Fed II Star newsletter - masthead The weekly newsletter for the Fed II game by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 19, 2006

OFFICIAL NEWS
Page 11

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WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton

Could it be that Google are starting to become politically savvy? Here in the UK they are hiring New Labour's arch spin merchant and fixer to represent them to the Blair government. Meanwhile back in the US of A Google were one of a number of IT companies roasted by Capitol Hill politicians over their kowtowing to Chinese censorship. Pretty hypocritical given the ambivalence of most US politicians to China, I thought. Still, I suppose grilling IT companies in Congress kept the politicians out of the Vice-President's firing line!

The other big event of the week was the RSA conference, one of the IT security community's major events. I'll report on that in a week or so; suffice to say at the moment, Bill Gates chose the occasion to talk up Microsoft's replacement for its ill-fated 'Passport' system - a new version called 'InfoCard'. I think he'd be better off just concentrating on getting his company to write secure software in the first place!

And talking of Microsoft...


Roundup: Microsoft

Microsoft's Valentines Day gift to the IT masses this year was a typical geek offering - seven security patches, two rated as critical and five as important. Just what everyone needed. There were patches for Internet Explorer and for Windows Media Player. Interesting that they are all for things you can't just eliminate from the system, and things which Microsoft products fire up regardless of whether you have alternatives registered as your browser and audio application of choice :(

Regardless, I suppose we'd better all go and get the patches and apply them, because there is already a 'proof of concept' attack on the Windows Media attack out there, which means that the real thing won't be long in coming...

http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?c=1495974-7863277&brand=techrepublic&ds=5&fs=0
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/15/ms_patch_tuesday/
http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?c=1517811-7863277&brand=techrepublic&ds=5&fs=0

The row over whether or not Microsoft is complying with the European Commission (EC) anti-trust ruling or not continues to rumble on. Microsoft is supposed to provide proper documentation to enable third parties to interface to its products. The documentation supplied was pronounced unacceptable by an independent expert appointed jointly by Microsoft and the EC. Microsoft claimed that was all they could manage and offered to allow third parties to see the source code so they could compile their own documentation (that should keep the world's supply of Visual Basic programmers in work for years to come).

This week Microsoft announced that it had met the requirements, and that the EC officials just hadn't read the documents! A somewhat exasperated EC official pointed out that not only were Microsoft late getting the documentation in, but that it was up to the EC to say whether Microsoft's offerings were adequate or not! And guess what? While all this is going on there are suggestions from the US court overseeing the US anti-trust settlement that the documentation provided by Microsoft to meet its obligations under the US anti-trust settlement is inadequate and too expensive... Oh my, whatever next!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/15/microsoft_prolongs_ec_row/

As if that wasn't enough, it emerges that a number of Microsoft rivals have been 'expressing concerns' about Windows Vista, the next version of the Windows operating system, due to be launched at the end of the year. The EC is 'monitoring' the situation, although there is no formal investigation. The way things are going Vista will not only be the first operating system to get security patches before it's launched, it will also be the first to suffer an anti-trust investigation before it's launched. Quite an achievement.

http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=10F6753:1F69382

Finally in this round up, Microsoft opened up the test version of its new Office Live service. This is an interesting experiment aimed at small businesses with less than 10 employees. Such businesses rarely have their own web sites, or the wherewithal to set up and maintain one. Office Live offers a three tier system. The Basic, free service offers an Internet domain, 2GB storage for five e-mail accounts, 30MB Web site storage and 10GB a month data transfer. The next level increases the e-mail accounts to 50 and the web storage to 50MB and bandwidth to 25GB a month.

Frankly I don't know how many genuine takers they'll get. It seems to me that the cost, as such, isn't usually a problem even for very small businesses. The cost today of what Microsoft is offering at the basic level is rarely more than US$30/month, petty cash for even mom and pop stores. The real problem, as I mentioned earlier, is a lack of expertise and resources to set up and maintain a site. I don't think Microsoft addresses this problem at all. Oh, I think they'll get plenty of takers for the basic service, after all it's free. But real businesses that would be able to/want to expand to the second tier? Not very likely.

The other service Microsoft is offering is web based programs for managing contacts, tracking projects and such things as completing expense reports. Microsoft is making it clear that they are targeting these, paid, services at people who don't use such software today. Interesting, but first Microsoft will have to persuade those people that they actually need to use software for such things. And as an aside, I don't think I can think of any small business, like corner shops, that have anything they would consider to be a 'project'. As such they wouldn't see any need for project tracking software. If your 'projects' are really simple, tracking them using software would double or triple the time spent on the project, hardly what you'd call a productivity increase...

http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?c=1485470-7863277&brand=techrepublic&ds=5&fs=0


Shorts:

Microsoft may be trying to fend off Open Source by dragging its heels on documentation and launching 'Live', but Oracle is adopting a different strategy in its chosen market - eat up all the Open Source database companies. News emerged this week that it had tried to buy MySQL, the most successful open source SQL database company. Fortunately, MySQL turned them down (this time) saying it wished to keep its independence. Less fortunately, Sleepycat, makers of the excellent Berkeley DB embedded database system succumbed to Oracle's blandishments and allowed Oracle to buy them. This is a real pain. I've used Berkeley DB for a number of years now, it provides both the player database in all of my games and the ibgames account database. I'm going to have to keep a very close watch on what Oracle is doing with Berkeley DB.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/15/oracle_buys_sleepycat/
http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?c=1507010-7863277&brand=techrepublic&ds=5&fs=0

Our old friends the Recording Industry Ass of America are up to their tricks again. This time they are suing a woman for downloading files even though she didn't have a computer! Yes really. At the time she was supposed to be downloading files her computer was away being repaired. What seems likely is that she was a victim of a wardriving attack via an open wireless router at her house. In their typical arrogant fashion, the Ass are ignoring the facts of the case and insisting that the woman pay over US$4,500. The case is due to come to court in the not to distant future, and is going to be contested - the woman's lawyer will be asking for costs against the RIAA. More about the result after the hearing.

But that's not all. The Ass are also making threatening noises about people who sell on their iPods without first erasing the music. Yes that's music that's paid for. The Ass are now scanning eBay for offenders committing this heinous crime, so watch your backs, if you decide to get rid of your old iPod.

http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=15592
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/02/13/riaa_ipod_warning/

'Important stop Telegrams abolished stop'.

Sad news earlier this month from Western Union - the yellow flimsy telegram is now a thing of the past - after 154 years. The telegram almost defined the era for over a hundred years, but this month Western Union stopped offering the service. No more yellow envelopes hand delivered by a courier.

Western Union's component companies were formed in 1851, and Western Union came into being ten years later. Telegrams reached a peak in the 1920s and 30s when it was cheaper to send a telegram than to make a long distance phone call. Since punctuation was extra, and the four letter word 'stop' was free, people started using the word stop instead of a period to end sentences, giving the telegram its unique syntactical flavour. Ironically, the end of the telegram was reported by bloggers - one of the agents of its demise!

RIP Telegrams stop.

(Thanks to reader Lois for drawing attention to the story).
http://cbs13.com/topstories/topstories_story_033183306.html/


Homework:

There was a great deal of follow up to the piece on IT education written by Verity Stob. You can read the interesting comments at http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/02/13/gcse_bitesize_letters/


Scanner - Other Stories:

US concludes 'Cyber Storm' exercise testing net defences
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/13842562.htm

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
19 February 2006

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.


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