Author: Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

It’s official: Longhorn is Windows Vista

The press release is here, but it leads to a Windows Media clip which I am not even going to try to watch on this crappy dial-up connection.

And before anyone tells me how lame the name is, please see if you can say, with a straight face, that it is somehow less cool than (deep breath): Tiger, Panther, Jaguar, RedHat, Fedora, Debian, BSD, Solaris, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Knoppix, Xandros, or Suse. Extra points if you can do it with a Nigel Tufnel accent.

Although I do have to admit that Slackware is a pretty cool name.

Longhorn news tomorrow?

I just got an e-mail from Microsoft’s PR agency alerting me to big news about Longhorn that will be released tomorrow at 6 AM PDT.

I have no idea what it is, but here’s a clue: The URL contains the acronym LHMA. I suppose that could stand for Longhorn Media Announcement, but maybe it’s Longhorn Media Access or Longhorn Might Arrive.

Fortunately, I’m an early riser, so I’ll pass along the news as soon as I have it.

(Oh, and I got my beta invite.)

Update: ActiveWin, via Chris Lanier, says the new is that Longhorn has a name: Windows Vista.

I’ll sleep better tonight.

Twenty-eight dot eight

I’m stuck on dial-up for a few more days. My notebook has a 56K modem, but my desktop machine has a rusty old 28.8K Supra external faxmodem, which I keep around because it supports distinctive ring, and how often do I need to do dial-up, anyway?

A quick rant about Comcast. I placed an order for service two weeks ago. We agreed on an appointment window between 8 am and 12 noon yesterday. The guy showed up at 11:59 (of course) and told me, apologetically, that he couldn’t do a thing because their underground folks need to come out and run a wire from the cable tap across the street to my new house. That will take 7 to 10 days, he said. The surly service guy I talked to an hour later (to see if that could be expedited in any way), said it could be up to 15 days.

Excuse me? Could no one have foreseen this two weeks ago? Comcast is living up to its reputation for terrible customer service.

Meanwhile, Qwest says they can have 7Mbps DSL installed on Friday, and they’ll match Comcast’s price. It’s a deal! I’ve had Qwest DSL before, and it worked just fine. If they can deliver the speeds they promise, I’ll take it. I should have a week or two to evaluate it before Comcast shows up.

And if Comcast doesn’t have an HD-DVR here by the end of the month, DirecTV might get a call.

For the next two days, though, I get to experience the 2005 Web at 1995 speeds.

Trash your PC because of spyware? Rubbish!

This post is from guest blogger Carl Siechert:

On Sunday, the New York Times published “Corrupted PC’s Find New Home in the Dumpster”:

“I was spending time every week trying to keep the machine free of viruses and worms,” said Mr. Tucker, [an Internet industry executive who holds a Ph.D. in computer science and] a vice president of Salesforce.com, a Web services firm based here. “I was losing the battle. It was cheaper and faster to go to the store and buy a low-end PC.”

Until Mr. Tucker secures his computer (with a firewall, automatic updates, and an antivirus program), he’s soon going to have the same problems with his new computer. In his case, since he apparently can’t say no to installation of unwanted software, he ought to add an antispyware program to the arsenal.

In the face of a constant stream of pop-up ads, malfunctioning programs and performance slowed to a crawl or a crash – the hallmarks of spyware and adware – throwing out a computer “is a rational response,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

No, it’s not a rational response, whether you’re looking at it from an environmental perspective or merely a technical one. Clean up your mess (or hire someone who can; the article reports the cost of professional cleanup averages $129, which is still only a third the price of the cheapest replacement computer), set up a few basic protections, and learn to not click OK to every installation prompt that pops up.

Rupert Murdoch, spyware magnate

The Wall Street Journal (paid subscribers only) reports this morning:

Seeking to expand its Web presence, News Corp. said it is buying online entertainment company Intermix Media Inc. for about $580 million in cash.

[…]

Intermix, which is based in Los Angeles, owns more than 30 Web sites, including sites that deliver online greeting cards and games, though its social-networking site MySpace.com is the best known. The network of sites attracts more than 27 million unique monthly users, News Corp. said.

The company came under fire from New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who accused Intermix of secretly installing “adware” — software that delivers pop-up advertisements or similar promotions. Last month the company reached a tentative agreement to pay $7.5 million over three years to settle the accusations.

It was stupid when Microsoft was thinking of acquiring a company that has an adware division. It is double-plus bad for the company that owns Fox and Fox News to get into the spyware business. But it’s completely in character with the Murdoch empire’s complete lack of business ethics.

Microsoft won’t buy Claria

ClickZ News:

Microsoft has ended its acquisition talks with behavioral targeting firm Claria, ClickZ News has learned from a source close to the discussions. Another Microsoft source later confirmed that report.

A Microsoft staffer, who asked not to be identified, characterized the end of the talks as driven by concerns about a PR fallout that could follow a Claria purchase. That company has, in the past, been associated with spyware.

Good.

Update: Oh, and will someone please find whoever it was at Microsoft who thought this was a good idea and lock them in a room until they realize what a stupid, stupid, stupid idea this was?

Someone could even read them this quote:

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know.

Just stupid.

Spyware: Defining the problem

The Anti-Spyware Coalition, which is led by the Center for Democracy and Technology, has published a draft document that seeks to define spyware and other potentially unwanted technologies (announcement is here, document is here, both in PDF format). It includes an excellent glossary and is now in a 30-day public comment period. Here’s the definition the ASC has proposed, which is followed by a table listing lots of examples:

Spyware and Other Potentially Unwanted Technologies

Technologies implemented in ways that impair users’ control over:

  • Material changes that affect their user experience, privacy, or system security
  • Use of their system resources, including what programs are installed on their computers
  • Collection, use, and distribution of their personal or otherwise sensitive information

These are items that users will want to be informed about, and which the user, with appropriate authority from the owner of the system, should be able to easily remove or disable.

Of course, any definition that a broad coalition can agree on is going to be vague and inspecific. The really hard work begins when someone tries to turn that general definition into specific, actionable items.

Technical difficulties (solved) (oops, not solved)

If you’ve tried to post a comment here and you don’t see it, sorry.

The Movable Type/CPanel screw-up continues, despite good-faith efforts from everyone involved to get it fixed. The glitch means I have to rebuild the site manually every time I post anything, which sucks. It also means that the scripts which are supposed to notify me when a comment needs approval (and any comment that includes a link is held for approval) aren’t working either. I just went through the list and manually deleted more than 300 pieces of what appeared to be comment spam, and I approved about 20 comments that were being held. If yours doesn’t show up, it might have been deleted accidentally. Like I said, sorry.

Just to add to the festivities, I received an avalanche of comment spam (all of it blocked by MT-Blacklist, thankfully), a Slashdotting, and a Scobleizing or two over the past 48 hours.

The two hamsters who run this site are spinning themselves into a frenzy.

Hamster_wheel

Oh, great. Now everything’s broken. The main page looks OK, but the individual pages for today’s entries are blank, and I can’t fix them.

Oh well, I’ll worry about this next week.

Aha. 1.7GB of core dump files from CPanel had used my entire disk quota. As soon as I deleted them, things returned to normal.

Update 7/12 6:00 p.m.: Continuing to get HTTP 1.1/500 errors. Core dump files continue to fill server space. Oxygen running low. Hamsters begging for relief. WordPress looking better and better. This should be trackback #11 on SixApart’s ProNet. Anil, what’s going on?