Wow. Thanks to Scoble I just discovered that the Microsoft Knowledge Base now has RSS feeds, organized by category. This is huge news for people like me, who follow Microsoft products for a living and need fast access to new information.
There’s a good RSS tutorial, too, with a list of Windows-based stand-alone feed readers at the bottom. Suggestion to Microsoft: You should add Web-based aggregators to this list.
This is excellent news. Congratulations to Microsoft for making the right decision, even if it took a while. And congrats to all the Microsoft employees who spoke up against discrimination and prejudice.
Ryan Naraine at eWeek has word of a new Microsoft security service:
Microsoft plans to unveil a new security advisories service next Tuesday as part of an aggressive long-term effort to revamp the way it reacts to publicly reported software vulnerabilities.
The pilot project, which is independent of the scheduled monthly security bulletins, represents a major shift in the way the Redmond, Wash.-based software maker communicates with customers when information on security flaws is published by gray hat hackers and private research outfits.
The new offering, dubbed Microsoft Security Advisories, gives engineers at the MSRC (Microsoft Security Research Center) an outlet for providing instant feedback, guidance and mitigations when researchers jump the gun and release vulnerability details before a patch is available.
This is very good news, good enough to warrant interrupting a vacation! In this new program, security experts at Microsoft will be able to issue advisories with detailed advice without having to wait for a formal update to work its way through the Microsoft bureaucracy.
According to Ryan Naraine’s story, the impetus for this new program was a pair of embarrassing episodes – one in which a patch was issued but not properly documented, and the other involving the issue of “poisoned” Windows Media files, for which a patch was issued only after three months.
When it comes to security, transparency is a very good thing.
In the comments to my post yesterday on the Apple versus Wiley dustup, several commenters asked why I haven’t said anything about the controversy over Microsoft dropping support for the anti-discrimination bill in Washington State. The full version of this post contains my thoughts on this issue. If you’re here to read about Longhorn or Windows and you prefer to avoid political discussion, you might want to stop reading now.
One of the most intriguing demos at WinHEC yesterday was a sneak peek at a new document format code-named “Metro.” According to Microsoft’s white paper [in Microsoft Word format] on the new technology, it’s “a complete specification for a fixed-layout document format based on XML that offers ‘electronic paper’ for use by any application on any platform.”
Sound familiar? If the spec succeeds, it would obviate the need for Adobe PDF files.
Metro will reportedly be backward compatible with Windows XP. You’ll be able to print directly to a Metro file, use a universal viewer (like Adobe’s Reader) to open files, and send them to any printer that has a compatible driver. Yesterday’s demo of a Metro-optimized printer showed off the capability to print color pages that have the same sort of gradients and shading you see on the screen. Metro-optimized printers probably won’t be ready until 2007.
The new technology should be in Beta 1, which is due this summer. Developers can get the full spec here
Not that I’m paranoid or anything, but have you noticed anyone missing from this list of people covering WinHEC? (Thanks to Scoble for the pointer.)
Update: Ah, good to see that Microsoft is paying attention and I’m now on the list. If you want the latest news from WinHEC, follow the blogroll.
I was really looking forward to liveblogging Bill Gates’ keynote address at WinHEC today. I’m sure a few other folks were as well. But a funny thing happened when I made it into the exhibit hall. Someone had decided to (1) Disable Wi-Fi in the exhibit hall (but not announce it – it’s amusing to watch people try every possible setting in the Windows XP wireless dialog box); (2) Squeeze the media (print and online) into a specially reserved section without any tables (why do you think they call them laptops?); (3) Provide no power outlets (thus giving my old Toshiba a real-world stress test).
So, you don’t get the benefit of my real-time analysis of BillG’s keynote, and instead you have to put up with my after-the-fact pontificating based on notes I wrote in the dark until my battery died with a half-hour to go. The last 30 minutes was just a blur.
It was a low-energy keynote, without a clever, self-effacing video clip like the ones that have become a hallmark of Gates appearances in recent years. The geeky audience got an appropriately geeky talk from the Alpha Geek, who had (in classic Microsoft style) three key messages to pass along:
Bonus geek content: The Longhorn demos were using build 5060. If you downloaded anything older via BitTorrent, you are so last week
(Good news: This afternoon’s sessions, including a fascinating presentation on new hardware designs, were held in rooms with tables! Bad news: Still no power strips. So I had to drag a chair to the back of the room, next to a power outlet, and blog from long distance. Good news: My battery is back up to 70% charge.)
Bloggers’ lunch tomorrow at Tulio. Don’t expect me to liveblog it.
Stay tuned.
I’m here in Seattle at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, where Microsoft is laying out its vision of what sort of technology will be running your office and living room in the coming years.
There’s lots of good stuff, including some nicely detailed looks at Longhorn. I’d be sharing all sorts of details with you, except that the rocket scientists who set up the conference facilities didn’t set up these facilities to be blogger-friendly.
Stay tuned. I’ll be passing along details soon enough.
Dana Epp has a fascinating post about Microsoft’s security development lifecycle:
In the past decade it has been easy to slag Microsoft for their stance on security. It has appeared that the drive for profits have always trumped the safety and security of the code. When Microsoft decided to STOP development and retrain the ENTIRE development group about secure programming, many in the industry brushed it off as a PR stunt. But as I pointed out early last year, if we look at what Microsoft has been doing as of late, we can see that they have made significant changes to build a foundation for a more secure computing experience.
Read the whole list, and bear in mind that Dana Epp knows security issues better than just about anyone. His perspective is a fascinating one here. I’m not a slavish Microsoft booster, and in fact I have been critical of some recent decisions they have made that are not consistent with their stated security goals. But anyone who thinks that Microsoft hasn’t made huge progress on security in the past four years simply isn’t paying attention.
This is the main reason you can expect that Internet Explorer 7 will be a very big deal and not a simplistic bunch of cosmetic fixes. Just watch…
Ed Bott 