Moores Law

BBC News: I share, you rip off, they pirate
This editorial at the BBC calls for a copyright balance, mentioning Free Culture, the Grey Album, and a bootleg copy of The Return of the King along the way.[via Lessig News]

China Blocks Typepad, Prompts Weblog Blackout dcm writes "As U.S. Ambassador Richard Williamson prepares to introduce a resolution at the U.N. Human Rights Commission to censure the Chinese Communist ... [via Slashdot: Your Rights Online]

The Longer Road to Longhorn
According to numerous news stories, yesterday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates off-handedly said that probably true is speculation Longhorn wouldn't ship until 2006. I can't say that I'm surprised. In the summer 2003 report, "Longhorn: Implications of the Next Windows' Ship Date," I pegged 2006 as Longhorn's likely release date.
Circumstances since lead me to question whether Longhorn's delivery might be later. As I blogged previously, release delays for "Whidbey" (Visual Studio .Net 2005) and "Yukon" (SQL Server 2005) jeopardized Microsoft's internal release schedule for Longhorn. I also see Windows XP Service Pack 2 compatibility issues and plans for Windows Server 2003 R2 as other indicators Longhorn's delivery would push out further.
Now weigh in those news stories, where Mr. Gates reportedly said that an "alpha" Longhorn version would ship later this year. In October, Microsoft had said…

Linux vs. Windows: Which Is More Secure? According to Forrester Research, Microsoft fixes its security problems faster than the Linux vendors. That's a good thing, since Windows tends to have more severe security problems than Linux. [via eWEEK Technology News]

Microsoft PR: Looking Under The Hood

iPod: This Season's Must-Have for Muggers

Virtual Peace for Middle East It may sound crazy, but an Israeli cybernetics expert believes a hologram, a blimp and a massively multiplayer game could bring peace to the Holy Land.  [via Wired News]

How E-Voting Threatens Democracy Nobody wants another Florida election debacle. Electronic voting is supposed to be the answer, but a growing body of evidence suggests the technology, at least in its current form, cannot be trusted. [via Wired News]

Gates points to 2006 Longhorn release Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates on Monday pointed to 2006 as the release year for the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. [via InfoWorld: Top News]

Bill Gates Dons His Chief Software Architect Hat When Bill Gates thinks, Microsoft jumps. Gates recently emerged from one of his sequestered Think Weeks, full of ideas about the next great thing in which Microsoft should be investing. eWEEK chats with Microsoft's chief software architect about mesh networking, WiMax, Web services and more. [via Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley]

Code attacks Cisco vulnerabilities [via Moreover - ZDNet]

Gartner CEO to CIOs: Embrace offshoring or else [via Moreover - ZDNet]

Gates gives magical software tour  [via Moreover - ZDNet]

Israeli hackers attack Islamic portal

Staying one step ahead of attackers The majority of intrusion prevention systems use signatures - similar to the way that anti-virus products work. Such signature-based systems monitor electronic traffic and compare them against known attacks. [via IT-Director.com - Information Security]

Hold the Presses: A Non-Microsoft-Funded Windows vs. Linux TCO StudyFrom Microsoft Watch: The Yankee Group and Sunbelt Software have teamed to do a truly independent total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) study that pits Windows vs. Linux. And Windows fares quite well, despite the lack of Microsoft influence. But there are still bright spots for Linux, too  especially among smaller businesses with custom vertical applications and/or no legacy networks to support. . [via Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley]

Digital certificates - still harder than the hardest thing you know Nice piece from Jon Udell who thinks that he may have installed more certs on more browsers on more platforms than anyone in history (which is some confession given how generally difficult that is). [via e-Government @large]

EC MS ruling: simply the end of the beginning This one will run and run [via The Register]

Auditing the mind of a hacker FBI and security experts probe psyche [via The Register]

Shooting-Up

On the path down to the beach, I find a bent and scorched spoon alongside a used hypodermic needle with a brown substance coating its surfaces. No prize for guessing what this is and it explains the number of discarded BIC lighters I’ve seen lying around the seafront recently.



The idea of people shooting heroin a hundred yards from my peaceful seaside home disturbs me. It’s bad enough that Government are using the local area as a dumping ground or should I say ‘Processing Centre’ for refugees, leaving them marooned with little else to do than claim benefit and drive around in uninsured cars but hard drugs and the social problems that accompany them are another matter, the ugly face of 21st century Britain in all its dirty glory.

