La pre-release pubblica di Windows 8 potrebbe non essere l’unico “regalino” che Microsoft farà ai suoi utenti. Secondo quanto riferito dal sito LiveSide, il colosso di Redmond starebbe per lanciare la sfida definitiva a Dropbox e Google rendendo addirittura illimitato lo storage per documenti e foto su SkyDrive, il suo popolarissimo  hard disk online grazie al quale si possono conservare gratuitamente su Internet fino a 25GB di dati.
Lo storage online illimitato non è stato ancora reso disponibile ma potrebbe arrivare presto, secondo i bene informati l’aggiornamento del servizio arriverà in contemporanea con Windows Live Wave 5, la nuova suite di applicazioni e servizi online di Microsoft che dovrebbe debuttare nel 2012. Lo spazio illimitato, come detto, riguarderà solo le foto e i documenti di Office, per tutte le altre tipologie di file lo spazio disponibile su SkyDrive rimarrà di 25GB.
(...)Continua a leggere SkyDrive, arriva lo storage illimitato per documenti e foto, su Geekissimo
SkyDrive, arriva lo storage illimitato per documenti e foto, pubblicato su Geekissimo il 12/09/2011
© naqern per Geekissimo, 2011. | Permalink | 6 commenti | Aggiungi su del.icio.us Hai trovato interessante questo articolo? Leggi altri articoli correlati nelle categorie Microsoft. Post tags: cloud storage, servizi online, SkyDrive, storage online, Windows Live Skydrive

Microsoft has just beefed up its Hotmail security with new features that make it easier to report hacked email accounts. More »

It’s amazing to compare how the Microsoft Security Response Center handles vulnerability disclosures versus how things were just 10 or 12 short years ago.

Here’s a typical disclosure process 10 years ago (based on a very true story):

Us: (sending an email to secure@microsoft.com) we’ve discovered a vulnerability in an office product. Here are the technical details. Can you confirm the issue and let us know when it’s patched?
Microsoft: Thanks for reporting, bla bla, we’ll get back to you soon

[about a week passes]

Us: Hi MSRC, any news about our office vulnerability?
[no reply]
[Sending a personal email to an MSRC friend to speed things up]
Microsoft: Oh, thanks for reminding us. We’ll check with the office team

[another few days pass]

Us: Hello? Anybody there?
Microsoft: Oh, yes. That vulnerability thing. Here’s what we decided: (a) It’s not a vulnerability. (b) it’s not a problem with the office product but with the world (or the RFC) (c) The office team can’t recreate it (d) even if the vulnerability was real, it wouldn’t be exploited in real world scenarios
Us: are you kidding us? Did you actually look at the sample code we gave you?
[a few days pass. We are pondering if to go complete full disclosure or give them time to digest]

Microsoft: Ok, this time we actually read your advisory and yes, it seems to work. But it’s just a denial of service. Nobody will ever exploit it because of … [something that heap spraying/DEP bypass/code mutation made look ridiculous about a year later]
Us: [starting the get mad] look guys. We sent you PoC code. You actually want us to write an exploit code for you?
Microsoft: yes, that would help convince our developers

[Us, spending time writing code so that Microsoft is convinced to fix their own products based on free information while wasting our precious time]

Us: here it is
Microsoft: oh, wow, it really does run code. Ok, we’ll fix it in the next release cycle which should be right after the democratic primaries of 2012.

Us: Ok, forget it. We’re going full disclosure

Microsoft: no, wait wait wait. We found your name on the world wide web and now realize you’re legit. Ok, we’ll fix it. Happy now? We might even mention your name in our advisory if/when that happens.

If it sounds familiar, that means you were disclosing vulnerabilities to vendors in the early 2000’s or late 1990’s. If you think I’m exaggerating, it’s only because you didn’t.

