Grey Panthers Savannah

Category: microsoft

  • The leaked Microsoft COFEE product

    So, the Microsoft COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor) tool was leaked. I took a quick look at it, and – as expected – there is nothing “magical”, “secret” or “backdoorish” about it (even though I love the picture which comes with the Gizmodo article, the text itself is complete and utter BS – COFEE…

  • One more thing…

    So, if I started ranting on Microsoft, here is one more thing: you should never ever use Microsoft servers if you want to scale. The reasons is simple: currently the best scaling method is horizontal (ie. buy loads of cheap hardware and distribute the load between them). Using Microsoft server software would mean that for…

  • My opinion about Microsoft, software piracy and everything

    This post is a response to a blogpost on tudor g’s blog about software piracy issues in Romania, and as such it might not be of interest to you, dear international reader. If this is the case, feel free to skip this post. Disclaimer: arguments are very emotional things. As much as we would like…

  • Removing features is the best defense

    When I’ve read the news that Microsoft is disabling Autorun for removable media other than CD/DVD in Windows 7 (and maybe HD-DVD/BlueRay) I said: cool! This will slow down the spreading of malware using this feature (on a very long timeframe of course, because Windows 7 isn’t even final yet – and far away from…

  • Spot the flaws in the Windows 7 UI

    I’ve been playing around with the Windows 7 beta for a couple of days now, and it feels painful! Regardless of what Leo Laporte says, it is very much a beta. And even the recent beta releases of Ubuntu are better than this. Below you can see a screenshot in which I tried to exemplify…

  • You say features, I say (possible) vulnerabilities

    I was listening to a recent MindOfRoot podcast (good podcast BTW if you are interested in IT type topics) which included an interview with a Microsoftie about WS-MAN (sorry for not recalling the exact name of the person). If you don’t know (I didn’t) WS-MAN stands for (drum roll please): web services management. That’s right…

  • Microsoft – fail!

    I’m not talking about the fact that they restarted my computer overnight – again! – because of a “critical” update (as far as I can tell the “critical” update was Windows Media Player 11 – WTF?) or about the fact that some of their utilities give you useless error messages (like “X has occured –…

  • Microsoft .docx format – fail!

    I was installing a WinXP + Office 2003 machine for an acquaintance and of course let Windows Update get it to the latest patchlevel. During this process the MS GDI+ detection tool popped up and said the the computer had software which may be affected by the GDI+ vulnerabilities (correct, since I had Office 2k3…

  • Will Morro continue to innovate?

    Rich Mogull thinks that Morro (the free AV from Microsoft) will lead more innovation. However I think that the issue is not so clear-cut: Morro will be forced to innovate like any AV vendor due to the external pressures of the extensive user base of existing AV solutions, changing threats/attacks, and continued pressure from third…

  • F*** you Microsoft!

    For deciding that your precious Windows Update is so important you have to restart my computer in the middle of the day, costing me two hours of work!