As information is offered for sale, negotiation
by telephone can seal such transactions

ROM ZDNet comes as item that speaks of yet another odd item ‘on sale’. The article states: “An online auction of a “brand new vulnerability” in Microsoft Excel had reached about $60 when eBay pulled the item late Thursday. A seller using the name “fearwall” started the auction Wednesday evening at 1 cent. It was up to $56 on Thursday afternoon with 21 bids placed, and eBay quashed the auction soon after that.”

Other strange items which I can recall eBay boasting: chewing gums that have been sput out by celebrities, fake love letters, and potato chips.

A single slide from my talk on data recovery (XHTML)

Below is a snippet from an amusing BBC article.

One incident involved a dog that used a USB flash drive as a chew toy and almost ate all its owner’s data.

[...]

But top of the list is an old laptop containing key company data that was found filled with cockroach corpses.

It seems as though computer disasters and Darwin awards are becoming a golden source of joy to the computer literate. This could leverage tentions. People should never be humiliated for being unfamiliar with technology, but then again, this is a blog…

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The clock ticks for Microsoft while their competition evolves

AKERS of Windows are expected to ship its next version in line with their promises. Release dates get postponed time after time while immature products develop and skip the conventional testing cycle. Having had to re-build Windows Vista from scratch, this becomes worrisome. More worrisome if the fact that a million users migrated from Windows to Apple Mac last year alone. With a flow of critical, and yet unpatched flaws, one wonders: why has Microsoft not fixed them all?

Almost 4 years after the launch of Trustworthy Computing, I found myself wondering why am I staying up till 4:00 AM to deliver an emergency set of instructions (Home and Enterprise) to my readers because Microsoft felt it unnecessary to patch a flaw six months ago that was originally low risk but mutated in to something extremely dangerous.

Timely link: Novell: Vista to Drive User to Linux