In a report sure to make its customers glad they pay so much for consulting services, Gartner analysts went way out on a limb and said that Microsoft will miss its target shipping date for Windows Vista by one quarter. The analysts also said that “Microsoft can’t accurately predict [shipping dates] more than a few months out.” That last statement is probably fair, but if Microsoft can’t, how can Gartner?
Not to mention that Gartner has a really lousy track record with its predictions.
Ben Edelman is putting his Harvard Law degree to good use. The renowned spyware expert has filed an epic lawsuit against Yahoo!, according to a report by the Washington Post’s Brian Krebs yesterday::
A class-action lawsuit filed Monday against Yahoo! Inc. and group of unnamed third-parties accuses the company of engaging in “syndication fraud” against advertisers who pay Yahoo to display their ads on search results and on the Web pages of partner Web sites. The suit claims that Yahoo displayed these advertisers’ online ads via spyware and adware products and on so-called “typosquatter” Web sites that capitalize on misspellings of popular trademarks or company names.
Potentially more explosive is the plaintiff’s claim that Yahoo regularly uses its relationship with adware and typosquatting sites to gin up extra revenue around earnings time, alleging that the company is conspiring to boost revenue by partnering with some of the Internet’s seamier characters.
This is an escalation of an argument Ben has been making for some time now: Spyware couldn’t exist without the support of the companies that advertise through spyware networks. On his personal site, he’s documented the connection between big-name advertisers and spyware networks and Yahoo’s relationship with those shady networks. A PDF copy of the lawsuit is here.
As Ben has shown time and again, legitimate companies try to maintain plausible deniability for their relationships with these scummy networks. But those denials just don’t stand up to close scrutiny.
I hope this lawsuit scares the bejesus out of the legitimate companies that have been turning a blind eye to their complicity in these sordid schemes. The legal system isn’t fast, but it can be inexorable.
Go get ’em, Ben.
Thomas Lee has been a Windows beta tester for, oh, a gazillion years. His take on User Account Control (formerly User Account Protection, or UAP) is typical of longtime Windows users:
There are some other things about [build] 5365 I hate – particularly UAP. The concept of forcing users to run with relatively low privaleges is a great one. But the implementation is Vista is just plain lame. As I’m setting up the system, the entire screen goes black for 2-3 seconds (a visual sensation similar to what we saw when XP blue-screened) then a silly dialog box pops up – I click Accept – the screen goes black for another 2-3 seconds, and I can carry on. It’s very, very annoying – sufficiently so that I’m going to just log on with admin privaleges. It’s easier and far less intrusive. Sadly, while I like the concept, MS has made a poor job of the implementation. Of course, mileage may vary on this – but I doubt many IT Pros will even come close to liking this implementation. We’ll see.
I’ve published some screen shots of the latest UAC implementation at ZDNet. More to follow.
I’m having a hard time understanding why Google is so outraged at Microsoft’s design of the search bar in IE7. Steve Lohr summarizes the complaint in today’s New York Times:
Google, which only recently began beefing up its lobbying efforts in Washington, says it expressed concerns about competition in the Web search business in recent talks with the Justice Department and the European Commission, both of which have brought previous antitrust actions against Microsoft.
The new browser includes a search box in the upper-right corner that is typically set up to send users to Microsoft’s MSN search service. Google contends that this puts Microsoft in a position to unfairly grab Web traffic and advertising dollars from its competitors.
The move, Google claims, limits consumer choice and is reminiscent of the tactics that got Microsoft into antitrust trouble in the late 1990’s.
I don’t get this at all. Let’s look at IE7 up close and compare it to Google’s preferred browser, Firefox.
The turnstile on this site just clicked its 800,000th visitor – all the way from Vastra Gotaland, Sweden. At this rate, visitor #1,000,000 will stop by sometime around August 1st.
Thanks!
With the help of SiteMeter, I’ve been tracking which browser visitors to this site are using since October 2004. Here’s the latest:
The last time I published these stats was in August 2005. The share of visitors using Firefox or Mozilla has gone up very slightly, from 33.2% last August to 35.2% today, a gain of 2 percentage points. It wasn’t all at Internet Explorer’s expense, however. IE delivered an even 60% market share during the same period, down 0.6% overall, with the IE7 beta running on the PCs of 6.5% of all visitors.
