Let's hope the victims got help to clean up and secure their systems. Preferably by moving them to Linux and OS X of course, or they will soon be p0wned again.
Come to think about it, that'd be a pretty good prospect list for a business to have...
One of the things one should consider when evaluation Microsoft's true openness is the company's willingness to support their own technologies on competing plattforms. More than often - virtuall allways in the public debate, Microsoft seem to forget that they actually do supply products for another operating system: Mac OS X, and one metric for testing their willingness to share their own technologies outside of Windows is to take a closer look at their Mac products. For instance both Microsoft Messenger and Microsoft Windows Media Player significantly lacks in functionality and features compared to their Window versions.
Microsoft states in their response letter to MA:
...Microsoft has been deeply committed to supporting XML within Microsoft Office for a number of years and continues to work hard with many governments around the world toward these goals.
In the case of XML support in Microsoft Office:mac 2004, only Excel supports the MS XML format, where support for XML formatted Word 2003 documents produced on Windows are completely lacking. It is also not possible to write XML documents from Word on the Mac. I blogged an article earlier this fall that explains in more detail how Microsoft's XML support is only Windows deep and what they have stated on this in relation to Office 12 for Mac OS X. Repeated questions to Microsoft on the fact that this "openness" is only Windows deep remains unanswered.
I have also posted a question to Microsoft's latest blog on the ability to save as XPS format in the upcoming Office 12 for Mac -- a question that remains unanswered.
Microsoft has been very active on Norwegian discussion boards lately where Microsoft employees have been operating under nicks posing to be normal discussion partipants rallying against the OpenDocument formats and promoting the openness of the MS XML formats well knowing that the country in Europe closest to follow follow Massachussetts is Norway. This following a public hearing where the government wants to standardize on open document formats in all communication with, and within the public sector, in addition to promote the use of open source code. Microsoft's response to this has been surprisingly vague compared to the response to the Commonwealth of Massachussetts.
I think the issues around open document formats used by governments and in the public sector is too important that lawmakers should be discouraged because of accessibility issues. Such issues can and will be fixed - there is no technical reason why for instance OpenOffice can't provide the same functionality for these users as do MS office. The same goes for support of the OASIS OpenDocument format in applications spesifically crafted for these users. It should not be more difficult to parse these documents than.DOC files.
There are also a number or countries this side of the pond following Massachussetts very closesly, and IBM last week invited the new Norwegian government to follow Massachussetts in standardizing on OpenDocument in the public sector.
Microsoft has also been very active on Norwegian discussion boards lately where Microsoft employees have been operating under nicks posing to be normal discussion partipants rallying against the OpenDocument formats and promoting the openness of the MS XML formats. Repeated questions to Microsoft on the fact that this "openness" is only Windows deep remains unanswered. Microsoft's own Office:mac 2004 is unable to read the Word XML document formats produced by Word 2003 on Windows.
Obviously you won't find this in any Apple corporate presentations, but pr0n - pornography on the video iPod will help make it a success.
Experiences from countries with 3G cell networks show that a substantial portion of the additional bandwidth available to subscribers is consumed for sex or adult related content. With an efficient distribution and sync mechanism like RSS in the form of podcasting, or should we say pr0ncasting, I am sure the video iPod in current and future incarnations will be a success.
This is the first time I can remember to have gotten "unable to connect" and "network error" messages from Apple's server. And this just because of an article on Slashdot on iPod in cars!
If Microsoft starts charging for antivirus software, they may under various legislation be seen to ship a defect product that can only be fixed by making an additional purchase of a Microsoft product. This will open up the field for numerous lawsuits including class action in those countries that have it in their legislation.
The thing is that if Microsoft knowingly ships a product with open attack-vectors, and these can only be fixed by applying another product from Microsoft for which there is an additional charge, I am sure it can be argued under various legislation that they have shipped a defect product and you are entitled to a replacement product without the defects and/or a compensation.
