There’s another round of fussing among Linux users over Microsoft’s decision to require a feature called Secure Boot in Windows 8. I break down the details over at ZDNet. Here’s an excerpt from Linux won’t be locked out of Windows 8 PCs, but FUD continues

Let’s talk about Windows 8 PCs. The new specifications make it very clear:

• All versions of Windows 8 shall be UEFI-compatible …
• All client systems must support UEFI Secure boot …
• MANDATORY: Enable/Disable Secure Boot. On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement the ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup. A physically present user must be allowed to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup without possession of PKpriv [the private key that supports Secure Boot].

“Non-ARM systems” means the classic x86 PC design. Roughly 400 million of these devices will be sold this year, and probably an equivalent number will be sold in the first year that Windows 8 is available. Every single one of those PCs will have the ability to run older versions of Windows, Linux, or a new operating system you create yourself. To do so, you will simply have to flip a bit in the system’s setup screen.

Sorry, conspiracy theorists. This does not represent “Microsoft’s latest attempt to abuse their PC monopoly power .” Quite the opposite. In the general-purpose PC segment, where small vestiges of Microsoft’s one-time monopoly still exist, this new security feature will be enabled by default, but the option to disable it will be mandatory. No lock-out for Linux.

General-purpose PCs are awesome. I don’t believe they will ever go away. I do not want them to go away.

But I do think we’ll see many more specialized devices that are engineered as part of end-to-end experiences, not easily hackable, with limitations imposed by app stores and digital signatures.

I want to have the choice to buy those devices as well as general-purpose PCs. iPads are arguably highly locked down. One can chafe at the limitations and restrictions, but there is no doubt that the end result is a very secure, very usable, very supportable combination of device and software.

The reason that the full system is “locked down” and the app store is curated is to keep out malware. And I would bet the number of people who are affected every year by malware is an order of magnitude larger than the people who want to buy a PC with one OS installed and hack it so they can install something else.

For many people, especially nontechnical users, the availability of that type of device is a good thing. Between Apple, Google, and Microsoft, we are heading toward a world where we will have at least three different hardware/OS and app ecosystems, all of them designed around very different experiences. I hope that all three of those platforms are able to coexist. I’d rather not return to the days of monopoly, thanks very much.

Ironically, the “open hardware” movement wants to restrict my choice. I want the ability to buy a device that can’t be easily hacked, even by me. We both want “open” PCs to continue to exist. But by insisting that every device be “open,” they’re taking away my option to freely, with eyes wide open, choose “closed.”

Farhad Majoo at Slate predicts that 2012 will be "The Year of Microsoft":

I’ll say it: I’m bullish on Microsoft in 2012. This could be the year that it shakes its malaise and takes its place alongside Apple, Google, and Amazon as a dominant innovator of the mobile age. For the first time in forever, Microsoft has a couple major products that are not merely good enough. They’re just plain great.

Many of the pieces are there, and right now Microsoft is as focused as a company as I’ve ever seen them.

The big question mark is whether customers will be willing to forgive Microsoft for its flailing in the mid-2000s and recognize that this is a different, more tightly run organization. That’s especially true for any business that is still on XP.

Microsoft also has an uphill climb with journalists and reviewers who switched to Apple hardware and Google services in recent years. In the Silicon Valley echo chamber, many opinions of Microsoft products are based on pre-switch experiences and on groupthink. In that environment, it’s difficult to get more than a glance and a shrug from the so-called opinion leaders.

Microsoft 2012 is a different animal from Microsoft 2006, especially in terms of its ability to execute. Let’s see if anyone notices.

A few weeks ago, Rupert Murdoch discovered Twitter. The resulting stream of … well, let’s call it semi-consciousness, from @rupertmurdoch has been revelatory.

The man can turn on a dime. Here is the best example I’ve seen yet.

Rupert tweeting from CES on Wednesday, on Day 2 of CES:

The admiration lasted about 72 hours.

Three days later, after the show is over, Rupert’s opinion of Google has changed …

The piracy leader? It takes a lot of I-don’t-know-what-you-call-it-but-you-can’t-say-it-in-polite-company for the guy whose highly paid executives stole the voicemails of a murdered child and of soldiers who lost their lives in Iran and Afghanistan to complain about piracy.

And as for the "pouring millions into lobbying"? Again, this is Rupert Murdoch we’re talking about. Who spends millions of dollars a year on lobbying.

But there you are.

This post by an Android developer on TechCrunch very adroitly describes the mess that Google has made of Android:

Android’s fragmentation has become a giant millstone for Android app development, leaving it worryingly behind its iOS equivalent. It’s not the panoply of screen sizes and formats; the Android layout engine is actually quite good at minimizing that annoyance. It’s not the frequent instances of completely different visual behavior on two phones running exactly the same version of Android; again, annoying, but relatively minor. Device fragmentation is just an irritation.

OS fragmentation, though, is an utter disaster. Ice Cream Sandwich is by all accounts very nice; but what good does that do app developers, when according to Google’s own stats, 30% of all Android devices are still running an OS that is 20 months old? I sure would have liked to stop caring about Android 2.2 bugs fixed in 2.3.

