jmason + microsoft   72

Security Fix - Clampi Trojan: The Rise of Matryoshka Malware
'[Joe] Stewart said the sophistication and stealth of this malware strain has become so bad that it's time for Windows users to start thinking of doing their banking and other sensitive transactions on a dedicated system that is not used for everyday Web surfing.' it's that bad
joe-stewart  secureworks  malware  reverse-engineering  clampi  trojans  banking  security  danger  risks  windows  microsoft  fraud 
august 2009 by jmason
The Snooping Dragon
awesome, if terrifying research from Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson on Chinese cyber-surveillance of the Tibetan movement. 'we described how agents of the Chinese government compromised the computing infrastructure of the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. They used social phishing to install rootkits on a number of machines and then downloaded sensitive data. People in Tibet may have died as a result.'
phishing  social-phishing  dalai-lama  security  surveillance  privacy  law  china  ross-anderson  research  papers  windows  microsoft 
march 2009 by jmason
amazing car-crash interview attempting to justify DRM from Microsoft
interview with MS UK's Head Of Mobile attempting, and failing, to justify their DRM policy. Q: 'If I buy these songs on your service - and they're locked to my phone - what happens when I upgrade my phone in six months' time?' A: 'Well, I think you know the answer to that.'
omgwtfbbq  microsoft  funny  drm  fail  hugh-griffiths  interviews  mp3  music  mobile 
february 2009 by jmason
Microsoft Malware Protection Center: Malware and Signed Code
0.6% of malware files reported to MS, ~135000 files, had valid PKI code signatures
microsoft  pki  security  factoid  malware  viruses  code-signing  authenticode 
december 2008 by jmason
Microsoft offers free access to CPAN developers
6 VMs running different versions of Windows, in order to ensure CPAN modules run OK on 'doze. this is awesome, and UNIX vendors should be doing the same
perl  microsoft  windows  cpan  testing  porting  strawberry-perl  xp  vista 
december 2008 by jmason
MS To Offer Free Anti-Virus Software
about time! This has been necessary for ages. It will, of course, eat McAfee/Symantec/et al's lunch on a huge scale; I guess that was probably the issue
microsoft  windows  malware  viruses  mcafee  symantec  av  anti-virus 
november 2008 by jmason
Microsoft Open Source inside Google Chrome
namely the Windows Template Library, now distributed under the (OSI-approved) Microsoft Public License. strange days (via reddit)
microsoft  open-source  osi  google  chrome  wtl  windows 
september 2008 by jmason
Rob Enderle's page on Wikipedia
detailing this analyst's hilariously wrong pro-SCO, anti-Apple/Linux predictions over the years. John Gruber: 'the only way it would be worthwhile for reporters to [quote him] would be if they were willing to describe him as "almost always utterly wrong"'
rob-enderle  funny  sco  linux  apple  microsoft  analysts  enderle-group  oh-dear  wikipedia  john-gruber 
july 2008 by jmason
'A Low-cost Attack on a Microsoft CAPTCHA' [pdf]
'we estimate that the Microsoft [CAPTCHA, as used on Hotmail, Windows Live and MSN] can be broken with an overall (segmentation and then recognition) success rate of more than 60%.' with avg runtime of 80ms per segmentation
captchas  security  microsoft  msn  hotmail  windows-live  web  pdf  papers 
may 2008 by jmason
EFF press release: 'Betrayed MSN Music Customers Deserve More from Microsoft'
MSN Music is shutting down its DRM validation servers, leaving customers screwed if they have to move their legally-bought music to a new machine. The EFF is rightly kicking up a stink
microsoft  msn  music  mp3  drm  eff 
april 2008 by jmason
The Norway Vote - What really happened
the OOXML fiasco. unsurprisingly, bureaucrats go to do whatever they wanted -- come on, what did people expect from the ISO?
iso  ooxml  microsoft  corruption  norway  bureaucracy  standards  fiasco 
april 2008 by jmason
How open source has influenced Windows Server 2008
good to see MS finally starting to grok the key aspects of the OSS model, in particular how it impacts product design and management (via Glynn Moody)
oss  free-software  open-source  via:glynn-moody  sam-ramji  microsoft  windows  windows-server  software 
february 2008 by jmason
Coding Horror: DRM Ignorance is Expensive
Jeff Atwood gets screwed by rip-off Xbox 360 DRM policies - a cautionary tale
drm  nasty  horror-stories  xbox-360  microsoft  xbox-live  ouch 
february 2008 by jmason
Andy Baio's brilliant oneliner on MicroHoo!
