The inside story of the Conficker worm - tech - 12 June 2009 - New Scientist

Six days after the 1 April deadline, Conficker's authors let loose a new version of the worm via P2P. With no central release point to target, security experts had no means of stopping it spreading through the worm's network. The URL scam seems to have been little more than a wonderful way to waste the anti-hackers' time and resources. "They said: you'll have to look at 50,000 domains. But they never intended to use them," says Joe Stewart of SecureWorks in Atlanta, Georgia. "They used peer-to-peer instead. They misdirected us."

Internet Explorer 6 Forces Bing As Default Search Provider

"It appears that Bing is overriding the default search provider set by users of Internet Explorer 6. Several IE6 users have complained that since Bing launched, the search provided went from Google (which they set manually) to Bing. To makes things even worse, when the user tries to set the search provider back from Bing to Google, it doesn’t allow them."

He goes on to say that when contacted, Microsoft said it was a bug.

What a sense of humor these people have.

I wonder if the Justice department will laugh too.

Pillars of Amazon's Success

Bezos calls the process "working backwards" from customer needs rather than a "skills-forward approach that says, 'We are really good at X. What else can we do with X?'" While useful, the skills-forward approach doesn't enable a company to develop fresh skills or capabilities. It becomes outmoded. "Working backwards from customer needs often demands that we acquire new competencies and exercise new muscles, never mind how uncomfortable and awkward-feeling those first steps might be," he said.

Google App Engine Blog: Back to the Future for Data Storage

"It's an exciting time, and the takeaway here isn't to abandon the relational database, which is a very mature technology that works great in its domain, but instead to be willing to look outside the RDBMS box when looking for storage solutions."

Home Runs

I do some of my best "blogging" not here but as comments on other web sites. Slashdot used to be the primary target, and I still post there, just less frequently.

These days I read Valleywag and All Things D as my first pass on technical news (and gossip). Since they often don't do in-depth coverage, the hit and run pieces they offer up are excellent fodder for my excess verbage.

Today I hit two home runs (really, out of the park material). The first was regarding a feared rollback of IT workers built on a survey by one of the companies that question people who lie about their jobs to get free magazine subscriptions. What follows is only the link and my comments (as quoted text):

49 percent of US companies cutting back IT spending

"IT" has been the make-work of the last quarter of the 20th century. I am regularly in touch with IT workers who have no idea why they go to work daily and do what they do. They have learned not to ask ("What? You're not enthusiastic about what we do here?!").

I last worked for a company that was entirely composed of people who would be categorized as "IT workers", thousands of them. We worked for a federal agency, on a contract to an IT department, subsidiary to an IT division... and so on. It would have been impossible, had I tried, to actually speak to someone who's job wasn't providing information to someone else who was in IT.

We "analyze" everything to death, and then we "analyze" why it died. So many people are used in processing the data and no one is left to interpret what (if anything) it actually means.

The PC has of course made the situation much worse, though it was already underway with the explosion of small departmental computer systems and the staff needed to run them. The only thing that keeps this in check is the steady stream of companies going out of business after forgetting why they went into business in the first place.

I have a small hope that the re-centralizing of computer services (via web-based tools or by other means) might set this process back to a more healthy state, at least in the private sector.

Next is a comment on why Google's new scanning of newspapers is a good thing and not a bad thing. Really, how can anybody think more free things on the Internet is a bad thing?

The cuddly embrace of the Google monster

"But really, isn't Google's move to archive centuries of newspapers a bit like the architects of a genocide dedicating a museum to the holocaust they committed?"

I am with the bad analogy police and you are under arrest.

Most of the content Google is scanning for this thing would never see the light of day otherwise. Hits that involve the New York Times, Time Magazine, some publications already indexed by Cornell University and many others go directly to those sites where they can charge for the content, monetize it with ads, or whatever they want to do. But there are hundreds of other papers around the country that don't begin to have the resources (hardware, know-how, or will) to archive their own historical content in a way that will last, and be usable. These papers weren't broken by Google, they were broken by USA Today, cable news, Ebay, and Craigs List.

Nothing stops other big Internet companies from getting into this. It would be right up Yahoo's alley if they had any desire to provide real content instead of fluff.

Microsoft showed some initiative when they matched the Google Books project for a while (and in some ways they did a better job of it than Google). Why did they stop? Because they are total pussies that's why. To match what Google is doing in this and other areas with buildings full of Windows servers would mean (as I've calculated it) about 2000 Blue Screens of Death every second.