You can run but you can’t hide anymore, short of moving to the Falkland Islands perhaps? The place is falling apart and Government has few answers beyond plugging the gaps with higher taxes and more paperwork and statistics that have lost all credib…

Virus Era Hits 5-Year Milestone The first massive Net virus infestation -- Melissa -- happened five years ago. Since then, not much has changed, except for the frequency of outbreaks. [via Wired News]

Congress Moves to Criminalize P2P Two senators introduce legislation that would impose jail time for sharing as little as one file, while the House may consider another that would lower the bar to take people to court. Looks like entertainment lobbyists are winning their war against peer-to-peer networks. [via Wired News]

A perspective on General Public Licences for "free software code" There are prospective risks associated with the General Public Licences (GPL) in the context of "free software code", especially now there appears to be commercial value in it [via IT-Director.com: Impartial News Analysis]

New Microsoft program: 'You patch, we pay' Microsoft Patch Assurance Security Service offers free security audits [via InfoWorld: Security]

Security innovation is alive and well The best innovations in security may be coming from old enemies [via InfoWorld: Security]

CAIDA: Witty Exposes 'Spectacular Failure' of Patch System The Witty worm has exposed the "spectacular failure" of the current approach to computer security, according to a new analysis, which warns that the strategies used by the worm could be reproduced to create a far more widespread and damaging event. [via Netcraft]

Gates: Net 'mini bubble' has emerged  via Moreover - ZDNet]

Britain sees surge in 'phishing' A financial industry body warns it is seeing a surge in scam emails and tells bank customers to be extra- vigilant. [via BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

A Phishy Story

Phishing, using hijacked corporate logos and deceptive spam to steal personal information over the Internet, appears to have taken a more sinister turn. Reported Phishing attacks against well-known on-line brands such a Citibank, PayPal and eBay appear to be running as high as two hundred a month and none of the leading UK Internet banks and building societies remains untouched by increasingly imaginative criminals who can create near perfect digital copies of the website of the business they are targeting all the way down to the SSL key-lock on the browser.



A week ago, I’m told, something new and different appears to have happened in a phishing scam involving one of the UK’s largest banks. In fact, on the same day, two high street banks were targeted with elaborate scams but one introduced a new dimension to the crime.

In this case, the web site was so perfect that I doubted at first that it was a fake. All the links to the bank’s service worked perfectly and the only s…

Inside Crime

I was up in London yesterday filming a piece on ‘Phishing’ for the ITV ‘Inside Crime’ series.



Not a great day for the banks, as both Nat West and Lloyds TSB were both hit by elaborate scams, the former more worrying than most because it appears to introduce a Peer-to-Peer (p2p) element into the crime for the first time, in that the offending website looks to be moving around between hijacked personal computers on a broadband network. This of course makes detection and closing down the very good if not perfect digital image of the Nat West site very difficult indeed.

My most bizarre conversation was with Channel 4 News. I was trying to explain that the URL for the spoof Nat West site was not in fact the bank’s web page.

“But it says Nat West”
“Yes, but it’s not, it resolves to an address in Alaska and as far as I know, Nat West don’t operate that far West”
“But it says Nat West”

And so the conversation continued until someone else interrupted and confirmed that the bank was …

Windows NT4 Still the Biz

More than seven years after its debut, Windows NT4 remains the hosting Operating System of choice for a surprising number of big brand web sites. But with Windows NT4 officially retired and Microsoft planning to discontinue security patches and support at year-end, even die hard enterprises still running NT4 will presumably switch eventually.

Netcraft: Windows NT4 Still Astonishingly Popular

Monopoly, Platforms and Applications

Starting yesterday afternoon, some of us Jupiter Research analysts have been bantering e-mails back and forth about Microsoft and its platforms business. At least indirectly, the exchange relates to Microsoft’s antitrust problems with the European Union.

Microsoft Monitor

The God Particle and the Grid

The physics lab that brought you the Web is reinventing the Internet. Get ready for the atom-smashing, supercomputing, 5-gigabits-per-second Grid Economy.

Wired 12.04: The God Particle and the Grid: "The God Particle and the Grid

Society is, I believe, rapidly losing its marbles....

Today, we have the example of a hospital neurosurgeon suspended, while an inquiry determines whether he in fact paid for an extra spoonful of croutons that he added to his thin hospital canteen soup. So if you were waiting for a new brain or a service on the existing model, then tough, you’ll have to wait for management to reach a decision over his future.



Then we have the back-stroke banned from Britain’s public swimming pools for fear of litigation or mass casualties. Strangely enough, I agree with the Home Secretary on this measure as back-strokers represent a public nuisance and should be jailed together with personal injury lawyers.

Finally, I’m not convinced that Gordon Brown’s secret plan to tax Catholics after the next election will be a success. This may have worked for another prudent Scot, James 1st but times have changed, although one wouldn’t think so from looking at the Treasury’s plans for the UK economy.

