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The growing email security challenge
Vendors and enterprises alike are faced with a new email threat landscape, where spam is increasingly laced with malware and targeted attacks have become more common. IT pros have a lot to consider--both in terms of technology and best practices--as they deal with the growing email security challenge. How do you take control of email--ruthlessly or humanely?
Microsoft to halt Hotmail access
In the latest death knell for Outlook Express, Microsoft announced Thursday that it will turn off access to its Web-based Hotmail service from the desktop email software at the end of June.
Outlook Express users who want to continue to access their Hotmail accounts offline after June 30 are being encouraged by Microsoft to download its free Windows Live Mail software.
Users will still be able to use Outlook, the big brother of Outlook Express, to read their Hotmail messages offline, but first they may have to upgrade their Outlook Connector synchronization software, according to information posted online by Scott Hammer, a Microsoft email support manager.
Microsoft readies Albany subscription trial
Microsoft is set to start testing privately a consumer Software + Service bundle code-named "Albany," an all-in-one bundle of Office Home and Student, Windows Live OneCare, Office Live Workspace and various Windows Live services.
Microsoft began signing up testers for Albany in March. Earlier this week, Microsoft sent a note to potential Albany testers, informing them that they would hear soon whether they'd been selected to participate and, once they had gotten the nod, to download the Albany bits from Microsoft's private Connect site. On April 18, Microsoft acknowledged that the Albany beta was about to begin.
Fed record keeping deplorable
The White House isn't the only government office bungling its document management responsibilities, according to a new report that claims there is an "appalling lack of progress" in moving federal agencies to electronic record keeping.
Instead, CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) said April 16 that the government is clinging to "outdated, inefficient and ineffective paper record keeping systems" when readily available off-the-shelf software is available for the task.
WordPress 2.5 tops for blogging
With the recent release of WordPress 2.5, the popular open-source blogging application has greatly improved its already good administration and blogging management interface and has made it much easier for bloggers to add widgets and do extensive customizations of their blogs. That's right, the best blogging platform just got better.
Ozzie talks open source, mesh
Microsoft has "dramatically" changed because of open-source software, the company's Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said Thursday as part of a wide-ranging discussion during the annual Most Valuable Professional summit in Seattle. He also talked about Microsoft's mesh concept and the importance of virtualization.
"Microsoft fundamentally, as a whole, has changed dramatically as a result of open source," Ozzie said. "As people have been using it more and more, the nature of interoperability between our systems and others has increased." That means that from the very start when Microsoft begins developing new products, it considers what components it will want to open up to outside developers, he said.
Vista a Work in progress
As PC users clamor for Microsoft to continue to support Windows XP, company CEOSteve Ballmer called the Vista OS "a work in progress" at an annual Seattle event. "It's a very important piece of work. We did a lot of things right and have a lot of things we need to learn from. You never want to let five years go between releases," he said.
While Microsoft recently extended the date when the XP software will be available for low-cost PCs, it doesn't plan to listen to some other complaints, including that Vista is too big. "Vista is bigger than XP and it's gonna stay bigger than XP," Ballmer said. "We have to make sure it doesn't get bigger still."
Threat lists slammed as useless
Security vendor PC Tools has questioned the usefulness of the threat lists used by many security companies to warn of current malware attacks.
The problem, according to the Australian company, is that the lists--which are now regularly issued by almost every security software company--measure volumes rather than the underlying danger of a particular type of malware.
Most users repeat passwords
Using the same password for multiple Web pages is the Internet-era equivalent of having the same key for your home, car and bank safe-deposit box.
Even though a universal password is like gold for cyber crooks because they can use it to steal all of a person's sensitive data at once, nearly half the Internet users queried in a new survey said they use just one password for all their online accounts.
SQL Server 2005 SP3
Microsoft will release a third service pack for SQL Server 2005, just before the next version of the server software comes out. Service Pack 3 is expected to come out after the release to manufacturing of SQL Server 2008, which is scheduled to happen in the third quarter this year.
Microsoft didn't reveal much about what the service pack would include, except to say in a Tuesday blog post that it will contain all cumulative updates to the software plus some additional fixes to bugs that customers have reported on MS Connect, a Microsoft Web site for customer feedback.
Criminals hack CEOs with fake subpoenas
Panos Anastassiadis didn't click on the fake subpoena that popped into his inbox on Monday morning, but he runs a computer security company. Others were not so lucky.
In fact, security researchers say that thousands have fallen victim to an email scam in which senior managers such as Anastassiadis are told that they have been sued in federal court and must click on a Web link to download court documents. Victims of the crime are taken to a phony Web site where they are told they need to install browser plug-in software to view the documents. That software gives the criminals access to the victim's computer.
Thistype of targeted email attack, called "spear-phishing," is a variation on the more common "phishing" attack. Both attacks use fake email messages to try to lure victims to malicious Web sites, but with spear-phishing the attackers try to make their messages more believable by including information tailored to the victim.
ActiveX is least secure plug-in
ActiveX controls made up most of all browser plug-in vulnerabilities in the second half of 2007, according to Symantec.