Google's secret isn't search, it's clustering on the cheap, and the only way Microsoft will match it is to go back to Unix. Yahoo has a head start (and I think a quick reentry into alternate OSs might have been a part of MSs acquisition strategy), but as you portray almost daily, the people running Yahoo are airheads.

Records Sought in AMD's Suit Against Intel - WSJ.com

AMD filed its suit in 2005, alleging that Intel engaged in a world-wide campaign to coerce its customers into not doing business with AMD. A trial date is set for 2010. News Corp.'s Dow Jones & Co. unit, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, was among the organizations making the request.

Twenty Ten?!

That was news to me, I find it hard to believe.

I wonder if FTC computer systems aren't sabotaging the effort?

Your Social Network

Full Image at title or click this fragment.

I also want to add that I do think there is a use for this stuff. If you've ever posted any sort of resume online (and I have) you may have given away more information than you would on one of these social networks.

It would make sense to have a central place to post (for example) a complete resume, including all sorts of personal details (name address phone number) but only have that information available to a select few, for example with a key that can be reset as in your Google photo albums. No need for this information to even be available to your "friends" list.

I have at times submitted resumes without full contact information, or without salary history, or without a previous employment history at all.

Can the interface be made simple enough to use, and yet allow for all these variations (and more)? If so, it would be a great alternative to keeping track of all the variations with Word documents, PDFs, etc. Updating a field, like your phone number, would be a one step process, and only those with "need to know" would ever see this information.

Unfortunately I don't think any of the existing "Social" sites approach this seriously (especially Facebook, which makes a lot of claims in this area).

Here is an idea, free for the taking (patent pending):

A single place where all such information about your career life, social life, dating preferences, hobbies, etc. can be typed in using combinations of free-form fields, check-boxes, menu-lists, etc. Now the hard part, as I've mentioned, is making the access matrix both easy to set up, but complex in how it parcels out information. Not desirable for a potential employer to see your dating preferences, nor for a potential date to see your employment history. It needs to be EASY for you to keep these things straight, not a complex maze as Facebook now has. I personally think that Facebook is working at too many cross purposes to make this even possible.

Orkut, on the other hand, hasn't painted itself into a corner yet by making all sorts of high minded claims while actually implementing something totally different.

For Orkut, it should be possible for me to make both my friends list and my interest groups information invisible to everyone, or only visible to selected individuals. Facebook has addressed this to a limited extent, but then muck it up with their need to generate revenue. Google doesn't have this problem, Orkut is just one of the many products they have to keep you connected to them and viewing ads, they don't live or die by Orkut.

Finally, if all of this information could be collected, and properly segmented and secured, I should be able to do the following things with it:

1: Generate a nicely formatted resume for printing out or e-mailing or posting on a web page (with a revocable key in the last case). There might be a variety of formatting options for standard government resume formats, or more casual forms.

2: Generate a business card summary from above information. There are of course $69 Windows programs to do this item and the one above, but I don't NEED or want to manage such a system on a single PC, especially a Windows one with all the security and database corruption issues it has. Windows has been so bad it has made it positively acceptable to get data off your local PC as fast as possible and onto secure servers somewhere (but NOT a Windows Home Server!).

3. Coupled with online calendar information, photos, blogs, news feeds, address lists, credit card data, and so on, you could also do automated slide shows, photo albums, either online or for printing, holiday card processing...

I can't think of anything you wouldn't want to connect up to this, assuming of course that you have confidence in the security of the application, and as I've mentioned, the online alternatives don't have a very high hurdle to get over to be way ahead of what Windows has established as baseline for local storage.

Supposedly, Google is working on an online health system that would keep (will it be selected, or all?) of your medical history, prescriptions, allergies, and so on that can be rapidly and easily shared with your medical professionals. If this can be done in such a way that people trust it, I see no reason why even less sensitive information that would go into a resume or business card, can't also be stored online, all the time, for those with a "need to know" to get at.

---
See also: A Lover's Journal: Contacts Management System

Three Dollars Too Much

To try and thwart Nicholas Negraponte's One Laptop Per Child effort Microsoft is making copies of Windows available to a competing Intel box for $3 as I understand it. They are also working to make a version of Windows that will run on the OLPC, presumably for a similar price.

