Read Microsoft Vice President of Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney’s informal comments and let me know how you feel about his comparison between malware infected machines effects on other PC’s and the effects of second hand smoke as a driving force for EPA regulations. This is like playing… hmm, nothing as complex as chess… maybe its more like Tic-Tac-Toe. When it comes to knowing when a Windows based PC or Server is threat to other computers Microsoft should be able to let us know. However, any mechanism they use to let us know – a network based ‘tweet’, a page shot to the print queue, or even a pop message on the users screen – will come under attack and the baddies will ensure that the feature does not work. It’s far easier to STOP a page from printing or to stop a PC from contacting a server than it is to make it DO those things in the first place.

Leave it to Microsoft to kick itself in the gonads just days before a huge product launch. This particular incident doesn’t even involve Windows or any Microsoft product, but a subsidiary that probably few people associate with Redmond.

This is mostly from a Microsoft press release, so its more forgiving of Microsoft’s role in designing operating systems that so often become zombies that can be used by spammers or others with malicious intent to make the Internet a less pleasant place for the rest of us. When you consider the damage done by Conficker and earlier threats like NIMDA and CodeRed, $250,000 seems rather low if they really want to use this current threat to set an example to future virus designers.

This is a nice effort on the part of folks at Microsoft and Novell. They managed to roll out a Silverlight/Moonlight player for Linux and PowerPC Macs. The official streaming feed of Barak Obama’s Presidential Inauguration Committee will be using Silverlight 2.

The smart money is on those who understand that this really only applies to the class of PC users who actually give a damn about which OS is running on their system. Sadly, at present, thats a tiny fraction of users. People use what they are given or what they used in school or at the office. Those of us who shuttle back and forth between multiple OS’s or even multiple incarnations of the same OS will continue to do what we always have and select the best tool for the job.