Worm Authors Get Squashed
The Zotob worm made the rounds only recently, but with the help of motivated
investigators and Microsoft, a pair of virus-writing scumbags in Morocco and
Turkey found themselves in the
pokey.
I couldn’t be happier. No one has a right to mess with our property, our
computers, and private and business information. Slimy virus writers need to
pay for their automated, wanton destruction.
Here’s what the FBI
had to say.
WinFS For Sure
WinFS, a unified relational file system, may have been cut from the initial
release of Longhorn, now called Vista (By the way, why get us used to a cool
code name and then change it to some plain vanilla marketing speak?), but the
technology is far from dead -- it’s in beta!
The code is apparently so raw that Redmond hasn’t even decided what operating
systems it will support -- they want beta testers to tell them.
Redmond Public with Public Policy
Microsoft has long been involved with the federal government, often helping
shape legislation and backing up law enforcement, but sometimes on the sharp
end of an anti-trust stick. Still, no matter how many times the DOJ tried to
slap it down, Microsoft never backed away from Washington. This week the company
laid out its core
public policy goals -- goals, I think, our government will listen to very
carefully.
Most exciting for me is Microsoft’s strong campaign for anti-spyware
legislation. Spyware is giving Windows and IE a black eye, and as Jack Krumholtz,
Microsoft’s director of federal government affairs mildly put it, “It
diminishes our customers’ computing experience.” Ya think?
Also on the agenda: backing of free trade, more money for basic federal research,
passing a Cybercrime treaty with Europe and allowing more foreign computer experts
to work in the U.S. I’m still waiting to see something here I can disagree
with. What do you think? E-mail me at [email protected]
and you might see your message in the next Redmond Report.
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Cookies and Chips, er, Processors
On the Internet, cookies and now adware follow us and serve content based on
where we’ve been in the past -- but not always to our liking. Now Intel
is touting a similar idea for PCs themselves. Future massive multi-core
processors will have so much extra juice that they’ll be able to track
your activities and adapt operations to your computing habits. Not only that
but they’ll respond to the environment and work intelligently with other
electronic gizmos. All of this will make computers far simpler and so rich in
functionality they’ll seem like a team of highly trained assistants.
Hate to throw cold water on the idea, but even if the processors become capable
of such magic, they still need software to pull it all off. Put them together
and we’re talking about phenomenal levels of complexity, and we all know
what that means -- a million more ways for something to malfunction and development
schedules that stretch into years. By the time Intel’s vision is realized,
I’ll need a team of highly trained assistants -- to get me out of my wheelchair!
About the Author
Doug Barney is editor in chief of Redmond magazine and the VP, editorial director of Redmond Media Group.