I know a lot of people that use computers. Before I left the big city to head for the beach I might have had conversations about home computer use (leaving out work related use for the moment) with dozens of people. But having been in the boondocks for a while my circle of friends has grown smaller. Get this though, here is the percentage of my Windows using friends who are reporting significant problems with their home installations: 100.

It just struck me the other day that I don't know any Windows users, not one, who isn't having problems, and I don't mean minor problems, I mean major "lost everything" problems. To help convince you that I'm not making this up, here are their stories, names omitted to save them the embarrassment...

Case A is a retired technologist, programmer for the Apolo moon missions, inventor, and aspiring author. He doesn't want to tinker with computers any more, he just wants to write his books. For months he has been doing so on a laptop, without major incident, but having "normal" Windows users issues with pop-up ads, spy-ware, spam, and drivers mysteriously failing to do what they used to do. His reaction to these problems has been to remove almost everything except Microsoft Office from his machine. Having sent him either links, or actual files that require Adobe Acrobat or Real Player I find that he has uninstalled those things out of fear. Nevertheless he managed to get Internet Explorer outfitted with so many "helpful" tool-bar additions that there was little screen real-estate left over for anything else. His sound card stopped making sounds, pop-ups continued to pop-up and he complained that the machine was getting slower and slower. He didn't want to try Firefox though as Microsoft has succeeded in convincing him that his problems have nothing to do with Windows itself, but just that big-bad world that it has to live in on the Internet.

He recently called in a panic to tell me that his machine, a laptop, suddenly wouldn't boot at all. Long story short, he had installed yet another "security" package from his ISP that had caused the condition. A trip to the shop for an overnight stay and $65 later the machine was working again. Fortunately, the fact that he hadn't done a recent back-up didn't cost him anything as they were able to retain his existing file system. Fortunately or otherwise, he was so shaken by the experience he purchased another PC as a "back-up machine" on the rather safe assumption that a similar thing will soon happen again. If the medicine makes you sick, try taking more of it.

Case B is a dear little lady that I agreed to help with her e-mail problems. Now I've steadfastly refused to get involved with anyone's Windows issues other than offering generic advice such as "why are you still using that crapware?" but in this case the problems seemed to be mostly "older person trying to cope with new-fangled technology", so I stop by once in a while to get her unstuck with sending a reply, forwarding a message, or attaching a photo. Unfortunately this has turned into three machines so far. The last one I purchased myself, used, from a shop I trusted, with a clean install of Windows XP and little else. I put on anti-virus programs and such, and so far so good. I can't be sure that her earlier machines were hardware or software failures. At some point it gets hard to tell from a post-mortem point of view. Power supplies burn out, fans die and machine overheat, often after running at 100 percent CPU for days at a time doing no-telling what in the background. If she manages to kill this machine, her next one will run Linux. Enough is enough.

Case C is a minister, on a dial-up connection, who really doesn't do much more than e-mail and print out church related materials from time to time. When I first saw his machine it had an obscure virus that was not removable by any of the major packages that are supposed to do such things. Fortunately I learned this through research, which was much quicker than trial and error. He too took it to a "competent" shop who managed to get rid of the virus and most of his applications software at the same time. I'll be installing Open Office for him and he is already using Firefox, thanks to some other kind soul he ran into. Should the need arise, he will already be over the hurdles that tie most people to Windows.

Case D is a couple of guys that run a small home business involving shared files with several other people working at home. Their Windows machines, although of relatively recent vintage are always bogged down doing something in the background that nobody can quite define. Opening a web page is a go-to-the-fridge-for-another-coke sort of operation at times, and while some of this problem is a slow ADSL connection and a care-less Verizon support system, my Apple laptop works pretty well on their network, even wirelessly, while their hardwired desktop systems continue to crawl.

Finally, the co-workers in this small business are always having trouble with their PCs too, except for the one Apple user of course. So those machines have to be regularly hauled over to "headquarters" for diagnosis and I dread even hearing about the long tortuous road to recovery, which is often followed by an almost immediate relapse.

So those are my sample points. All of them. Other people I know that are using Apple computers or Linux haven't been complaining much about slow systems or slow Internet or random crashes. Oh I know, there are Apple machines that are junk (I had one of those once too) and Windows machines that perform flawlessly, those just don't happen to be in my universe of users at the moment.

Worth three dollars? Hardly.