But here’s the amazing thing. Just a few years later, some radical changes started to happen. The big dysfunctional dinosaur that was MSRC became an efficient, friendly and if I didn’t know it, I would think it’s a different company altogether. Here’s a real recent discussion:

Us: Hello MSRC, here’s information about an office vulnerability
Microsoft: Hi, thanks for reporting. I checked the information, went over the sample code and have some technical questions [some intelligent questions here, basically they are doubting the findings but being really careful to check all the angles first]

[technical discussion continues for a couple of days with questions and answers going back and forth]

Microsoft: Ok, we get the picture now. Thanks for reporting. Here’s the guy that is going to be responsible for your case.
[a few days pass]
Microsoft: Ok, we now know it’s a […] vulnerability and not a […] one. We’ll pass it to the relevant team, just wanted to keep you posted
[further proactive updates and niceties continue until disclosure time. Credits, the end.]

What could have possibly caused this radical change that made MSRC focus on the technical side instead of the PR, not to mention being so research-friendly? New team? New procedures? Full disclosure forced them to see the truth? Too many beers at defcon finally showed them the light? Whatever they are taking, I wish they could spread some around. Most of the other vendors could use that. Yes, I’m looking at you Google.

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Is your site safe from SQL Injection? Website Security Audit is the way to protect your network!

Nota veloce: ieri ero presso Microsoft insieme ad altri amici e blogger per una chiacchierata informale sul nuovo browser di Microsoft che uscirà tra pochi giorni. Sono arrivato senza aver fatto i compiti: mai visto prima IE9, nessun pregiudizio ma anche poche domanda da fare.

Mi è sembrato il miglior browser Microsoft di sempre (non ci vuole molto, diranno i maligni); sicuramente è molto veloce  e i siti che ho avuto modo di provare si vedevano egregiamente. Rispetto ai soliti competitor lascia più spazio a disposizione per il contenuto, avendo eliminato la status bar – sostituita da un tooltip a scomparsa che appare al suo posto solo quando serve – e sollevando menu e etichette dei tab sulla riga dell’URL. Aumentata anche l’integrazione con il sistema operativo e le prestazioni grafiche, che sfruttano molto di più il chipset video.

Il riconoscimento dell’importanza delle applicazioni online è dichiarato e palese: la tendenza è quella di dare loro una dignità sempre più simile a quella delle normali applicazioni installate in locale. E’ stata citata una statistica (non la fonte) secondo la quale il 70% delle attività su un computer si svolgono ormai attraverso il browser.

Microsoft dichiara una grande attenzione agli standard e spinge molto su HTML5. Quello che ho avuto modo di vedere non mi è dispiaciuto; in questo momento sto pensando di abbandonare Firefox, che secondo me ormai ha perso il treno, in favore di Chrome; a questo punto valuterò anche IE9.

