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Is Vista really safer?
I keep reading articles like this: Security – One of The Key Reasons to Migrate to Windows Vista (other articles from this category are for example one which breaks down the MS Malicious Software Removal Tool statistics by versions of Windows to conclude the same thing). The problem with these? They fail to account for…
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Free AV from Microsoft
It seems like Microsoft is dropping their OneCare product line and repackaging it as “Morro”, a free consumer AV product. I read the news on Graham Cluley’s blog. What does this mean? This will of course eat from the pie of other vendors offering free products (AVG, Avira and Avast!). It will also get more…
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Moving to an always connected world
I was browsing through some of the PDC reporting, when this announced feature of Windows 7 caught my eye; DirectAccess. It’s supposed to be a VPN which you don’t have to set up, it just magically works. Really? I didn’t know that VPN’s were so hard to set up. My personal experience is with managing…
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It can happen to the best of us
I was reading Scott Hanselman’s The Weekly Source Code 33 – Microsoft Open Source inside Google Chrome and came upon this piece of text: Older versions of ATL, and by older I mean pre-Visual C++ 2005, used dynamically generated code in small isolated cases. Obviously, without the appropriate APIs this is going to cause problems…
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Microsoft and the “Not Invented Here” syndrome
A couple of days ago I was listening to a recent episode of Hanselminutes (a great podcast BTW) about Distributed Caching with Microsoft’s “Velocity”, and the only thing I could think of was: How is this different from memcached? This is why MS should be broken up into smaller divisions: to keep them from reinventing…
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On IP, the Universe and everything
I’m getting old or something, because I seem to rant more an more. Much of this text is contained in an e-mai sent to the .NET Rocks podcast regarding their OOXML show, but I thought it might be interesting to publish it here to clarify my views on IP, OSS, the universe and everything 🙂…
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Consider the source before ranting
or else you could look foolish. Full disclosure: I work in the AV industry, however this post (and all of my posts, unless stated otherwise) do not necessarily reflect the opinion of my current or past employers. They are my own personal opinions / views of things. Getting back to the topic: some time ago…
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The fact that you write for a big site doesn’t make you an expert
The corollary of the above being: don’t rephrase what the expert said if you don’t understand it. Real life example from an eweek article: The Redmond, Wash. software giant has convinced major U.S. computer makers—including Dell, Gateway and Hewlett-Packard—to make default changes at the BIOS level to allow a new Vista security feature called ASLR…
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Offline updating of Windows
When re-installing Windows, you should always do so without any network physical connection (meaning unplugged network cables) or you risk infecting yourself via various exploits (for example there is at least one virus which scans the LAN for PCs to infect). Now heise security has put together a tool to download the security updates on…
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Undisclosed Microsoft bug
Over at the eEye research site you can read a worrying and little confusing advisory (how can something be a local privilege escalation and a remote code execution attack at the same time?). I’m eagerly awaiting more details about this. In the mean time, don’t forget to subscribe to their Zero-Day tracker. Update: I don’t…