and read English. If India is to aspire to the kind of personal-computer penetration that developed countries have, serious efforts will have to be made to reach the 99 percent that is not English-literate.

"The spread of the Internet has reinforced the dominant position of English, but it could be that India will find a workable solution to the digital have-not situation.

"India has the greater necessity to do it. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention."

- Venkatesh Hariharan of the Computer Society of India

CUSTOM DESIGN SOLUTIONS INC. (Utica, N.Y.), a provider of custom electronic-product-development services for scientific, military and commercial industries, has a site . Find info on specialties such as printed-wiring-board development, debug and analog-design consulting.

MICROSIM CORP. (Irvine, Calif.), fresh from its merger with OrCAD, has updated its site. There you can examine the company's work as a supplier of PC-based analog and mixed-signal simulation software and its popular PSpice circuit simulator.

TEMPO INSTRUMENT INC. (Commack, N.Y.), which desi gns and makes power-network utilities control and test instrumentation, has a new site . Find info on the company's history, which goes back to 1957.

SOLITRON DEVICES INC. (West Palm Beach, Fla.), a designer and manufacturer of power components and circuitry for the aerospace, defense, industrial, medical and commercial industries, has a site . Find info on how the firm's products have worked on virtually every U.S. and European aerospace and defense program.

WOMEN ENGINEERS don't get short shrift on a particularly powerful Web site called Women's Connection Online. In fact, the site has beefed up its resources with the recent add ition of 30 women's organizations-representing more than 440,000 women-who have contributed plenty of content in all areas of life, work and play .

The site offers news and feature content updated daily; a directory of community members, including women business owners; networking opportunities; and discussion groups. Visitors can find more than 1,500 pages of the most current news on issues of interest to women, plus live chats, bulletin boards, and an archive of the last 30 days of news relating to women.

In addition, there's an extensive library covering politics, business, finance, women's history, gender equity, health and many other topics, as well as a regionalized events calendar. The technology section features in-depth related articles for women engineers and a comprehensive section on Internet resources.

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