Microsoft shipping an anti-virus product for their own operating system is significantly different from anti-virus firms shipping such products for Windows. Since Microsoft is 100% responsible for the design and production of their operating systems and applications, and have sufficient knowledge to produce a product to prevent attacks from viruses and spyware targeting their operating environment, they are also 100% capable of clearing those attack-verctors from their own products either by re-design or re-writing the software being attacked.
So the solution, both from a legislative and technical point of view, is to fix the original defect products, hence there will be no need for the second product and no business can be made from it.
If Microsoft knowingly ships a product with open attack-vectors, and these can only be fixed by applying another product from Microsoft for which there is an additional charge, I am sure it can be argued under various legislation that they have shipped a defect product and you are entitled to a replacement and/or compensation.
So the solution, from a legislative point of view, is to fix the original defect product, hence there will be no need for the second product and no business can be made from it.
If Microsoft starts charging for antivirus software, they may under various legislation be seen to ship a defect product that can only be fixed by making an additional purchase. This will open up the field for numerous lawsuits including class action in those countries that have it in their legislation.
However, bundling it for free, they should be in the clear.
They'll probably make some other announcement sufficiently big to call for a special event, whereas the main purpose is to slip new hardware into the market without leaving Intel with too much egg on their face.
Yeah, I'd say going dual-core across the entire stationary product line would warrant a special event. Add to that a refresh of the PowerBooks.
Processor upgrades more likely
on
Video iPod Oct 12?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I wrote yesterday that processor upgrades are also very likely for this event for two reasons:
IBM will launch new hardware on October 14 with the multi-core Power5+ processor. Such announcements tend to have a connection - particularly since it would be "new" processors for both IBM and Apple in their products
The PowerMac, iMac, Xserve and Powerbooks are long overdue for a processor upgrade, and needs more performace to live through to the Intel 64-bit products in 2nd half of 2006.
They hardly have to write any code at all; they can get what is needed from a 3rd party that already supports PDF output on Windows. They can manage this at the printer-driver level where Office "prints" to a PDF file on disk. We're not talking about decoding PDF for opening in Office, and even if that is the case, there is code out there they can buy and integrate easily.
Nope, this has everything to do with Massachusetts and other governments selecting PDF, and where no support would disqualify them from getting on the bidders list.
Coincidence that this announcement comes a few days after Massachusetts goes for PDF as one of the approved formats to use in government? Methinks not...
haha, we love America here at the border of the old USSR;-)
I must admit that I have actually liked and used MS Office ever since the day I picked up Excel 1.0 for the Mac back in 1985. That software even changed my career.
But I have increasingly found the proliferation of the closed formats of MS Office to become unaccpetable - particularly from the standpoint of a sovereign state or country. Up to the point where I decided to work actively for a change and started my blog about it.
Well, first of all, they have the source code both for MS Office, OpenOffice and the format spesification for the OpenDocument format, so there should not be any massive surprises there.
Secondly, OpenOffice has to a large extent done the job for them. The convertion code is in the open source code for OpenOffice. Add to that the work that they also have done for XML support in Office 12.
Finally, if there were technical obstacles, Microsoft is free to contribute to the OpenDocument format and other sourcecode, much in the same way that Apple did with WebKit.
Sure, and I think this is one of the few exceptions. But then I can equally point you to my article Microsoft XML Support is only Win-Deep which shows how bad Microsoft's support for MS XML is in their own product Office:mac 2004. And no-one seriously use TextEdit for business word-processing.
It is not like Microsoft don't have the source-code to support OpenDocument formats, yeah?
All this oposition from Microsoft is only play for the gallery. Fact is that it would be dead easy for them to wite a filter or plug-in to MS Office that could read or write files in the OpenDocument formats.
Such a move would of course also invalidate many of the claims and concerns about replacing software, including the ones voiced from a disabilites point of view.