'It's like tying the Titanic to the iceberg. It'd keep you from sinking just long enough to freeze to death.' (via Torrez)
via:torrez  funny  waxy  oneliners  quotes  microsoft  yahoo  microhoo  mergers  acquisitions  quotable 
february 2008 by jmason
Microsoft's "Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?"
a fake children's book to advertise MS Home Server; treading a fine line between scary and amusing
viral  microsoft  advertising  childrens-books  servers  home  kids  scary  via:gizmodo 
january 2008 by jmason
Proprietary Software Does Not Scale
Wow, good point. 'The whole point about cloud computing is that it has to be effectively infinite - the more people want, the more they get. You can't do that with software that requires some kind of licensing payment, unless it's flat-fee.'
scaling  ec2  aws  microsoft  proprietary-software  open-source  coding  software 
november 2007 by jmason
Groklaw interview with Mark Taylor re the BBC's iPlayer project
the iPlayer is turning out to be a horrific piece of MS-DRM malware: 'the BBC management team who are responsible for the iPlayer are a checklist of senior employees from MS who were involved with Windows Media'. truly horrific; BBC are getting shafted
microsoft  bbc  iplayer  media  windows-media  drm  linux  open-source  free-software  groklaw  mark-taylor  bbc-trust  beeb 
october 2007 by jmason
Groklaw - Patent Infringement Lawsuit Filed Against Red Hat & Novell - Just Like Ballmer Predicted
'in July one Microsoft executive [joins patent troll company Acacia Tech]; then as of October 1, there is the second, a patent guy. October 9, IP Innovation, a subsidiary, sues Red Hat. And Novell. So much for being Microsoft's little buddy.'
sockpuppets  microsoft  old-tricks  patenting  swpats  nasty  acacia-technologies  patent-trolls  brad-brunell  paul-ryan  jonathan-taub  ip-innovation  ip  red-hat  novell  steve-ballmer  via:groklaw 
october 2007 by jmason
Corrupt countries were more likely to support Microsoft's OOXML document format
hahaha -- great correlation by EFFI (via Lars Wirzenius); countries preceived to be "very corrupt" by the Corruption Perceptions Index tended to vote favourably to MS' proposed standard
funny  microsoft  corruption  ooxml  via:lars-wirzenius  effi 
september 2007 by jmason
Google Docs vs. the Hassle of Microsoft Office and Friends
Jeremy Zawodny: 'I'm simply not going to bother with the hassle, trouble, expense, and complexity of desktop applications when an online substitute will do the job anymore. Life's too short already.' +1
jeremy-zawodny  online  saas  web-apps  bloatware  desktop  online-desktop  rich-clients  microsoft  google 
july 2007 by jmason
where that "Free Public Wifi" SSID comes from
turns out it's a side-effect of a Windows XP misfeature -- once your XP laptop connects to an ad-hoc network with a certain SSID, it in turn will broadcast that SSID in future as *its own* ad-hoc net. hence: viral!
viral  funny  windows  microsoft  wifi  free-public-wifi  airports  windows-xp  ad-hoc 
may 2007 by jmason
Hotmail's antispam measures snuff out legit emails, too | The Register
I've heard this a lot recently -- Hotmail's "SmartScreen" filter has become extremely false-positive-prone, silently discarding lots of non-spam mail without warning to sender or recipient. not good
hotmail  msn  microsoft  anti-spam  filtering  false-positives  errors  bugs  smartscreen  the-register 
may 2007 by jmason
Microsoft packing ISO meetings to push through their OOXML "standard"
'SC34 suddenly has a lot of new ['participating member' countries] sending representatives, and I am interested to note the majority of their representatives are, as individuals, also Microsoft employees.' up to their old dirty tricks, then
microsoft  dirty-tricks  ooxml  openoffice  via:simonphipps  open-source  iso  standards  politics 
march 2007 by jmason
MS Live Phishing Filter blocks their own website
The Windows Live OneCare software triggers on www.itsnotcheating.com.au, a Microsoft website, as a false positive. har har
funny  microsoft  false-positives  anti-phishing  web  security 
march 2007 by jmason
Firefox 2 Phishing Protection Effectiveness Testing
a test back in Nov 2006. FF2 + Google's anti-phishing blocklist had 81.54% accuracy, but (a) false positives were not measured, and (b) the Phishtank public feed of bad URLs was used, which is surely used as a data source by Google?