I do however…

Phatbot primed to steal your credit card details And launch DoS attacks [via The Register]
Witty attacks your firewall and destroys your data If you can read this, you're probably all right [via The Register]


February 'Phishing' report - eBay the most popular target.

UK.biz leaves door open to hackers Department of Trade and Industry's 2004 Information Security Breaches Survey reveals penetration figure is four times higher than that recorded by the last DTI Information Security Breaches Survey, two years ago. [via The Register]

Always Look on the Bright Side

I don’t wish to appear alarmist but on the one hand, you have Sir John Stevens warning us that a terrorist attack on London is inevitable and on the other, there’s talk among the IT security vendors, among them Symantec, of a ‘Zero Day’, ‘blended’ threat being imminent.

On the heels of the fuss last month surrounding the escape of Microsoft’s older source code into the wild, a “zero-day” blended threat, say Symantec, could target a potential vulnerability before that vulnerability is discovered and a patch made available. If such an outbreak occurs, the results could make Blaster look like a bad case of the sniffles in contrast with a raging flu pandemic.



Added to this, The Computer Virus Prevalence Survey found that last year, almost a third of the businesses polled worldwide had suffered a virus "disaster," defined as twenty-five or more computers infected by a single virus in the same incident. The survey indicated that antivirus software is…

Virus attacks: More pain and money drain  via ZDNet

Microsoft speaks in tongues via ZDNet

Bookies suffer online onslaught An investigation by BBC News Online has shown how many betting websites are being attacked. [via BBC News ]

MPs reassess e-crime laws MPs are to debate whether the law on computer misuse is too outdated to deal with the rising net crime. [via BBC News]

Why Microsoft 'Shared Source' can never be trusted Trojan wars and Cold Wars [via The Register]

Microsoft in Talks to Acquire AOL? The New York Post says Microsoft is making overtures. Word is that AOL is definitely on the block. [via Microsoft Watch]

No Settlement in the Cards Even the ultimate salesman, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, seems to have been unable to sway the European Union. Unless something drastic happens between now and Wednesday, it looks like Microsoft may be unbundling Media Player from some of the versions of Windows it sells (and paying a hefty antitrust violation fine, to boot). [via Microsoft…

Typhoon

I’ve been out tying down the aircraft against the wind. It’s so severe that it took my big 1150 GS BMW and tossed it over on its side as if it were a child’s bicycle.

With straps tethering the line of aircraft to a thick wire cable across the airfield, every now and then, a strong gust, over the wings is enough to achieve vertical take off and a hovering effect for a second or two before dropping down on the grass again.

The month has suddenly become incredibly busy with several projects appearing simultaneously. Microsoft are shipping me off to Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar at the beginning of next month for a security road show and somewhere in between I’ve to start thinking originally about computer crime and terrorism and potential points of convergence.



Meanwhile, back at Maypole Farm, Brian is now building a full-scale B52 Bomber in his workshop form matches and baked bean cans. While this may concern local residents, who might be worried by the noise and radiation implicati…

Who You Going to Call - eBusters?

I’m a victim of eCrime or at least I think I am.

Perhaps eSting or eFraud might be a better description but then I suppose it’s my own fault for not asking one very simple question when bidding on an eBay auction “Is the photo of the item on sale, the item that I will actually receive”?

In this example, the seller, we’ll call him ‘Newcastle Boy’, had gone to some trouble to paint an attractive description of an “Authentic” timepiece, with three photos, a front, rear and side view. The only problem was that when it finally arrived, it became immediately clear that an original manufacturer’s library image had been used for the display photograph, with all the correct branding, while two digital photos of what turned out to be a good fake, had been dropped in for the side and rear detail shots.


Caveat Emptor

This raises a broader question about auction sites and exchanges on the Internet that I’m finding hard to resolve, even though eBay have been m…

DDoS Counterstrikes Prompt Debate The recent spate of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is prompting discussion about defense strategies available to web sites. The debate intensified this week when Symbiot Inc. announced a new product that offers the capability to launch damaging "counterstrikes." [via Netcraft]

One IT job in four 'to go abroad' India and a clutch of other countries will pick up a quarter of Europe's IT jobs by 2010, a report says.  [via BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

WIRED: Some Like It Hot. Lawrence Lessig.This doesn't mean that there are no questions raised by the latest piracy concern - peer-to-peer file-sharing. But it does mean that we need to understand the harm in P2P sharing a bit more before we condemn it to the gallows.