Theo de Raadt on 'Intel Core 2'

"- Basically the MMU simply does not operate as specified/implimented in previous generations of x86 hardware. It is not just buggy, but Intel has gone further and defined 'new ways to handle page tables' (see page 58).
- Some of these bugs are along the lines of 'buffer overflow'; where a write-protect or non-execute bit for a page table entry is ignored. Others are floating point instruction non-coherencies, or memory corruptions -- outside of the range of permitted writing for the process -- running common instruction sequences.
- All of this is just unbelievable to many of us."

also...

(While here, I would like to say that AMD is becoming less helpful day by day towards open source operating systems too, perhaps because their serious errata lists are growing rapidly too).

I guess I'll stick with my old "previously owned" P4 computer for a bit longer after all.

Doubleclick turned down Microsoft money? « Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger

Keep in mind all the speculation and rumor mongering on all of this is just that. parties are forbiden to disclose what went on in those negotiations, so in a sense, by listening to this stuff: Everything You Know is Wong!

That said, let's jump right in shall we?:

Is it just me or isn't it a little strange to have Microsoft legal in the form of Brad Smith calling around to journalists trying to sway public opinion on all of this? Don't they have other "departments" to do that sort of thing?

Has anyone thought of the possibility that had Microsoft won the bidding then there most certainly WOULD have been an antitrust issue, and without any prompting from Google?

Google is not a convicted monopolist, nor do they dominate search in the same way that Microsoft dominates the desktop. Microsoft would have done everyone a big favor, including their investors, had they voluntarily split the company into separate OS and Applications companies. Still not too late for that move either, but as Microsoft continues to lose mindshare the benefits diminish.

Maybe Microsoft legal meddled a bit too much in the negotiations and now they have a guilty conscience, aka fear of the next re-org. After all, they DID lose the antitrust suit, it was only sloppy sentencing that got them off the hook. And now with everyone re-evaluating DRM, MS selling copies of Windows for $3 there isn't much for MS legal to do other than work out cross licensing issues for patents. Must be hell.

As Eric Schmidt said in *this interview*:

Google promises not to lock users data into their products. To me, that has become the number one feature of any software I use.

While there is always reason to be skeptical when a vendor makes such a promise, we don't have to be skeptical if Microsoft were to make such a promise (which they haven't to my knowledge), we only have to look at their history: With almost every product, with every press release, with every membership on any standards body Microsoft's goal even beyond a desire to have the best products is to make it difficult if not impossible to use competing products side by side with monoliths such as Office and Exchange.

As someone already pointed out, I doubt that the sellers in this case really care what Microsoft's evil intent might have been, but the US Justice department might have, and that would have held up them getting their money.

There is relatively little merit in challenging the Google buy however, so this sale will sail (hehe) through by comparison to what would have happened if MS had won the bidding.

Wired: AP Technology and Business News from the Outside World on Wired.com

As the professor on Futurama says: "Good News Everyone!"...

"Diebold Inc. saw great potential in the modernization of elections equipment. Now, analysts say, executives may be angling for ways to dump its e-voting subsidiary that's widely seen as tarnishing the company's reputation."

Good news, because Windows based flaky touch screen systems will get a much deserved black-eye.

Good news, because maybe a few taxpayers (regardless of political affiliation) will be outraged by yet another wholesale replacement of voting systems by what is (almost**) certainly going to be more of the same. You think the laptop, touchscreen, and software (particularly Microsoft) sales reps are going to just sit idly by as Diebold leaves the playing field? With luck a few well placed (and as many cases as not Democratic leaning) election officials will be publicly driven from office. Do I care whether they are corrupt or just stupid? Um, no. In fact, corrupt governments might tend to watch how they spend our money more carefully. I want the spending on things that obviously don't work to stop, no matter what the cause.

Good news, because it might serve to remind people how close some of the 2006 results were (just as close in many cases as Florida 2000) and yet very few of these results were contested by Republican losing candidates, who could have wasted more taxpayer money with a nod. The one case of a contested results in the states surrounding me was in fact one in with a republican won by a comfortable margin. The Democrats called for a recount anyway. There is no doubt who the "ends justify the means" crybabies are (except in the mainstream media that is).

Good news, finally, because there is (**at least) some chance that the few stories of poor to non-existent systems analysis that went into these new touchscreen voting systems will yield some viable open source alternatives (in fact open source applications running on Linux are ready to go.)

I'll continue to spank posters on Slashdot, local forums, and newspaper editors, who imply that an election has only been mishandled when Republicans win. That shallow thinking HAS lead to tyranny (even if a tyranny of "the masses") in other countries and it will do so here if not stopped.