And it’s not like those devices are going to magically stop working anytime soon. They could be out on the network for three or four years, maybe more, without security updates and with core components that can’t run current apps.

Android’s phenomenal market-share grab has come at a price. This is a real problem, and as I wrote a few weeks ago, it is inherent in the Android business model.

I ran across this free Microsoft Office Labs add-in a while back, but it’s worth sharing again:

Search Commands

You know there’s a button for it, but you don’t know or remember where it is. If this ever happens to you, check out Search Commands. You can use this concept test today to quickly find the commands you need in Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Just search with your own words and click on the command you need.

Here’s an example. You want to change the default font used for new Word documents but you’re not sure where the command is located? Type in the search box and the command appears immediately, like this:

Click that result to go directly to the dialog box tab that contains the command you’re looking for.

This is ostensibly a power user’s tool, but it also works nicely for anyone who is having trouble making the transition from menus to the ribbon and tabs.

Based on these worldwide share numbers for the just-concluded month of December 2011, it looks like this Microsoft company continues to be successful with a web browser called Internet Explorer.

Source: Net Applications "Desktop Browser Version Market Share, December 2011"

The U.S. share numbers are a little different. In the U.S., usage of IE6 has dropped below 1%. A post on the official Exploring IE blog notes other countries where IE6 usage is under 1%: Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway, with this month’s additions of the Czech Republic, Mexico, Ukraine, Portugal, and the Philippines.

Update: this t-shirt arrived in the afternoon mail from the Internet Explorer team, which is no doubt as sick of supporting IE6 as the rest of us:

XP, you’re next.

It’s more trouble than it should be, but yes, it is possible to capture screens on a Windows Phone.

This is the Music+Videos hub.

For now, just consider this a test, in anticipation of some later posts.

Also, anyone want to guess who the artist in the background photo is?

Farhad Manjoo at Slate: The year’s worst tech trend: complexity

People who write about technology for a living are fundamentally different from those who don’t, and we know it: We’re obsessed with gadgets, and we’re prepared to invest time learning complicated things if the payoff looks grand. But we also know that the real audience for tech products is non-techies—or normals, as they’re called in the business—and we’re instantly taken by anything that promises to demystify tech for those users. That’s why tech journalists love Apple, and why the last half-decade has been such an exciting time in the business. Over the last few years, the industry finally started paying attention to normals: With the advent of smartphones, tablets, and centralized app and media stores, it looked like computers would finally become easy enough for every tech reviewer’s mom to use.

As he notes, the major players—Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon—have competing interests that prevent them from creating technologies that truly work together.

Thoughtful piece, well worth reading.

This morning an odd message landed in my inbox. It appeared to be from the New York Times, and it was sent with High Importance. Here’s how it started out:

Dear Home Delivery Subscriber,

Our records indicate that you recently requested to cancel your home delivery subscription. Please keep in mind when your delivery service ends, you will no longer have unlimited access to NYTimes.com and our NYTimes apps.

The only problem? I am not and have never been a New York Times home delivery subscriber. I have an online account only.

Judging by my Twitter feed, I am not the only person who received this message. For several hours, the New York Times’ official Twitter account denied responsibility for it:

Based on my inspection of the e-mail headers, they’re wrong. The message does indeed appears to have been sent by an authorized agent of the paper. And in fact, as I was getting ready to publish this post, a New York Times spokesperson acknowledged the error. Via Twitter, Amy Chozick, corporate media reporter for the Times, quoted the spokesperson as saying that the message, which should have gone to 300 people, went to 8 million instead.

A little background is in order…

I get e-mail messages from the New York Times regularly. The ones containing editorial content are sent from nytdirect@nytimes.com. That’s the source of the regular Travel Dispatch mailings I get once a week. It’s also the source of David Pogue’s Personal Tech column.

This message came from a different address: nytimes@email.newyorktimes.com. When I searched through my e-mail archives earlier today, I found eight examples of mailings from this address. An inspection of the headers shows that all of these messages are from the same IP address, 208.70.142.122, and can be traced back to a mail server at bfi0.com.

That IP address and server name are part of a very large direct mail company called Epsilon Interactive. (The company used to be called Bigfoot Interactive, which explains the server name bfi0.)

Epsilon is a division of Alliance Data, which boasts that "Epsilon sends over 40 billion permission-based emails annually on behalf of clients." That client list includes Hilton Hotels, Verizon, New York & Company, Kraft, KeyBank, and AstraZeneca, according to the company’s web page.

Nothing in this mailing appears to qualify it as spam. It appears to be a legitimate direct-mail piece that was mistakenly sent to a much larger group of New York Times customers than it was supposed to have been.

By the way, if the name Epsilon sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because the company suffered an enormous data breach back in April. In my research for this post I found an April message from Target:

Target’s email service provider, Epsilon, recently informed us that their data system was exposed to unauthorized entry. As a result, your email address may have been accessed by an unauthorized party.

Several tech news outfits, including GigaOm and TechCrunch, speculated that this was another Epsilon data breach. Based on what I’ve seen, this is a garden-variety "oops" moment, noteworthy only for its size. It sounds like the New York Times and Epsilon need to acknowledge it, apologize, and move on.

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