Of course there will be massive costs in converting documents from older Win-Word formats to OpenDocument, but Microsoft is planning on slapping this cost on businesses and states anyway since they will be changing the default fileformats in Office 12 to MS XML.... Which of course all current software out there is equally incompatible with as the OpenDocument format.
I think that radical measures should be used, and an open competition by the EU is one means of facilitating that. The outcome would be an open format spesification that anyone could implement regardless of operating system. A format -- or rather a set of formats being able to handle media, spreadsheets, drawings, presentations and so on....and because government has selected these formats as mandatory, they will become widespread very fast because everyone has to communicate with government. That will grow the ecosystem very fast and basically all developers will benefit from it.
I also think we have to remember that for any open format selected, it will be dead easy for Microsoft to write filters or plug-ins that read and write the open formats.
I am not sure that going straight for OpenDocument is such a good idea. For any government.
The reason being that, and here I give Microsoft some credit to their critizism, the format is still immature in supporting spreadsheets and media-rich documents. Further, the software ecosystem around OpenDocument is very limited, and is likely to be so for quite a while.
OpenOffice for instance does little for Mac users and StarOffice does nothing, and you are in essence making it even more difficult for the second largest desktop to compete in a business environment. There is no way Apple can openly support OpenDocument right now -- Microsoft would kill Office:mac spot on.
This debate is going on in Norway too right now, but the effects will be even more profound than the Massachusetts case, because the government wants to mandate a format that will be used in any communication between the public sector, businesses and citizens.
What I think is needed, and what I have proposed to the Norwegian Government, is that the government, together with the EU, hold a public competition where anyone can submit their contributions to an open document format. This also gives Microsoft an option to contribute. However, the stakes are also very high for Microsoft, because the winning format will be made mandatory for use throughout the public sector of the EU.
I have written many articles on this in my blog under the Agenda subsection. Here one can also find the public hearing documents for the Norwegian government case.
Well, if this becomes a real threath to components in WebSphere, there is nothing keeping IBM from packaging JBoss into their offerings. IBM would still be in a heck of a lot better position to offer both servers for it to run on, and integration services than most other companies.
The beauty of open source is that Microsoft cannot remove competition from F/OSS by buying the technology - there is nothing to buy. The source code is out there in the public domain. So they are forced to compete.
This is what's happening; Microsoft finally beginning to feel some pain.
In the response letter from Microsoft written by General Manager Alan Yates to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts decision to standardize on the OASIS OpenDocument format in addition to PDF, Microsoft are making claims both to the openness of the company's own Office XML formats, and that they are becoming widely adopted in Microsoft's products, and therefore argues that Microsoft Office qualifies as a product supporting open standards.
This "openness" goes only Win-deep in that Microsoft is not even willing to extend its XML support to the company's own Mac product line, where Office:mac 2004 only has fragments of the XML support found in Office 2003. The company also cites lacking XML support in OS X Panther (10.3) as the reason why Office 12 on the Mac will be released significantly later than Office 12 on Windows.
This information is missing entirely in the response from Microsoft to the state of Massachusetts, and is another in a series of misinformation and not representing the full extent of Microsoft's support, or rather lack thereof, for standards and openness. The full story goes here
In the response letter from Microsoft written by General Manager Alan Yates to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts decision to standardize on the OASIS OpenDocument format in addition to PDF, Microsoft are making claims both to the openness of the company's own Office XML formats, and that they are becoming widely adopted in Microsoft's products, and therefore argues that Microsoft Office qualifies as a product supporting open standards.
This "openness" goes only Win-deep in that Microsoft is not even willing to extend its XML support to the company's own Mac product line, where Office:mac 2004 only has fragments of the XML support found in Office 2003. The company also cites lacking XML support in OS X Panther (10.3) as the reason why Office 12 on the Mac will be released significantly later than Office 12 on Windows.
