One stock maven believes that the Wall Street collapse may
reignite
Microsoft's interest in Yahoo
. The theory is that Yahoo is now far cheaper
and the value of Microsoft cash is relatively undiminished.
This could well be true, though I still think buying Yahoo is a terrible me-too
idea. And Microsoft has recently
spent $80 billion buying back its own stock (a better investment than AIG,
I dare say). Does Redmond still have the cash to snag Yahoo? And if not, can
it borrow that amount in today's market? You tell me at [email protected].
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 13, 20080 comments
Tomorrow will be a particularly busy
Patch Tuesday
, and once again remote code execution attacks are taking center
stage, with no less than four fixes. Active Directory will get plugged, as will
Windows Server 2000, Internet Explorer and Office.
Posted by Doug Barney on October 13, 20080 comments
It's been a bit of secret how much Microsoft has been pushing SQL Server 2005
and 2008 as a business intelligence (BI) platform. But Microsoft doesn't want
it to be such a secret anymore, and has a range of
new
features to increase the IQ of BI
in the next rev of SQL Server. Topping
the list? New reporting and analysis services aimed not just at BI gurus, but
rank-and-file managers and information workers.
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 09, 20080 comments
It might not be a reversal of XP's death sentence, but if reports are to be
believed, XP did at least get a
six-month
reprieve
and won't be yanked from OEM hands until July 2009.
Some say this is a bunch of hooey, but whether or not Microsoft has formally
made the decision, I have to believe the company will offer XP as long as humanly
possible. After all, people want it, Microsoft gets paid for it and the monopoly
remains intact. Where's the downside? There isn't one.
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 09, 20080 comments
Here's one more scareware story to cap off the week. At least in this one, the
user learns his lesson:
I have a boss, the company vice president yet, who has a bad habit of
going places on the Internet that he shouldn't and clicking on things better
left unclicked. In the past, I have been able to clean some of the scareware
off his system, but the last couple of times I couldn't. The scareware folks
had gotten smarter. The first thing they did was disable anything I could
use to get rid of their work, such as Task Manager, the Run box, any malware
or anti-virus products it could find, and even access to the c: drive (they
hid it).
I basically told him that I couldn't get rid of the crap and that it
would take me two days to reformat and reload his machine...two days during
which he would have no access to his e-mail or anything else. Since the second
two-day outage, he has been behaving himself much better.
-Phil
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 09, 20080 comments
This isn't the first time this newsletter has warned about the need for better
virtualization security. The whole issue is that virtualization is a relatively
new form of computing (and yes, I do know IBM mainframes were virtualized in
1968), and many security tools haven't kept up. Add to that the fact that a
single virtualized server can act as dozens of machines. Compromise that server
and you can compromise the whole shooting match.
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 09, 20080 comments
Last week, I
wrote
about scareware
, those pesky pop-ups that claim your PC is infected. Click
the pop-up and you're either buying security or performance software you don't
need and doesn't even work, or your machine is now infected and ready to cash
it in.
I've been getting plenty of horror stories -- you can check out a few of them
in
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 09, 20080 comments
Scareware victims have been
venting
to us
all
week
. Here are some more of your thoughts, including some praise for Vista's
scareware-fighting tactics:
My own laptop became infected and I could not even turn my Office on!
I turned the machine off and prayed I would not have to format it. A colleague
sent me this
link and it worked well. I have not had a problem since running the malware
removal software.
-Susan
Regarding your scareware item, I am a system admin responsible for over
40 Vista machines. I've had Vista deployed since March 2007 with User Access
Control enabled. The users don't have administrator rights to their box. I
haven't had a single virus or malware incident reported by my users or by
Symantec AntiVirus.
You tend to bad-mouth Vista in many of your articles, but you can put
me down as one admin that loves it because the users can't mess it up.
-Ken
Oddly enough, I can give some support to Vista on this one. After having
set up a computer that I was not concerned about, I decided to put Vista to
the test. I went to any number of search engines and started searching for
any site that I thought might give me a nasty bug. I finally found one. I
allowed the system to accept whatever was being offered despite Windows Defender
screaming at me not to do it. Yup, I was then infected. Symantec AV was helpless
against this new computer corrupter that I picked up and Vista sure hated
it, as well. Ended up just rebuilding the system.
This along with another experience I had taught me one lesson: My system
is more secure with Windows Defender on and without Symantec AV than the other
way around (as you're not supposed to run AV with Defender on). To date, I
haven't seen anything to prove me wrong. Now, I'm sure there are others who
have had the opposite experience, and I'd like to hear from them. That way,
I'll know where not to go as well. The additional experience was that I ran
a test computer for around three months with Defender and no AV. I then installed
AV and ran a scan. No virus. Two weeks later I had a virus; my Defender was
turned off. But hey, maybe that's because I'm not using Forefront/Antigen,
right?
-Jacob
I wrote an article re-infecting a VM with a sample malware I obtained
from a client's machine, and documented all the corners of the VM that were
infected. See it here.
-David
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 08, 20080 comments
Steve Ballmer defended himself, it seems, even more than his own company in
a class-action lawsuit over "Vista Capable" logos. Many consumers
are angry after buying a Vista Capable Computer (I call them VCCs) only to find
out it only ran lower-end versions of the OS. And sometimes, even that was a
stretch.
Ballmer claims
he was out of the loop and not part of the logo decision. I believe him.
Heck, this guy is busier than Paris Hilton at an all-male revue! But Ballmer's
reasonable excuse doesn't excuse the misleading logo program itself. Consumers
and the fee-hungry lawyers (who'll get most of the award, anyway) are right
on this one.
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 08, 20080 comments
Public relations folks come in all shapes, sizes and levels of professionalism.
Sometimes, I get calls from a newbie clearly reading tech-speak from a script.
Other times, a trusted longtime pro calls me with information that's of 100
percent interest to my readers. Often, the level of creativity is less than
that of a Backstreet Boys song.
Then there are the moments of true cleverness. I would've never written about
the company Secure
Computing this week were it not for PR spin-meister Richard Mulligan, who
told me that when it comes to spam, "Obama" beats "McCain"
by a factor of 6-to-1 (there's six times as much Obama-related spam as there
is about McCain), and that "Sarah Palin" slightly edged out "Joe
Biden" in the same category -- don't ya know!
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 08, 20080 comments
If you're one of the richest -- if not
the
richest -- men in the universe,
then a little thing like a near-stock market collapse isn't such a big deal.
Bill could lose $50 billion and still have enough to control Third World economies,
give Paris Hilton a clothing allowance and buy everyone in America a six-pack
of Pabst.
Even though Gates lives in a very different world, I trust his economic judgment.
(I try not to be political here, but does either major presidential candidate
understand anything about the economy or how to reduce our federal deficit?
You tell me at
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 08, 20080 comments
Everyone, it seems, has a different way of passing their time in a hotel. Some
hit the town, many hit the restaurants, a lot hit the bars and more than a few
hit the pay-per-view. And some of us try to get some work done, and use the
wireless or Ethernet connections at $12.95 a day to connect to the home office.
But like the food in the restaurants or some of the creeps in the bars, these
connections
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Posted by Doug Barney on October 07, 20080 comments