Europe Considers Harsh Piracy Law The European Union will likely enact a law to give local police more power to seize the assets of suspected intellectual-property thieves. Opponents say the law is jus…

Interview: Securing Windows - Infoworld Staff As director of product management in the Security Business and Technology Unit at Microsoft, Amy Carroll is responsible for making sure that new enhancements to Windows and new versions of Windows are very secure. Carroll spoke to InfoWorld Senior Analyst Wayne Rash about the company's approach to security and commitment to improving the overall security of its operating system. [via InfoWorld: Security]

Shorthorn Server? It sounds like the Windows server team is struggling just as much as the Windows client team in trying to decide how best to deliver out-of-band features. And one of the options under consideration by the server group is a possible interim release of Windows Server that would go live before Longhorn Server (which, we're guessing, is a 2007/2008 deliverable, at best). [via Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley]

One Month Later: Security Risks from Microsoft's Leaked Windows Source It's been just over a month since Microsoft's Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 source code leaked to the Web. At the time, Microsoft said the security risks from such a leak were nil. But eWEEK finds there are plenty potential malicious attacks waiting in the wings.  [via Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley]

Whoops Apocalypse

Prompted by the record of the last six months and with security vendor, Symantec, reporting that financial services, healthcare, power and energy sectors are being increasingly targeted by hackers for “severe cyber attacks”, the Conservatives are to call for an Opposition Day (or half-day) Debate on information security, “Concentrating on DTI and economic issues”, in areas where it touches the critical national infrastructure, crime and overall commercial confidence in the Internet.



“How”, says Parliamentary Group, EURIM’s Philip Virgo, “Are we going to handle the rising tide of E-Crime from grooming and phishing through to large scale charge card and benefit fraud as criminals use the Internet to automate old crimes and invent new ones faster that law enforcement appears able to respond”?

Symantec’s latest ‘Internet Security Threat Report’, which gives an average of 220 security vulnerabilities (an average of 99 were of “high severity), a month between July and Dec…

Identity Crisis
Identity theft awareness on the rise Identity theft has been much in the news recently. According to data provided in an e-mail from Reuters, cases are up 80% in the US over last year and the average case costs $90,000 to solve. [Source  IT-Director.com - Information Security]

True or False?
Is proprietary software as bad as we all think it is? Way back when (about two decades ago) pretty much all the software you could buy was proprietary. Then along came UNIX and SQL and everybody started talking about how much better it was to have open software that could be ported from one environment to another. [via IT-Director.com - Strategy]

Patching confusion reigned in second half of 2003

Computer Weekly reports there was an average of 220 security vulnerabilities a month between July and December 2003, of which an average of 99 were of “high severity”, and 70% of which were easy to exploit, according to Symantec’s latest Internet Security Threat Report.

The findings of the report highlight growing concerns among IT users that implementing every software patch released is becoming an impossible task.

Symantec Internet Security Threat Report July-Dec 2003: Main points

- Blended threats increasingly target backdoors left by other attackers and worms

- Financial services, healthcare and power and energy sectors were the hardest hit by severe cyber attacks

- 2,636 new vulnerabilities – an average of 220 new per month

- 70% of new vulnerabilities are easily exploited requiring no exploit code providing opportunity for attackers to gain access to critical systems more easily.

Trust Me - I'm Gordon Brown

I had to turn off Gordon Brown’s ranting speech to the Labour Spring Conference yesterday, it was making me and my wife feel ill.



And the gestures? “A mix between Adolph H. and Edith Piaf”, said my wife and quite unnatural to the observer. One could almost imagine him reading his speech from the autocue, with a line break and “Gesture Now Gordon”, printed in large red letters. As a political speech writer, I have to smile!

We are, it seems, all better off under Labour. In fact we’ve never had it so good. Families, pensioners, business, education, and even the ungrateful, such as me are benefiting. He may have added sixty new taxes since he became Chancellor and increased the average family tax bill by £5,000 but it’s built a dynamic economy or so he says, standing at the edge of an abyss of personal debt, government overspend and a financial crisis looming in just about any direction you care to look.

I really don’t believe that people object to paying e…

Linux as a Tactic and Not a Religion

An interesting Register story on government procurement this morning:

"The British government is effectively abdicating IT strategy to the major players and confining itself to attempts to play them off against one another in order to obtain lower prices. But it isn't considering overall strategy, and it isn't seriously opening up the competitive landscape. Nor can it do this without putting serious funding behind its own studies, ones that could conceivably be described as independent".

Full Story

The Maypole Action Group

It may prove to be good preparation for a future at Westminster but I’ve just come from a village meeting that more closely resembled a revolutionary council than a democratic debate.

