I had one thought of a way that might be effective if implemented but I need to talk to out with Brian and Mike before I commit it to ‘paper’ since I may be missing something important. The idea came from a technique the virus writers themselves have used for several years now.

(Update: I was about to hit Publish and I thought of three ways to get around my idea so it belongs of the scrap heap.)

Here is Scott Charney’s statement (and you can read more at the link at the bottom).

“The [Environmental Protection Agency] comes out with second hand smoke and suddenly smoking is banned everywhere,” he said during a keynote at the RSA security conference in San Francisco. “You have a right to infect and give yourself illness. You don’t have the right to infect your neighbor. Computers are the same way.”

Charney is the latest to champion the idea that infected PC users should be put in their own rubber room, so the malware, spam, and other attacks they generate can’t harm others. The logistics of such a plan remain woefully unformed. While many say ISPs should monitor subscribers for infections, there’s considerable disagreement about how with providers should carry out and pay for such a system.

via Microsoft wants to put infected PCs in rubber room @ The Register.

Scott Charney

By the way, one thing I love about technology and the people involved:

Charney holds a law degree with honors from Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y., and bachelor degrees in History and English from the State University of New York in Binghamton.

When else in history would a English and History major be leading the “effort to help ensure secure, private and reliable computing experiences for everyone.”

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.

Some background: As any T-Mobile Sidekick user will tell you, for the past week they’ve been unable to get their e-mail or other data because of an outage at Danger, the company that (allegedly) manages the Sidekick database. On Saturday T-Mobile admitted what no Sidekick user wanted to hear: Danger had lost the data.

via Microsoft screwup puts T-Mobile users in Danger | Adventures in IT – InfoWorld.

There is a lot more to read at John Mac’s blog and at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/.

Spread of Conficker worm - by Gppande via Wikipedia

Today, Microsoft Corp. announced a partnership with technology industry leaders and academia to implement a coordinated, global response to the Conficker (aka Downadup) worm. Together with security researchers, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and operators within the Domain Name System, Microsoft coordinated a response designed to disable domains atargeted by Conficker. Microsoft also announced a $250,000 reward for information that results in the arrest and conviction of those responsible for illegally launching the Conficker malicious code on the Internet.

“As part of Microsoft’s ongoing security efforts, we constantly look for ways to use a diverse set of tools and develop methodologies to protect our customers,” said George Stathakopoulos, general manager of the Trustworthy Computing Group at Microsoft. “By combining our expertise with that of the broader community we can expand the boundaries of defense to better protect people worldwide.”

As cyberthreats have rapidly evolved, a greater level of industry coordination and new tactics for communication and threat mitigation are required. To optimize the multiple initiatives being employed across the security industry and within academia, Microsoft helped unify these broad efforts to implement a community-based defense to disrupt the spread of Conficker.

Along with Microsoft, organizations involved in this collaborative effort include ICANN, NeuStar, VeriSign, CNNIC, Afilias, Public Internet Registry, Global Domains International Inc., M1D Global, AOL, Symantec, F-Secure, ISC, researchers from Georgia Tech, the Shadowserver Foundation, Arbor Networks and Support Intelligence.

“The best way to defeat potential botnets like Conficker/Downadup is by the security and Domain Name System communities working together,” said Greg Rattray, chief Internet security advisor at ICANN. “ICANN represents a community that’s all about coordinating those kinds of efforts to keep the Internet globally secure and stable.”

“Microsoft’s approach combines technology innovation and effective cross- sector partnerships to help protect people from cybercriminals,” Stathakopoulos said. “We hope these efforts help to contain the threat posed by Conficker, as well as hold those who illegally launch malware accountable.”

More information about how to protect yourself from Conficker can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/conficker

I’ve installed the plugins in Ubuntu 8.04 and Firefox 3 and while I get a picture its more like a slideshow than a streaming video.  I don’t know if thats by design, or if its a problem.  The new player can only stream the 500Kbps stream so it may be a bandwidth thing right now.

I’d love to see how much of the wired (non-satellite) Internet capacity in Washington DC is in use today between 11:00am and 2:00pm.

Even if it does not play as well as one could hope, the folks behind this get an A for effort.

Obama Inauguration on Linux and PowerPC Macs! Plus codec details | Ben Waggoner

We kicked the project off this afternoon before the event, so pardon us if it’s a little rough. The only significant limitation is that the SL1 player can only do the 500 Kbps stream – lacking managed code, making a manifest XML parser in JavaScript didn’t seem like something we should start testing only nine hours before the event goes live.

But anyway, thanks to Joseph, Larry, Geoff, Rusty and especially Aaron at Novell for pulling this together so quickly and so well, and Mio at iStreamPlanet for making the last minute encoder tweaks to make it Silverlight 1.0 compatible. On the Microsoft side, Brian Goldfarb and Eric Schmidt did a great job making the call and making it happen. Just go to www.pic2009.org in the morning and the updated player should be available around 6 am EST (11 am GMT).