Tags: browser, IE9, microsoft, Tecnica

Our privacy on Facebook has been steadily eroding but the networking site is so powerful many people find it hard to leave
If you want to surf the zeitgeist, then look at the most common queries on Google. When I looked the other day, "How do I delete my Facebook account?" was fourth on the "How do I...?" list. Just to put this in context, number two was "How do I know if I'm pregnant?" You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to twig that something's up.
What's happened is that Facebook's latest tweak to its default privacy settings has sparked a firestorm. Four US senators have voiced their concern. Fifteen privacy groups have filed complaints with the Federal Trade Commission. On this side of the Atlantic, the EU's data protection working party has written to Facebook, saying recent changes that made previously private information publicly viewable by default were "unacceptable". And many online commentators, influential and otherwise, have joined the fray.
If you think that privacy is an abstract concern of EU bureaucrats and libertarians with too much time on their hands, then might I suggest that you consult youropenbook.org. This is an ingenious site which allows you to type in a search phrase. It then ransacks the publicly available Facebook "status updates" and displays what it finds.
A search for "I cheated", for example, brings up all kinds of intriguing stuff. A nice young woman from Baltimore posted "dam right i cheated i coulnt get it from u wen i needed it". There's also the odd potentially embarrassing reference to cheating in exams. A search for "I lied" brings up updates like "I'm sorry, I lied before when I said I used to make lots of bets. My therapist tells me I should try lying a lot to help get through my... gambling problem". Another writes "im not gonna bother anymore...theres no point hiding the truth.....iv lost too much and all because i lied to the one i love...im such a fukin dick head, i fucked up the best girl i've ever had".
I could go on but you will get the point. All of these people are instantly identifiable. Millions of Facebook users are posting embarrassing or damaging messages which can be read by the entire internet. My guess is that most of them think they are just writing to their "friends" because they don't understand how to fix their privacy settings and have simply accepted the defaults provided by Facebook. There's a trend here. Privacy on Facebook has been steadily, inexorably eroding. To track the erosion, see the timeline posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or a sobering animation created by IBM researcher Matt McKeon. What we're looking at is the implementation of a corporate strategy designed to maximise return for Facebook's owners.
The response of the company's PR flacks is predictable. Users are free to set their privacy settings, they say, and if people don't like what Facebook's doing then they can always leave. Nobody's forcing them to join the network.
On the face of it, both assertions are true. It is possible permanently to delete a Facebook account, but doing so involves quite a palaver and takes about a fortnight. A bigger problem is that because the service has become so ubiquitous, many users are discovering it's become essential to their professional lives. "Don't think I don't think about [leaving]," wrote one on her blog. "I don't like supporting Facebook at all. But I do.... The rewards are concrete and immediate. The costs are abstract and ideological. When I try to balance the two, the rewards win, but that is because of my friends and despite Facebook... Telling people with complaints to leave ignores the very real value of the networks they have built and what should be their right to continue those networks on the grounds on which they were built."
Welcome to Metcalfe's Law – the idea that the value of a network increases dramatically the more people belong to it. It's the same phenomenon that keeps people using Microsoft Office – not because they love the software, but because their professional lives would be impossible if they couldn't share Office documents with workmates.
It's one of the great ironies of information technology – that the aggregate effect of billions of free choices made by independent agents results in a kind of tyranny imposed by the winner that took all. We first saw it with Microsoft, and then with Google. Is it now Facebook's turn?
Privacy and the netInternetFacebookGoogleMicrosoftJohn Naughtonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Negli ultimi tempi hanno iniziato a fare la loro comparsa online tutta una serie di apposite utility mediante cui risolvere agevolmente tutti quelli che sono i più comuni problemi dell’OS in uso e, nello specifico, di Windows.

Si tratta senz’altro di validi strumenti che, mediante pochi click, mettono ciascun utente in condizione di ripristinare il corretto funzionamento ed andamento del sistema senza dover dunque intervenire personalmente e manualmente su di esso.

Ora, alla già ben ampia lista di strumenti adibiti a tale scopo, si aggiunge un’altra interessantissima risorsa, questa volta, però, rilasciata direttamente dalla nota azienda di casa Redmond.

(...)Continua a leggere Fix It Center, Microsoft offre ai suoi utenti un apposito tool per risolvere le più comuni problematiche di Windows, su Geekissimo

© Martina Oliva (Bugeisha) per Geekissimo, 2010. |
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Post tags: correggere errori, Fix It Center, Microsoft, problemi windows, tool, utility gratuita, Windows 7, windows server, Windows-Vista, Windows-Xp

L’ombra dell’antitrust torna ad incombere su Google. Microsoft (nelle vesti di Ciao! From Bing), insieme a Foundem (sito di comparazione prezzi) ed ejustice.fr (motore di ricerca francese), ha denunciato il colosso di Mountain View presso le autorità europee e statunitensi, asserendo che i risultati del suo motore di ricerca sono stati modificati ad arte in modo da penalizzare la concorrenza.

Nel mirino del gigante di Redmond – che ha spiegato le sue ragioni qui – c’è la posizione monopolistica di Google nell’ambito della ricerca e della pubblicità sul Web. Posizione di cui l’azienda californiana avrebbe abusato, facendo sparire le pagine interne dei siti concorrenti dai risultati delle ricerche e imponendo condizioni d’uso poco vantaggiose legate alla piattaforma Adsense.

L’indagine dell’Unione Europea, in ogni caso, non è ancora partita. I capi d’accusa sono attualmente in fase di studio e solo ad analisi conclusa Bruxelles deciderà se intervenire o meno.
(...)Continua a leggere Microsoft denuncia Google all’antitrust, inizia una nuova sfida, su Geekissimo

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Post tags: Adsense, Antitrust, microsoft vs google