Ramblings & ephemera
From Jeff Bertolucci’s “Windows 7 Ads: Microsoft Tarts Up the Desktop” (PC World: 13 November 2009):
Microsoft has announced plans to peddle Windows 7 desktop space to advertisers, who’ll create Windows UI themes–customized backgrounds, audio clips, and other elements–that highlight their brand, Computerworld reports. In fact, some advertiser themes are already available in the Windows 7 [...]
Posted on December 1st, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
From Munir Kotadia’s “NSW Police: Don’t use Windows for internet banking” (ITnews: 9 October 2009):
Consumers wanting to safely connect to their internet banking service should use Linux or the Apple iPhone, according to a detective inspector from the NSW Police, who was giving evidence on behalf of the NSW Government at the public hearing into [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Jim Giles’ “The inside story of the Conficker worm” (New Scientist: 12 June 2009):
23 October 2008 … The dry, technical language of Microsoft’s October update did not indicate anything particularly untoward. A security flaw in a port that Windows-based PCs use to send and receive network signals, it said, might be used [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Farhad Manjoo’s “I, for One, Welcome Our New Android Overlords” (Slate: 5 June 2008):
Microsoft promises that Windows 7 will be able to run on netbooks, but it has announced a risky strategy to squeeze profits from these machines. The company plans to cripple the cheapest versions of the new OS in order to encourage [...]
Posted on June 7th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Liz Laffan’s “GPLv2 vs GPLv3: The two seminal open source licenses, their roots, consequences and repercussions” (VisionMobile: September 2007):
Cumulatively patents have been doubling practically every year since 1990. Patents are now probably the most contentious issue in software-related intellectual property rights.
…
However we should also be aware that software written from scratch is as likely [...]
Posted on April 25th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, politics, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Joel Snyder’s “Exchange: Should I stay or should I go?” (Network World: 9 March 2009):
There are many ways to buy Exchange, depending on how many users you need, but the short answer is that none of them cost less than about $75 per user and can run up to $140 per user for [...]
Posted on April 13th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
From Daniel Eran Dilger’s “The Unavoidable Malware Myth: Why Apple Won’t Inherit Microsoft’s Malware Crown” (AppleInsider: 1 April 2008):
Thanks to its extensive use of battle-hardened Unix and open source software, Mac OS X also has always had security precautions in place that Windows lacked. It has also not shared the architectural weaknesses of Windows that [...]
Posted on March 26th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security | No Comments »
From Asavin Wattanajantra’s “Windows worm could create the ‘world’s biggest botnet’” (IT PRO: 19 January 2009):
The Downadup or “Conficker” worm has increased to over nine million infections over the weekend – increasing from 2.4 million in a four-day period, according to F-Secure.
…
The worm has password cracking capabilities, which is often successful because company passwords sometimes [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, security, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Brian Krebs’ “Atrivo Shutdown Hastened Demise of Storm Worm” (The Washington Post: 17 October 2008):
The infamous Storm worm, which powered a network of thousands of compromised PCs once responsible for sending more than 20 percent of all spam, appears to have died off. Security experts say Storm’s death knell was sounded by the recent [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | No Comments »
From “Storm Worm botnet cracked wide open” (Heise Security: 9 January 2009):
A team of researchers from Bonn University and RWTH Aachen University have analysed the notorious Storm Worm botnet, and concluded it certainly isn’t as invulnerable as it once seemed. Quite the reverse, for in theory it can be rapidly eliminated using software developed and [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | No Comments »
From Gregg Keizer’s “RSA – Top botnets control 1M hijacked computers” (Computerworld: 4 October 2008):
Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, presented his survey at the RSA Conference, which opened Monday in San Francisco. The survey ranked the top 11 botnets that send spam; by extrapolating their size, Stewart estimated the bots on his [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | No Comments »
From Robert Lemos’ “Bot-infected PCs get a refresh” (SecurityFocus: 28 December 2006):
On Christmas day, the number of bots tracked by the Shadowserver group dropped nearly 20 percent.
The dramatic decrease in weekly totals–from more than 500,000 infected systems to less than 400,000 computers–puzzled researchers. The Internet Storm Center, a threat monitoring group managed by the SANS [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | No Comments »
From Sam Hiser’s “Achieving Openness: A Closer Look at ODF and OOXML” (ONLamp.com: 14 June 2007):
An open, XML-based standard for displaying and storing data files (text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations) offers a new and promising approach to data storage and document exchange among office applications. A comparison of the two XML-based formats–OpenDocument Format (“ODF”) and [...]
Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
I’m really proud to announce that my 5th book is now out & available for purchase: Google Apps Deciphered: Compute in the Cloud to Streamline Your Desktop. My other books include:
Don’t Click on the Blue E!: Switching to Firefox
Hacking Knoppix
Linux Phrasebook
Podcasting with Audacity: Creating a Podcast With Free Audio Software
(I’ve also contributed to two [...]
Posted on February 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, education, history, personal, social software, tech help, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Nicholas Carr’s “Further musings on the network effect and the cloud” (Rough Type: 27 October 2008):
I think O’Reilly did a nice job of identifying the different layers of the cloud computing business – infrastructure, development platform, applications – and I think he’s right that they’ll have different economic and competitive characteristics. One thing we [...]
Posted on December 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Lisa Vaas’ “Storm Worm Botnet Lobotomizing Anti-Virus Programs” (eWeek: 24 October 2007):
According to an Oct. 22 posting by Sophos analyst Richard Cohen, the Storm botnet – Sophos calls it Dorf, and its also known as Ecard malware – is dropping files that call a routine that gets Windows to tell it every time a [...]
Posted on December 7th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Stephen E. Arnold’s The Google Legacy: How Google’s Internet Search is Transforming Application Software (Infonortics: September 2005):
The figure Google’s Fusion: Hardware and Software Engineering shows that Google’s technology framework has two areas of activity. There is the software engineering effort that focuses on PageRank and other applications. Software engineering, as used here, [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, science, security, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From John Wharton’s “The Origins of DOS” (Microprocessor Report: 3 October 1994):
In August of 1981, soon after Microsoft had acquired full rights to 86-DOS, Bill Gates visited Santa Clara in an effort to persuade Intel to abandon a joint development project with DRI and endorse MS-DOS instead. It was I – the Intel applications engineer [...]
Posted on November 23rd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, technology | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “My Open Wireless Network” (Crypto-Gram: 15 January 2008):
A company called Fon has an interesting approach to this problem. Fon wireless access points have two wireless networks: a secure one for you, and an open one for everyone else. You can configure your open network in either “Bill” or “Linus” mode: In the [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
From Tim O’Reilly’s “Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing” (O’Reilly Radar: 26 October 2008):
Since “cloud” seems to mean a lot of different things, let me start with some definitions of what I see as three very distinct types of cloud computing:
1. Utility computing. Amazon’s success in providing virtual machine instances, storage, and computation [...]
Posted on October 31st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
