ICROSOFT have announced officially their intent to enter the anti-virus market a couple of months ago. They now unveil a service called OneCare (homonym of “wanker”) Live, which is paid for annually. In simple words, the customer gets protection for the operating system’s own flaws and pays $50 per year for the service from no-one but the O/S vendor. As reported by CNN:

Microsoft Corp. said on Tuesday it plans to launch a new computer security service in June, marking the world’s biggest software maker’s entry into the fast-growing consumer anti-virus market.

Microsoft’s Windows OneCare Live, a subscription-based, self-updating service, will push the software giant into competition with consumer security providers Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc.

The article neglects to mention the controversy that is associated with this anti-competitive strategy. Microsoft exploits a monoploy in the desktop market and gives itself motives to create flaws intentionally, then offer the cure for a high cost. I believe Symantec filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft over a month ago.

Google and Firefox are everywhere nowadays

Firefox news:

• Firefox downloads hit the 150-million mark
• Firefox developer takes Internet Explorer 7 (beta 2) for a spin

Google news:

• BMW banned by Google
• Dell-Google partnership

Computer maker Dell said Jan. 30 it has quietly begun testing a new partnership with Internet search provider Google.

Related item: Google Reward for Firefox Downloads

Google continue to be the prime target of hoaxes which attract media attention in vain. Example of recent false publications:

• Opera/Gopera – Google for Web browser domination?
• Napster+Google – Google goes peer-to-peer?
• Goobuntu Linux – Google to enter the operating systems market?
• Low-cost PC – Google to sell electronics?

All of the above are recently-falsified and openly-denied rumours. Many of these rumours appear to incite hatred toward a company that is cautious about destroying its profile and has maintained a relatively ethical historical record. Are they a victim of their own success or perhaps a tool in the hands of investment sharks?

HAT if we ever reached a state where we had full ‘O/S freedom of choice’? What if we were endowed freedom as to which operating system got used on any machine whenever booting?

It wasn’t too long ago that Ubuntu made a version of Linux which is compatible with PowerPC, which made Ubuntu runnable on older (and otherwise legacy) Macs. It also wasn’t too long ago that Mac unveiled their Intel-based Macs, which makes them accessible to both Linux and Windows, or various different versions of Windows, or different Linux distributions. This also caters for seamless purposeless separation into several partitions, provided some partitioning software.

Some time in the past, shortly after Apple had announced their move to Intel chips, people ran Mac OS X on standard (non-Apple) hardware, which was not as expensive as that which is typically provided by Apple Computers. It is now reported that a certain proportion of all Mac users might opt to dual-boot their Macs. This way, they can run Windows, as well as the native operating system in tandem.

Dual-partition and dual-boot hard-drives have become rather common in recent years, predominantly owing to progressive and staged Linux migrations. It is probably only a matter of time until triple-boot machines become widespread. Such machines would run Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. It is an interesting vision. Legally, the three could only be run on Apple hardware, but in practice, who can tell?

Michael Dell once offered Steve Jobs to port Mac OS X and have it run on Dell hardware. Is the vision of Mac OS on potentially any computer (also legally so) nearing a reality?

AKING of efficient algorithms and use of more compact data representations have a cost in terms of complexity. They lead to greater coding and programming time, yet there is plenty to be gained.

Broad-scale example: writing of a good search algorithm makes it hard to understand, let alone algorithms that discriminate data. There is a reason why the Web was made available and practical throughout its decade-long extension.

One would say that the Web has been open. Its pertinent objects were also broken down rationally. It was also because not all pages and graphics are bitmaps, but instead the Web exploits wavelets that are based on mathematics or defined a palette and then use some conventions to refer to it.

Moreover, rather than poster-like Web sites, where everything is hard-coded, there emerged a language called (X)HTML which is concise, descriptive, and unambiguous. There are protocols which define how it should be rendered so a description — a code that is — makes it laborious to implement. Construction of pages becomes arguably easier and the end product much more concise, in terms of its size. Versatility (or flexibility) is yet another matter.

The take-home message: complexity in implementation or even specification takes its toll, but entails true benefits. ‘Lazy’ programming leads to inefficiency, whereas tactful complexity pays off in the long run.

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

OW can Microsoft ever permit the existence of something interoperable? To a company so aggressive, interoperability is the very face of evil. It is a threat. What it comes down to is the equivalent of a destructive competition, which is counter-productive to humanity. It portrays the core danger of monopolies, whose power and scale can deter any resistance attempts. It embodies the scenario where people take risks only to avoid what is adverse to ideaology — steering away from the ‘norm’. Windows has become a norm. Its avoidance symbolises a state of social outcasting, at least in people’s perception.

Whether it was Java, or C, or even OpenGL, such technologies had to be ‘extinguished’, at least in accordance with Microsoft’s agenda. Even Adobe’s Flash (Macromedia takeover) and the PDF format are bound to be replaced according to the Microsoft Grand Plan. What about DivX and WMV? MP3 and WMA? The formats Microsoft have proposed are not only inferior in terms of performance, but also they are proprietary.

Will that trend ever stop? To critical IT professionals the current state-of-affair is like a pungent knife in an open sore. To many others, this entire manipulation from up above is misunderstood and thus perceived as innocent. The ‘cattle effect’ is to be attributed for some inertia, not to mention pre-installed software.

On to page 2

ERE I am to report about yet another critical Windows bug, which many others have blogged about already. This DLL-based exploit has floated about for quite a while. It has now grown tremendously in terms of its scale though.

The victimised user can be infected merely by opening an E-mail message with a graphics files embedded. Older versions of Outlook, for example, have no protection against that. A short visit to a Web site can lead to a malicious program installed on Windows workstations. This flaw was described can be ‘severe’ and it comes at a rather sensitive time of the year. This whole situation relates to a post of mine from yesterday.

As Matt Cutts put it:

…new exploit of the Windows WMF graphics rendering engine that applies to Windows versions from 98 to XP. This is a pretty nasty exploit… You’ll lose some thumbnail previews and such, but if you want to be safe until a patch is available, click Start->Run and then type “regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll” to disable the vulnerable DLL.

Older related items:

• Windows Today Worse Than Windows in 2001
• Microsoft and Windows Zombies
• Yet Another Windows Patch
• Phishing Vulnerability
• 3 More Critical Flaws in Windows
• Internet Explorer Trojan