This information is missing entirely in the response from Microsoft to the state of Massachusetts, and is another in a series of misinformation like about KOffice and not representing the full extent of Microsoft's support, or rather lack thereof, for standards and openness. The full story goes here
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you could start KDE ;-)
Darwinport now installs KDE 3.4.1, with the command port install kdebase3.
I can crack my harddrive in a split second by using a sledge hammer.
Let's hope the victims got help to clean up and secure their systems. Preferably by moving them to Linux and OS X of course, or they will soon be p0wned again.
Come to think about it, that'd be a pretty good prospect list for a business to have...
One of the things one should consider when evaluation Microsoft's true openness is the company's willingness to support their own technologies on competing plattforms. More than often - virtuall allways in the public debate, Microsoft seem to forget that they actually do supply products for another operating system: Mac OS X, and one metric for testing their willingness to share their own technologies outside of Windows is to take a closer look at their Mac products. For instance both Microsoft Messenger and Microsoft Windows Media Player significantly lacks in functionality and features compared to their Window versions.
Microsoft states in their response letter to MA:
In the case of XML support in Microsoft Office:mac 2004, only Excel supports the MS XML format, where support for XML formatted Word 2003 documents produced on Windows are completely lacking. It is also not possible to write XML documents from Word on the Mac. I blogged an article earlier this fall that explains in more detail how Microsoft's XML support is only Windows deep and what they have stated on this in relation to Office 12 for Mac OS X. Repeated questions to Microsoft on the fact that this "openness" is only Windows deep remains unanswered.
I have also posted a question to Microsoft's latest blog on the ability to save as XPS format in the upcoming Office 12 for Mac -- a question that remains unanswered.
Microsoft has been very active on Norwegian discussion boards lately where Microsoft employees have been operating under nicks posing to be normal discussion partipants rallying against the OpenDocument formats and promoting the openness of the MS XML formats well knowing that the country in Europe closest to follow follow Massachussetts is Norway. This following a public hearing where the government wants to standardize on open document formats in all communication with, and within the public sector, in addition to promote the use of open source code. Microsoft's response to this has been surprisingly vague compared to the response to the Commonwealth of Massachussetts.
I think the issues around open document formats used by governments and in the public sector is too important that lawmakers should be discouraged because of accessibility issues. Such issues can and will be fixed - there is no technical reason why for instance OpenOffice can't provide the same functionality for these users as do MS office. The same goes for support of the OASIS OpenDocument format in applications spesifically crafted for these users. It should not be more difficult to parse these documents than .DOC files.
There are also a number or countries this side of the pond following Massachussetts very closesly, and IBM last week invited the new Norwegian government to follow Massachussetts in standardizing on OpenDocument in the public sector.
Microsoft has also been very active on Norwegian discussion boards lately where Microsoft employees have been operating under nicks posing to be normal discussion partipants rallying against the OpenDocument formats and promoting the openness of the MS XML formats. Repeated questions to Microsoft on the fact that this "openness" is only Windows deep remains unanswered. Microsoft's own Office:mac 2004 is unable to read the Word XML document formats produced by Word 2003 on Windows.
Obviously you won't find this in any Apple corporate presentations, but pr0n - pornography on the video iPod will help make it a success.
Experiences from countries with 3G cell networks show that a substantial portion of the additional bandwidth available to subscribers is consumed for sex or adult related content. With an efficient distribution and sync mechanism like RSS in the form of podcasting, or should we say pr0ncasting, I am sure the video iPod in current and future incarnations will be a success.
This is the first time I can remember to have gotten "unable to connect" and "network error" messages from Apple's server. And this just because of an article on Slashdot on iPod in cars!
I agree with you on malware particularly since there often is a social engineering aspect to getting it installed on a user's computer.
If Microsoft starts charging for antivirus software, they may under various legislation be seen to ship a defect product that can only be fixed by making an additional purchase of a Microsoft product. This will open up the field for numerous lawsuits including class action in those countries that have it in their legislation.
