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Re:The new battle ground by drsmithy · 2009-01-14 04:02 · Score: 1 · on Interview With an Adware Author

Trying disabling Symantec Anti-virus on an XP system without a reboot, for example, and then doing a reinstall of it remotely. In the field, I saw failure rates of about 6% for SAV10. On a hundred thousand systems, let's just say I was not happy on that deployment! Killing malware is even more risky.

This is particularly poor example, however, since AV software is notorious for messing in parts of the system that it shouldn't be, as a hangover from the way it had been developed in earlier (DOS-based) versions of Windows. The blame there lies solely with the AV developers, who refused to improve their techniques and code to take advantage of the "proper" ways of doing things in NT-based Windows.

Heck, even when Microsoft (finally) closed the door a bit on their shennanigans with Vista, they screamed and bellowed and threatened lawsuits just so they wouldn't have to go back and fix up their decade-old broken design and code to do things properly.

If you ask me, Microsoft is complicit in allowing malware to exist because they are unwilling to modernize Windows.

Please define "modernise" in this context. By any objective measure, Windows is one of the most 'modern' OSes available.

They need to start over from scratch on their codebase and have a good hard think about what those APIs and interfaces are going to look like and then stick to it.

There is almost never any reason good enough to 'start over from scratch', and there definitely isn't in this instance.

Or at the very least, they could start by documenting these interfaces and releasing some code so we can be more confident that our hooks into their black-boxed APIs won't tear the operating system's heart out...

Errr, MSDN ring any bells ?

Re:What about Microsoft? by jesterzog · 2009-01-13 20:45 · Score: 1 · on FOSS Development As Economic Stimulus

For what it's worth, both Adobe[1] and Microsoft[2] work on a variety of Open Source projects (for some definition of open source), which I'm sure they could convince the relevant people are worthy of funding under whatever scheme might be proposed. And if they get government money to fund their open source labs, I guess they can potentially divert more of their open source lab money into closed source projects.

All of this would depend upon the terms of which a grant is given out, though, and none of the detail has really been specified here. If something like this ever happened, don't be surprised if, by the end of it, there were clauses to either channel most of the money to corporates through some kind of absurd requirements, or to make sure that nothing being funded would directly hurt corporates.

Re:Nokia did that already by dhavleak · 2009-01-13 11:42 · Score: 1 · on Microsoft Tag, Smartphone-Scannable Barcodes

Just re-read your post and I think you're making a few mistakes.

Actually the data is 8x as dense in that example, whoever wrote the page is not doing their geometry right... Plus in the above comparison they ignored the white line which is another pixel of height.

For the scale of the drawing, the data is merely 4x density in the MS Tag. Each triangle takes half the area of each square at that scale. To give you the final picture - cut off the right half of the right-most triangle and move it across all the way to the left. Fit it into the white space like a puzzle piece. You'll see that 1-byte of data will take 2 squares in the MS Tag, where 1-byte of data took 8 squares in the QR code. 2 squares : 8 squares = 4x data density. btw: it's important to note that the scale used in this drawing is not what's necessarily used in practice. Also, note the slim white line at the top and bottom of the triangles -- they have indeed allowed for the white line.

However their second example comparing the actual QR code to their code, for some reason (probably honesty) prints the QR code so small that each Microsoft triangle is approximately the size of a 3x3 rectangle of QR code.

This is realistic. Remember what I said above about the first drawing not being done to scale. I'll come back to it again.

Also the QR code example is 4x the size of any real ones I ever saw printed in a paper.

That's okay -- the bigger the better. Makes it easier on the camera. You can scan it better from a distance as well. Imagine how big the code would have to be if you needed to scan it from a Billboard. All you have to do is move your camera back a bit.

The biggest dishonesty is they they are comparing a very long URL with a Microsoft number being looked up on their servers.

I think you're mistaking the redirecting service for the data encoded in the tag -- it isn't. The tag just contains an id that's being handed to it. The service sees that and knows that it has to go to http://www.microsoft.com/tag/. For the QR and Datamatrix codes this step isn't needed -- they should be configured to go to http://www.microsoft.com/tag/ directly.

I do think it is somewhat dishonest to try to claim that their color is what makes it so tiny, when in fact it is that it is storing very little data.

Actually, they are claiming exactly what you said -- that they have to store very little data in their tag. That's why they're able to make it so small. That's also one of the reasons pattern recognition works so much better for them.

Also artificially inflating the size of the QR code is not very honest as well.

Size makes it easier for the camera to get a good image, to resolve the black and white squares easily, etc.

keeping your information on Microsoft's servers in order to use this does not sound really like something everybody will want.

Judging from the responses here, clearly it isnt.