Microsoft gets the blogging bug
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It is launching a test service to allow people to publish blogs, or online journals, called MSN Spaces. Microsoft is trailing behind competitors like Google and AOL, which already offer services which make it easy for people to set up web journals.
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roundup Free-roaming source code breeds new Netsky pest. Also: From IE to Opera, browsers are a likely prey.
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[Technology India]: London, Dec 3 :Software giant Microsoft is now ready to take the plunge into the world of blogging by launching a test service to allow people to publish blogs, or online journals, called MSN Spaces.
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The blogosphere is buzzing about about the 'death of the page view' declared by Internet traffic measurement services.
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What Yahoo! can do for Microsoft--and what it can't.
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Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a new set of Web-based services allowing users of its MSN service to publish and track each other&#39;s blogs.
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If you search for Yahoo Microsoft, this page is the second hit. I like that of course. It's generating a fair amount of flow, since the combination of Yahoo and Microsoft is a pretty hot topic. Keeping the topic going, I think it's pretty amazing that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, but then again, which of all their web efforts has captured our imagination? At least Yahoo has Flickr, and when they try something new, we all try it with them (often with not the greatest results). The rambling continues... If Yahoo is into poison pills, try this one out.  Reserve 5 percent of Yahoo's common stock for blogger options. Put us to work to find new businesses for Yahoo, ones that are relevant to our world. When we find them, reward the bloggers with a significant upside stake in Yahoo's future, not the airy-fairy kind, but real stock that we can trade. Handled properly, it could raise shareholder value by much more than 5 percent. Just the kind of deal they pay you to do, oh Yahoo gods and board members.  Of course it'll never happen. It's an idea like the one I keep proposing for newspapers -- that they hire their public editors from the public, independent bloggers with no journalism experience, with no undue reverence for the institutions so revered by journos. They're going away, just like Yahoo is (sad but true). Now what will rise in their place? Imho, something that's home grown, with the integrity of the people, in our interest. The more they invite the public in, the more clued in they will be when we figure out where we want to go with news on the web. It's why I'm excited about the Obama campaign and why I keep giving to it (I'm up to $400 now). I'm excited because so many other people are excited.  I like his idea about tuition for public service for college students. It's so simple. People want to be involved, they want to use their energy and creativity to solve problems. In the 20th century we were couch potatoes. In the 21st we do it for ourselves.  The first tech company that fully embraces this, not just in the form of User Generated Content (what an insult) but by giving us power (that comes from stock) will rule the world. If Y! had the guts, it won't be long before they're making tender offers to buy out Ballmer.  BTW, I think I understand why Ballmer wants Yahoo! When Yahoo engineers wake up they program stuff like Yahoo Live, which is pretty cool and runs on the web, and while it steals ideas from smaller companies, it adds some pretty cool stuff of its own. When Microsoft engineers wake up they program stuff like Vista, a multi-year, multi-billion dollar waste of money, time and customer goodwill. They can't do another Vista without wrecking the franchise. Now the question is -- where do they go for growth? That's what Yahoo is for.
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Blog: Here's a follow up to a blog of a few days ago outlining workaround until Google issues a patch.
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This is really cool!  I finally get my own comment spam!  For some reason I felt left out of the party.  I just wasn't cool enough for the spammers to consider me worthy of their spam.  Anyway.  I implemented my own little turing test.  Now the comments say:  {{{  Turing Test: Are you a human? (required. Just type yes... this is for automated spam prevention)  }}}  While this wouldn't work for all blogs in the wild I'm sure it will work just fine here in my little corner of the blogosphere.  If spammers really want my blog enough then I'll deploy a captcha.  If they solve the captcha I'll deploy a sentient robot  which will traceroute packets back to the host and then terminate with prejudic ...
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. has released its monthly set of security patches, fixing a critical flaw in Office. Attackers could exploit the bug by tricking Office users into opening a maliciously encoded .pub document, which would then allow attackers to run unauthorized software on a victim's PC. These .pub documents are created by Microsoft's Publisher software, an Office component used for designing print and online business publications. The flaw isÂ described here. Microsoft rates the bug as critical for Publisher 2000, but this warning has been downgraded to "important" for the Publisher 2002 and Publisher 2003 products. Some security experts expected Microsoft toÂ fix a similar bug in Word, which has been used by online attackers over the past few weeks, but that problem remains unfixed. Microsoft acknowledged the Word problem last week and probably did not have time to run a fix through its quality assurance tests, said Jonathan Bitle, a manager of technical accounts with Qualys Inc. "It's really late in their engineering cycle, so it's understandable that they wouldn't manage to get something out," he said. Both the Word and Publisher bugs rely on the same type of attack to work: an attacker e-mails a malicious document and somehow tricks the victim into clicking on the attachment. Security experts have been seeing more of these Office flaws exploited of late. "This is one of the trends that we have observed," said Amol Sarwate, director of the Qualys vulnerability research lab. "The growing number of client-side vulnerabilities where you have a malformed Publisher file or Word file or Excel file." Tuesday's patches also include less-critical fixes for two Windows components: the PGM (Pragmatic General Multicast) protocol used by Microsoft's Reliable Multicast Program software to transfer data, and the Windows Indexing service, which is used by the operating system's search engine. Microsoft's security bulletins offer more information. September may seem likeÂ a bit of a reprieve for harried system administrators who were given 19 updates to test and deploy over the past two months. Microsoft was forced toÂ reissue one of its August patches after it caused Internet Explorer to crash when working with a Web-based enterprise applications such as PeopleSoft and Siebel. But before Microsoft patchers get too relaxed, they should brace for the possibility of another patch later this month, Qualys said. Because attackers are actively exploiting the Word problem, Sarwate believes that Microsoft may issue an "out-of-cycle" patch for the problem, ahead of its next scheduled security updates, which are due Oct. 10. Â
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Software giant Microsoft is joining the ranks of companies offer blogs or online journals.
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Software dinosaur Microsoft paid millions for a tiny piece of trendy internet property Facebook. But the company needs something to make it hot again
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Plus: Is Microsoft search engine crawling Google? [News.com Extra]
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A bug in Microsoft&#39;s Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000 and Proxy Server 2.0 can let hackers spoof Web content, such as a trusted site, with their own fake content, the Redmond
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Target to the blogosphere: youâre irrelevant.
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I'm starting to realize that my blog is a bit of a time machine.  For example I can create a blog entry to warn myself about something that WILL happen in the future.    My current NTP  blog entry is a good example.  I wrote this for myself as much as for the people who read my blog (or find me via Google).  I know for sure that NTP on Debian is going to bite me sometime in the future and I'm going to forget WHY.  Then I'm going to (of course) go to Google or my aggregator and search for NTP and then find my blog post.    I've done this about a dozen times now and its saved me a TON of time!
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....