Do we want Mac in the enterprise when we have Linux?

"Larry Dignan recently posted a piece on Mac in the enterprise (The eternal question: Can Apple go enterprise?). I think a better question is actually why we would want Apple to bother with the enterprise when we have Linux? This assumes, of course, that you're in the market for a Windows alternative. However, Apple has done such an incredibly nice job moving into the world of consumer electronics that I say, 'Let them stay there!'"

VOTE! - Dell IdeaStorm

"CHOICE is what consumers want on their new PCs, not annoying surprise circus-ware (the typical smattering of confusing 3rd party popup-infested software found on most new Dell PCs). Quality free and open source software is well behaved, and may be legally pre-installed on PCs, and legally shared with friends and family, sharing is encouraged! Cast your vote for consumer CHOICE and public transparency at Dell. "

Adobe wants to be the Microsoft of the Web

"What is not appealing is going back to a technology which is single sourced and controlled by a single vendor. If web applications liberated us from the domination of a single company on the desktop, why would we be eager to be dominated by a different company on the web? Yet, this is what Adobe would have us do, as would the many who are (understandably, along some dimensions, anyway) excited about Flex? Read Anne Zelenka’s post on Open Flash if you don’t think that Flash has an openness problem. I’m not eager to go from being beholden to Microsoft to being beholden to Adobe."

Application Exchange: Business Software Built on Google Apps

From the website:

"The first business applications fully integrated with Google Apps for your domain. See meetings scheduled with your prospects, support cases open, and use Gmail to track and follow-up on both.

All of this available on-demand, on-site and 100% open source. Find out more.

Launching Q1 2007. "

Dell to Linux users: Not so fast

Last Friday night, Dell posted a note on the IdeaStorm Web site saying it was listening to thousands of users who had posted messages asking for Linux on its machines by moving forward to certify three of its corporate hardware lines -- OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks and Dell Precision workstations -- for use with Novell SUSE Linux.

The company said today that the note was just about certifying the hardware for being ready to work with Novell SUSE Linux, not an announcement that the computers would be loaded and sold with the operating system in the near future.

McKesson Offers Health Care Apps On Red Hat Linux - Technology News by InformationWeek

"McKesson Corp. is selling its clinical applications for doctors' offices and hospitals based on Red Hat's Enterprise Linux operating system, offering what McKesson says is a less-expensive alternative to non-open source platforms."

FOXNews.com - Donston: Google Apps Had Me at Hello - Technology News | News On Technology

"When Google Docs and Spreadsheets came along, we toyed with the idea of using the spreadsheet functionality for our Labs schedule, but we were a little bit skittish. Would our super-secret Labs schedule be safe hosted by Google?

In short order, however, we decided that the benefits would be worth whatever small risk there was.

And the benefits have been big. The document is live, of course, so anyone with read or write access and an Internet-connected system can see the most recent changes."

Ohio school district upgrades to Linux, saves $412K

"The Bexley, Ohio high school district reportedly is migrating all of its desktop computers running Windows ME to Linux, instead of to Windows XP. The move is expected to save taxpayers as much as $412,000 in licensing costs, according to an article in a local community newspaper."

I still love Xbox, TabletPCs, Media Center, Halo, etc. Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger

NEVER trust someone to be objective about their employers products vs alternatives. It's not human nature, it's certainly not smiled upon by most companies, and there are always more objective sources to go to.

It is useful to have an insiders perspective on a company, and for such insiders to establish their credibility they have to avoid statements that are verifiably false. But there is certainly no dearth of people willing and able to speak up on behalf of Microsoft, including people who have relatives on the payroll at the Washington Post.

View the comments for this article, written by Bill gates:

*here*

What you'll find is that among ordinary people, not technogeeks (well some of those in there too including mine) people's opinions about Microsoft are almost uniformly negative. Even when Bill Gates makes several statements that most people would agree with, we almost universally question his motives.

Actions speak louder than words. We all know that. What the world waits for is some indication, not an open letter or a press release, that the company has changed its attitude about how it competes, and how its products fit into the vast world of technology.

The insatiable, palpably pathological urge for a few top executives to dominate, rather than just contribute to the "technosphere" worries the average informed person, and with good reason. What is needed is for these tendencies to not just be curbed, but eliminated.

Still watching for signs of (real) change.