Searching for Yahoo: Take Two?

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


11 Patches Patching

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


Smarter Databases

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. More

Posted by Doug Barney on October 09, 20080 comments


New Lease on XP Life

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


Mailbag: Vista Hardware Requirements, More

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


Real Security Needed for Virtualization

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. More

Posted by Doug Barney on October 09, 20080 comments


Scareware Scams and Pop-Up Perils

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 More

Posted by Doug Barney on October 09, 20080 comments


Mailbag: When Scareware Attacks, Are Your Gadgets Trying To Kill You?, More

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


Ballmer Out of Touch on Vista Logos

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


Obama Taking Names in Spam Poll

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


Gates Not Freaking

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 More

Posted by Doug Barney on October 08, 20080 comments


Hotel Fear

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 More

Posted by Doug Barney on October 07, 20080 comments