The thing is that if Microsoft knowingly ships a product with open attack-vectors, and these can only be fixed by applying another product from Microsoft for which there is an additional charge, I am sure it can be argued under various legislation that they have shipped a defect product and you are entitled to a replacement product without the defects and/or a compensation.
Microsoft shipping an anti-virus product for their own operating system is significantly different from anti-virus firms shipping such products for Windows. Since Microsoft is 100% responsible for the design and production of their operating systems and applications, and have sufficient knowledge to produce a product to prevent attacks from viruses and spyware targeting their operating environment, they are also 100% capable of clearing those attack-verctors from their own products either by re-design or re-writing the software being attacked.
So the solution, both from a legislative and technical point of view, is to fix the original defect products, hence there will be no need for the second product and no business can be made from it.
If Microsoft knowingly ships a product with open attack-vectors, and these can only be fixed by applying another product from Microsoft for which there is an additional charge, I am sure it can be argued under various legislation that they have shipped a defect product and you are entitled to a replacement and/or compensation.
So the solution, from a legislative point of view, is to fix the original defect product, hence there will be no need for the second product and no business can be made from it.
If Microsoft starts charging for antivirus software, they may under various legislation be seen to ship a defect product that can only be fixed by making an additional purchase. This will open up the field for numerous lawsuits including class action in those countries that have it in their legislation.
However, bundling it for free, they should be in the clear.
They'll probably make some other announcement sufficiently big to call for a special event, whereas the main purpose is to slip new hardware into the market without leaving Intel with too much egg on their face.
Yeah, I'd say going dual-core across the entire stationary product line would warrant a special event. Add to that a refresh of the PowerBooks.
I wrote yesterday that processor upgrades are also very likely for this event for two reasons:
They hardly have to write any code at all; they can get what is needed from a 3rd party that already supports PDF output on Windows. They can manage this at the printer-driver level where Office "prints" to a PDF file on disk. We're not talking about decoding PDF for opening in Office, and even if that is the case, there is code out there they can buy and integrate easily.
Nope, this has everything to do with Massachusetts and other governments selecting PDF, and where no support would disqualify them from getting on the bidders list.
Coincidence that this announcement comes a few days after Massachusetts goes for PDF as one of the approved formats to use in government? Methinks not...
haha, we love America here at the border of the old USSR ;-)
I must admit that I have actually liked and used MS Office ever since the day I picked up Excel 1.0 for the Mac back in 1985. That software even changed my career.
But I have increasingly found the proliferation of the closed formats of MS Office to become unaccpetable - particularly from the standpoint of a sovereign state or country. Up to the point where I decided to work actively for a change and started my blog about it.
Well, first of all, they have the source code both for MS Office, OpenOffice and the format spesification for the OpenDocument format, so there should not be any massive surprises there.
Secondly, OpenOffice has to a large extent done the job for them. The convertion code is in the open source code for OpenOffice. Add to that the work that they also have done for XML support in Office 12.
Finally, if there were technical obstacles, Microsoft is free to contribute to the OpenDocument format and other sourcecode, much in the same way that Apple did with WebKit.
Sure, and I think this is one of the few exceptions. But then I can equally point you to my article Microsoft XML Support is only Win-Deep which shows how bad Microsoft's support for MS XML is in their own product Office:mac 2004. And no-one seriously use TextEdit for business word-processing.
It is not like Microsoft don't have the source-code to support OpenDocument formats, yeah?
All this oposition from Microsoft is only play for the gallery. Fact is that it would be dead easy for them to wite a filter or plug-in to MS Office that could read or write files in the OpenDocument formats.
... Which of course all current software out there is equally incompatible with as the OpenDocument format.
Such a move would of course also invalidate many of the claims and concerns about replacing software, including the ones voiced from a disabilites point of view.
Of course there will be massive costs in converting documents from older Win-Word formats to OpenDocument, but Microsoft is planning on slapping this cost on businesses and states anyway since they will be changing the default fileformats in Office 12 to MS XML.