That something like this could come together on such short notice is a testament to the chops and passion of the Moonlight team and the great platform we’re both implementing. I’m glad we got this chance to demonstrate how serious we are about this collaboration (although I wouldn’t have minded starting a day earlier…).

Update: The Silverlight 1.0 compatible player is low live at:  http://www.pic2009.org/page/content/linuxplayer

Note that this player is only for Silverlight 1.0 and doesn’t work with Internet Explorer. The Silverlight 2.0 player for Windows or Intel Mac is at: http://www.pic2009.org/page/content/live

A couple days ago this came out over at TheInquirer.net:

Windows 7 is enough to kill Linux on the desktop

FOR THE PAST three years I have been a Linux fan-boy using Ubuntu most of the time and Windows XP when I needed to play games or run CS desktop lay out stuff.

In a bid to focus my bile on something other than Apple for a bit I decided to play with the new Windows 7 beta. I was disappointed. It was pretty good and, if I am right, could result in the move away from Voleware to Linux and OSX being stopped in in its tracks….

And then that was addressed on a ZDNet.com blog:

7 reasons why Windows 7 will not wreck Ubuntu

One of our competitors has a review of the Windows 7 beta which claims that desktop Linux is doomed — doomed!

Not exactly. Not even approximately.

First let’s understand what 7’s target is. It’s not so much desktop Linux as a particular Linux distro — Ubuntu — that targets the desktop…

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.

If I want to use Dreamweaver, I load a Windows XP virtual machine on my Ubuntu Desktop and use it since, in my opinion, XP is the best platform for using Dreamweaver for me – personally.  If I could run OSX in a VM and use Dreamweaver there, my opinion could change.

If I was constrained through my employer to only use Windows as my primary desktop, I would stll have Ubuntu running in a virtual machine for those times when I need a robust shell like bash to do what needs to be done.

With current PC’s shipping with lots of RAM and big hard drives there is no longer any good reason to limit yourself to a single operating system.

In my work as an IT professional I have been seeing this for some time.  Microsoft is not the ubiquitous presence it used to be.  Windows operating systems have their place and will be around for a long time, however, more and more IT departments, faced with tight budgets, are looking at more open source and free software solutions.  When I started in my current position we had seven Windows 2000 servers handling newsletters and other mailings.  I was able to convert two of them to Ubuntu Linux servers online with Postfix.   Those two servers now do the work of the seven and they do it better and faster. 

That was just one example of a free software solution replacing a proprietary Microsoft solution.  There are more alternatives every month.  When Microsoft embraces the idea of "forced obsolescence" the way it has with Vista they are bound to take a hit in people’s opinions.  There is a reason places like Tiger Direct are doing a brisk trade in older models of PC’s and refurbished units that run Windows XP Home or Pro.

The company where I work has purchased fifteen desktop computers with Windows XP Professional since December of 2007.   

When the alternative either something like this: Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz, 512MB RAM, 40GB HDD, DVDRW, 10/100 LAN, Windows XP Professional for $249.99 or a Vista Business machine that will provide the same work experience for easily twice the price its easy to see why Microsoft is not making anyone jump for joy. 

I know I write about Linux a lot, and some people know that if Linux were not an option I would be a Mac user.  But I also try not to sound like a knee jerk MS/Windows basher.    As you can see from my Yahoo! Answers history, I spend a lot of time helping Windows users and I realize that Windows is the best solution for many people and many businesses.  There are things I like about Microsoft products, but most of the them have existed since Windows XP was released over half a decade ago and the rest came with Office 2003 five years ago.  Unless Microsoft starts getting more creative and comes up with new and innovative features that people can’t find in Linux or OSX, their decline is sure to continue.

From Study sees Microsoft brand in sharp decline

According to the CoreBrand Power 100 2007 study, which polled about 12,000 U.S. business decision-makers, Microsoft dropped from number 12 in the ranking of the most powerful U.S. company brands in 2004 to number 59 last year. In 1996, the company ranked number 1 in brand power among 1,200 top companies in about 50 industries, said James Gregory, CEO of CoreBrand.

CoreBrand measures brand power using four criteria. It first rates the familiarity of a company’s brand. Once a company has a certain level of familiarity, they are ranked according to three "attributes of favorability": overall reputation, perception of management and investment potential, Gregory said. While Microsoft’s brand is still eminently recognizable, the company is declining in all three favorable attributes, he said.

Gregory said that a decline in and of itself is not indicative that a company is losing its mindshare or reputation among customers. However, what’s significant in Microsoft’s case is that the decline has been consistent over a number of years, and has plunged dramatically in a brief time.