phishing  anti-spam  google  firefox  msie  microsoft  testing  software  blocklists  dnsbls 
march 2007 by jmason
Talk notes from a talk by Microsoft's "deliverability" guy Brian Holdsworth
'in Outlook 2007, they are moving to a [HTML] rendering engine built on MS Word instead of IE. The deliverability team found out about this at the same time [as] the general public ... -- doesn't know why this decision was made by Outlook.' wtflol MS!
omgwtf  inept  microsoft  funny  mail  html  outlook  microsoft-word  msie  communication 
february 2007 by jmason
Nate Lawson: _Copy Protection Wars: Analyzing Retro and Modern Schemes_ (RSA Conference 2007, PDF)
This brings me back! I spent much of my teenage years investigating these techniques on the C=64. This excellent presentation notes the similarities between those days and the techniques used nowadays on the Xbox 360
xbox360  microsoft  copy-protection  drm  security  nate-lawson  rsa2007  papers  pdf 
february 2007 by jmason
Interview with the spampire
a small-time spammer makes about $300 per day (on a good day) by sending 10 million spams
anti-spam  spam  economics  terry-zink  microsoft 
february 2007 by jmason
Microsoft patents BlueJ
scummy. You know, maybe allowing your product managers to blog is not a good idea, if you have the same kind of corporate approach to patents and ethics that MS clearly seems to have
microsoft  patents  java  visual-studio  bluej  swpats  ip 
january 2007 by jmason
EOOXML objections - Grokdoc
a concise, but complete, list of objections to Microsoft's proposed standardisation of the MS Word file format as an ISO standard. a strong case; tey even invent a new date representation, and treat 1900 as a leap year (MS vs. the Gregorian calendar!)
microsoft  proprietary  iso  ecma  ms-word  ms-office  openoffice  formats  interchange  interoperability  standards 
january 2007 by jmason
Microsoft's proprietary Word extensions broke my cake (JPEG image)
"Happy Birthday to Elsa / Aunt Elsa <!--{if !supportEmptyParas}--> <!--{endif}--> 12/01/1926 to 12/01/2006 <!--{if !supportEmptyParas}--> <!--{endif}-->". hahahaha!
via:fp  cake  microsoft  proprietary  open-systems  ms-word  comp-risks  funny  html 
january 2007 by jmason
Telegraph | News | Man banned in first case under anti-spam law
some guy in the UK called Paul McDonald sold spammy address lists containing Microsoft spamtraps; MS sued him under the "EU Privacy and Electronic Communications directive of 2003", and won. Good result there
uk  law  spam  anti-spam  bizads  microsoft  prosecutions  privacy  spamtraps 
january 2007 by jmason
Microsoft Breaks HTML Email Rendering in Outlook 2007
MS inexplicably switches from an IE-based rendering engine, to the one from MS Word 2007! no background images, no Flash, no forms, no CSS floats, no animated GIFs. wow. still, may be good news for anti-spam/anti-phish protection
html  microsoft  outlook  email  smtp  mime  flash  muas  via:simonwillison 
january 2007 by jmason
Handling of Microsoft's copyleft violation
Goatse'ing the official 'Microsoft Team RSS' blog, in response to licensing contravention. that takes chutzpah (via b3ta)
via:b3ta  microsoft  rss  syndication  goatse  windows  flickr 
december 2006 by jmason
moblog: The Windows Shutdown crapfest
a great example of how pathologically bureaucratic the decision-making can become, when a traditionally-managed software company becomes too large. Unsurprisingly, it's Microsoft we're talking about here, and the product is Vista (via spicylinks)
via:spicylinks  vista  microsoft  pathological  bureaucracy  software  business 
november 2006 by jmason
Verisign backs Vista security green streak | The Register
Pissing and moaning from Verisign suit about Mozilla's "loose collection of technoanarchists" (sic) refusing to support some kind of expensive^W"extended" cert format that Verisign are flogging. great -- SSL certs have worked so well in the past...