From these stats, it’s pretty clear that this is a two-horse race. Netscape continued its slide into irrelevancy, with its share dropping almost in half, to 0.7%. Opera could only gain a half a percentage point in share despite the company’s decision last September to give away the browser.
I’m willing to draw another conclusion as well – at least tentatively. The easy gains for Firefox are over. I’ll be very surprised if Firefox is able to make any significant gains in share when I look at this snapshot six months from now. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that IE will gain back some ground during that time with the help of IE7.
David Lawsky of Reuters, analyzing the Microsoft antitrust hearings before the European Commission’s Court of First Instance, comes up with the Worst. Metaphor. Ever.
The workings of what one might call “Chinese restaurant protocols” may help explain the importance of computer protocols.
Chinese restaurants deal with clients, who sit at tables waiting to eat while servers go from table to table taking orders and delivering food.
In the case of computer protocols, the clients are personal computers, operated by Microsoft’s near-monopoly Windows system. The PCs send requests to central computers, known as servers, to validate passwords, provide files and print documents, among other tasks.
Chinese restaurant servers, like computer servers, follow protocols—that is, rules and custom of interaction—in meeting the needs of the clients.
For example, clients are served in the order they came in, unless they have reservations. All clients at the same table want their meals at the same time.
Menu items may be designated by number as well as description, a familiar code to Chinese restaurant clients. Egg fried rice might be Number 18 and General Tsao’s Chicken Number 14.But if someone calling from home for take-out has an old menu, the code could be wrong. The old number 14 was sweet-and-sour pork, and the caller winds up with General Tsao’s Chicken.
About the only cliche he missed was a reference to wanting to access those files again an hour later. I had to check the dateline carefully to make sure it wasn’t April 1.
What do you get when you cross a phishing e-mail with a virus? I don’t know exactly, but the thought makes my blood run cold.
A bright red alert that I first saw this afternoon reports that some visitors to the American Express secure website are seeing the following pop-up dialog box, which asks them to enter their Social Security number, mother’s maiden name, and date of birth – enough information, in short, to open dozens of credit accounts and steal an identity:
Let me repeat the really chilling part: According to American Express, people are seeing these pop-ups when they’re on AmEx’s secure site!
The AmEx page that warns about this scam is very short on details, but it suggests that they first received notice of this attack around March 29, 2006. The security alert also contains this hint that the culprit is a piece of malware:
Please note that this fraudulent activity may be the result of a computer virus and is not a part of the American Express website. If you received this pop-up box, your computer may have this virus.
In recent years, malware distributors have been mostly interested in setting up bot networks for relaying spam and hosting phishing messages. Some trojans with keylogging capabilities, like those in the PWSteal family, attempt to spot web-based forms where you enter credit card or banking information and scrape their contents to send to an outside source. Attackers running phishing scams have mostly worked via e-mail, and the tools for detecting and blocking phishing attacks are getting better. So this represents a significant escalation. When you see a pop-up dialog box while logged onto a secure site run by a reputable financial institution, you might be fooled.
I haven’t seen this documented elsewhere, and a search at some leading AV sites turns up nothing. If American Express is alarmed enough to put out a public warning, it must have hit a significant number of their clients. Anyone have any further information on what this thing could be?
Nick Bradbury disagrees with John C. Dvorak’s view that Internet Explorer is Microsoft’s biggest blunder ever:
I’ll be the first to admit that the way Microsoft embedded the browser into Windows was sloppy. I still wince when I think about the support problems I had with HomeSite that were caused by new versions of Internet Explorer updating important system files such as comctl32.dll. And don’t even get me started on the anti-competitive ways in which Microsoft negotiated OEM deals regarding Internet Explorer, or the poor design decisions that have caused so many of the security problems that Windows users face. So, if we’re talking about how the browser was embedded in Windows, I agree that Microsoft blundered. But if we’re talking about whether embedding a browser in an OS is good idea, I say that it is (and Apple says it is, too).
What Dvorak ignores is the huge number of Windows applications that have benefited from the ability to embed a web browser. Microsoft has done a great job making it easy for developers to host Internet Explorer in their software, and this has been a good thing for customers. Think of all the software that relies on an embedded IE – not just commercial web authoring tools, feed readers, email clients, etc., but also the thousands of in-house applications that need to display web pages. This isn’t a minor point: millions of people rely on software that requires an embedded web browser, and in this regard, these people benefit from having the browser included in their OS.
Word.
Ed Bott 