The company has just released its semi-annual Web security report and in it said that Microsoft's technology, primarily used to create add-ins for Internet Explorer, accounted for 79 percent of the 239 plug-in bugs discovered between July and December 2007. The plug-in with the next-highest number of flaws was Apple's QuickTime, which had just 8 percent of the six-month's total.
Only one vulnerability in a plug-in for Mozilla's Firefox browser was detected in the same period, meaning Firefox's extensions--the moniker Mozilla uses for plug-ins--accounted for only 0.4 percent of all found flaws.
Microsoft hints at Live Mesh
Microsoft plans to launch its Live Mesh offering next week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco but so far is not revealing details of the service.
On Friday night, Microsoft sent out email invitations to a "Mesh it up" event on April 24 featuring demos by Microsoft "experts." The invitation includes a reference to the mesh.com Web site, which currently requires visitors to sign in with a Windows Live ID and then displays an error message.
Microsoft declined to offer any more details about Live Mesh except to say that it will launch next week and further information will become available on Tuesday evening, April 22.
Users fight to save Windows XP
Microsoft's operating systems run most personal computers around the globe and are a cash cow for the world's largest software maker. But you'd never confuse a Windows user with the passionate fans of Mac OS X or even the free Linux operating system. Unless it's someone running Windows XP, a version Microsoft wants to retire.
Fans of the six-year-old operating system set to be pulled off store shelves in June have papered the Internet with blog posts, cartoons and petitions recently. They trumpet its superiority to Windows Vista, Microsoft's latest PC operating system, whose consumer launch last January was greeted with lukewarm reviews.
New partners, DRM for Silverlight
Microsoft on Monday unveiled new content partners for its Silverlight technology and provided details of a forthcoming digital rights management (DRM) technology for its multimedia platform.
The company made these announcements to promote the use of its Silverlight multimedia development and deployment technology to broadcasters at the annual NAB Show 2008 in Las Vegas.
Among the companies that now have projects based on Silverlight are Madison Square Garden (MSG) Interactive, Tencent, Abertis Telecom, Terra Networks Operations, SBSi, MNet and Yahoo Japan, Microsoft said.
Windows demise exaggerated
In a presentation at a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas, analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald said Microsoft is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and has not responded to the market, and it faces serious competition that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts. Linux, Mac and other operating systems have been around, viable and available for some time, yet none has really chipped away at Microsoft's dominance on the desktop. What's more, by all accounts, the Windows Server Market is expanding, not contracting.
Vista designed to annoy
A Microsoft manager has said that one of the security features in Vista was deliberately designed to annoy users to put pressure on third-party software makers to make their applications more secure.
David Cross, a product unit manager at Microsoft, was the group program manager in charge of designing User Account Control (UAC), which, when activated, requires people to run Vista in standard user mode rather than having administrator privileges, and offers a prompt if they try to install a program.
New article: My Inbox in the Sky, a hosted Exchange mailbox
Have you ever wanted access to your Outlook data, anywhere, any time, on any device? If you want to learn how to accomplish this, easily, and without running your own servers, read this important article by Bill Mann.
Read this OutlookPower article.
New article: Are political journalists falling prey to technological misdirection?
Our own Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz has a new article out, Are political journalists falling prey to technological misdirection?. This time, though, it's not in a ZATZ magazine. Instead, it's running in the Nieman Watchdog of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Here's more interesting news on David and his analysis of the White House email mess. He was just interviewed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The interview will be broadcast to 60 terrestrial stations, XM satellite radio, and on the Web sometime during the weekend of April 26th. We'll have more details as we get closer to the broadcast day.
Yahoo, Time Warner forming AOL deal
Yahoo and Time Warner are closing in on a deal where Yahoo would merge with Time Warner's AOL Internet unit, brushing aside Microsoft's bid for Yahoo, a source familiar with the talks said on Wednesday.
The source confirmed a Wall Street Journal story saying Yahoo would receive a cash investment from Time Warner in exchange for a 20 percent stake in the combined Yahoo-AOL business. The deal would exclude AOL's fading dial-up Internet access business and value AOL at about $10 billion.
IE 8 security change
Microsoft plans to make a key Internet Explorer default change to thwart attackers trying to hack into its Web browser.
The software maker will enable DEP/NX (Data Execution Prevention/No Execute) by default in IE 8 when the browser is running on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, a major tweak aimed at mitigating browser-based vulnerabilities.
DEP/NX is already available in IE 7, but it's turned off by default because of compatibility issues.
Google doesn`t understand enterprise
Google Apps is like a "fog rolling into the harbor," permeating businesses quite possibly at the expense of Microsoft and IBM, Gartner analyst Tom Austin said. Google just isn't doing it by coddling the enterprise market the way its rivals do.
Austin, in a presentation at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo April 9, said that 20 to 30 percent of businesses Gartner surveyed claim they are using free Google Apps in addition to Microsoft Office, SharePoint or IBM Lotus software.
While this wouldn't seem to threaten Microsoft or IBM, Austin wondered what might happen if 80 percent of the users in 80 percent of large enterprises start using Google Apps. He argued that the more people use Google Apps, the harder it will be for Microsoft or IBM to benefit from renewing contracts.
| Wednesday, April 09, 2008 | |
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