Right, ...encouragement is not enough.
...and because government has selected these formats as mandatory, they will become widespread very fast because everyone has to communicate with government. That will grow the ecosystem very fast and basically all developers will benefit from it.
I think that radical measures should be used, and an open competition by the EU is one means of facilitating that. The outcome would be an open format spesification that anyone could implement regardless of operating system. A format -- or rather a set of formats being able to handle media, spreadsheets, drawings, presentations and so on.
I also think we have to remember that for any open format selected, it will be dead easy for Microsoft to write filters or plug-ins that read and write the open formats.
I am not sure that going straight for OpenDocument is such a good idea. For any government.
The reason being that, and here I give Microsoft some credit to their critizism, the format is still immature in supporting spreadsheets and media-rich documents. Further, the software ecosystem around OpenDocument is very limited, and is likely to be so for quite a while.
OpenOffice for instance does little for Mac users and StarOffice does nothing, and you are in essence making it even more difficult for the second largest desktop to compete in a business environment. There is no way Apple can openly support OpenDocument right now -- Microsoft would kill Office:mac spot on.
This debate is going on in Norway too right now, but the effects will be even more profound than the Massachusetts case, because the government wants to mandate a format that will be used in any communication between the public sector, businesses and citizens.
What I think is needed, and what I have proposed to the Norwegian Government, is that the government, together with the EU, hold a public competition where anyone can submit their contributions to an open document format. This also gives Microsoft an option to contribute. However, the stakes are also very high for Microsoft, because the winning format will be made mandatory for use throughout the public sector of the EU.
I have written many articles on this in my blog under the Agenda subsection. Here one can also find the public hearing documents for the Norwegian government case.
Well, if this becomes a real threath to components in WebSphere, there is nothing keeping IBM from packaging JBoss into their offerings. IBM would still be in a heck of a lot better position to offer both servers for it to run on, and integration services than most other companies.
The beauty of open source is that Microsoft cannot remove competition from F/OSS by buying the technology - there is nothing to buy. The source code is out there in the public domain. So they are forced to compete.
This is what's happening; Microsoft finally beginning to feel some pain.
In the response letter from Microsoft written by General Manager Alan Yates to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts decision to standardize on the OASIS OpenDocument format in addition to PDF, Microsoft are making claims both to the openness of the company's own Office XML formats, and that they are becoming widely adopted in Microsoft's products, and therefore argues that Microsoft Office qualifies as a product supporting open standards.
This "openness" goes only Win-deep in that Microsoft is not even willing to extend its XML support to the company's own Mac product line, where Office:mac 2004 only has fragments of the XML support found in Office 2003. The company also cites lacking XML support in OS X Panther (10.3) as the reason why Office 12 on the Mac will be released significantly later than Office 12 on Windows.
This information is missing entirely in the response from Microsoft to the state of Massachusetts, and is another in a series of misinformation and not representing the full extent of Microsoft's support, or rather lack thereof, for standards and openness. The full story goes here
In the response letter from Microsoft written by General Manager Alan Yates to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts decision to standardize on the OASIS OpenDocument format in addition to PDF, Microsoft are making claims both to the openness of the company's own Office XML formats, and that they are becoming widely adopted in Microsoft's products, and therefore argues that Microsoft Office qualifies as a product supporting open standards.
This "openness" goes only Win-deep in that Microsoft is not even willing to extend its XML support to the company's own Mac product line, where Office:mac 2004 only has fragments of the XML support found in Office 2003. The company also cites lacking XML support in OS X Panther (10.3) as the reason why Office 12 on the Mac will be released significantly later than Office 12 on Windows.
This information is missing entirely in the response from Microsoft to the state of Massachusetts, and is another in a series of misinformation like about KOffice and not representing the full extent of Microsoft's support, or rather lack thereof, for standards and openness. The full story goes here