I’m writing, of course, about a village protest against planning permission that seeks to increase the daily number of permitted flights from the flying club at Maypole Farm, from the present twelve to a maximum of twenty-five.



As a guest at this Hoath village meeting, I was immediately worried, as were others, by the abrupt ejection of the airfield owner before the meeting even began. Surely, any truly democratic process demands a balanced argument and by throwing out the one person who could explain the finer detail behind the planning application, the audience in the packed village hall lost any real opportunity of being able to arrive at a truly informed opinion. Instead, it was offered the equivalent of a drum head court martial by the chair. “It’s our meeting and we can deci…

Spoofed

I was almost convinced, caught or ‘conned’ and it took a call to the head of security at eBay to confirm that the email I had received was part of a much larger ‘phishing’ scam; out to catch my credit card details and those of a million others,

Now I’m not unfamiliar with phishing, after all, I write about eCrime regularly in Computer Weekly. However, on this occasion I had been editing my account details inside eBay, when by sheer coincidence, an email arrived with the message: “Unfortunately, eBay has not been able to authorize your credit/debit card. Your credit/debit card information must be updated on your eBay account immediately.”



As I have only just registered on eBay and had bought my first items the previous week the request that I visit http://www.ebaydbs.com/ and “Use this secure form to update your credit/debit card information on your eBay account”, had, I thought been triggered by my updating my account preferences.

But hold on a moment. What is ebaydbs.com? It c…

Beware the 9th of March

In fact, it’s three years since I was last in Rome, once again visiting the eternal city’s favourite sites, the Vatican, the Coliseum and of course, the remains of the Forum.



As a teenager, I took an A level in Ancient History, in fact, I almost pursued a career in archaeology and not IT but I’m reminded that Roman history is largely a political history, Caesar, Sulla, the Gracchii, Cicero and a great number of different laws, which in many ways parallels our own history but without Cromwell, Alistair Campbell and the violence of the Forum and the revenge of Clare Short.

The Romans also respected the innovative energy of small business and both this and military power built an Empire for Rome and for Britain, except that the former took four hundred years to collapse but we managed it in a mere forty.

Today however, in our own very special compensation and tax-driven culture the privateering spirit that once made Britain a world leader is being driven rapidly t…

The Last Refuge of the Scoundrel

I’ve a confession. I’m being steadily drawn into politics.



Last week I was elected vice chairman of a re-launched Conservative Technology Forum (CTF), the President being Michael Fabricant, MP, the Shadow Minister for Economic Affairs and the Chairman MEP, Malcolm Harbour.



I’ve spent twenty years in IT and have tried to remain apolitical, even as an advisor to The Office of the e-Envoy but now I find myself assisting the Westminster Front Bench in the preparation of policy and the materials needed to support technology-related debates in Parliament.

Just over a year ago, I realised that it would be nearly impossible for me to set-up any of the small and successful IT businesses that I had done in the past. That favourite Microsoft expression ‘agility’ might be true of software but it no longer appears to be a commodity available to smaller IT companies. Legislation, as my overworked friends tell me, makes running an SME a full-time burden and the entrep…

Save Maypole Airfield from The Developers?

I’ve just returned from a fifteen minute loiter above Thanet in the fog, to find the road through the village of Hoath to the A229 dotted with fluorescent red posters asking people to “Fight further development of the Maypole airstrip”.



What development is this I wondered? After all, Maypole is a farm strip to the West of the village and my own little Cessna is tied-down on the grass there together with an assortment of around ten other light aircraft, most of which are rarely used.

Could it be an unpublished extension to the runway at Manston, ‘Kent International’ airport, ten miles to the East or perhaps the Defense Minister, Geof Hoon, plans to move what’s left of the RAF to a tiny stretch of grass in Kent which doubles as a livery stables?

In fact, to find Maypole, you have to know where it is, a ‘Catch-22’, which took me three years before I found the gate. There are, I'm told, people in the village of Hoath, adjacent to the airstrips…

2005 eCrime Congress

I need to start planning for the 2005 eCrime Congress and it's only just over a week since we closed the 2004 event which saw four hundred government, business and law-enforcement experts attend from around the globe and saw Sir John Stevens confirming my honorary appointment as a Detective Sergeant in the Metropolitan Police. - I'm still wondering about the pension rights -

Predicting what's going to be hot in computer crime in 2005 is a bit of a challenge and I'm already working on ideas but my thanks goes to DCS Len Hynds, the head of the NHTCU, who just penned a very nice endorsement for the work I put into this last congress.

"I think that Simon has a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing law enforcement and business as they work together to combat hi-tech criminality. His in depth knowledge of the subject enabled critical issues to be examined in precise detail, stimulating debate and exploring workabl…