via:2lmc  verisign  firefox  ie7  microsoft  mozilla  tls  certificates  security  phishing 
october 2006 by jmason
which version control systems do you currently use, or plan to use, in the next 12 months?
Survey results -- amazingly, Visual SourceSafe tops the list somehow. The comments are full of truly horrific stories, and developers using manual backups in case VSS eats their work... wow
microsoft  vss  scm  bad-software 
august 2006 by jmason
OSCamp wiki: MicrosoftOSSandYou
notes from a chat between MS employees and OSCon attendees. two things: (a) PowerToys are "going to be open sourced" (about bloody time!); (b) you can smell the FUD that MS' lawyers have created internally regarding even *looking* at OSS code
open-source  oscon  oscamp  microsoft  powertoys  transcripts 
august 2006 by jmason
ITworld.com - Even the Builders of Windows Find Tech Support a Challenge
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer attends wedding; a parent asks if he'd have a look at their PC; Ballmer spends _no less than two days_ attempting to rid it of encrusted malware infestations -- before giving up and shipping it back to Redmond. hilarious
malware  steve-ballmer  ceos  spyware  viruses  ms-windows  microsoft  funny 
june 2006 by jmason
Blogzilla: DRM-a-go-go
'DRM-protected files exclusively released through iTunes ... appear in unprotected form on P2P networks 180 seconds later' -- omg, best DRM statistic ever
drm  p2p  copy-protection  cory-doctorow  microsoft  statistics  itunes  itms 
january 2006 by jmason
The story of Comic Sans
you know, if it had never made it past MS Bob, that would have been just fine (via Nelson)
via:nelson  ms-bob  microsoft  fonts  comic-sans  vincent-connare 
january 2006 by jmason
SNDS
Michele takes a look at this SenderBase-ish IP reputation db run by MSN Hotmail
hotmail  msn  microsoft  anti-spam  senderbase  reputation 
january 2006 by jmason
ACM Queue - A Conversation with Phil Smoot
good discussion about Hotmail. 'New hires tend to want to do complex things, but we know complex things break in complex ways. The veterans want simple designs, with simple interfaces and simple constructs that are easy to understand and debug and easy t
software  coding  hotmail  microsoft  megaservices  infrastructure  clustering  server-farms  parallelism 
january 2006 by jmason
BusinessWeek: The Patent Epidemic
the issue has really hit the mainstream now. Great Jefferson quote at the top, too: "[a man] has a right to use his knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee take from him the right to combine their use on the same subject?"
patents  thomas-jefferson  quotes  businessweek  microsoft  cisco 
january 2006 by jmason
Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger: Ross doesn’t trust Microsoft’s approach to Web
Scoble opens a Pandora's box by enumerating (correctly!) the reasons why open source is kicking MS' ass
scoble  microsoft  open-source  platforms  software 
november 2005 by jmason
Microsoft may become 'major opponent of patents', says Mark Shuttleworth
"I think in ten years you will see Microsoft become a major opponent of patents, and we will see very large software vendors turn around their position on patents"
patents  swpat  mark-shuttleworth  linux  open-source  microsoft 
october 2005 by jmason
Mini-Microsoft: Comment Overload at Mini-Microsoft
Microsoft Messenger has no less than 42 program managers. that's hilarious
bureaucracy  funny  microsoft  middle-management 
september 2005 by jmason
interview with Red Hat deputy gen'l counsel for IP on the state of software patenting
MS now have two *separate* US patents, on adding and removing white space from a document, respectively. it'd be funny if it wasn't so tragic. (via Danny)
via:malaclyps  software  patents  swpats  us-politics  patent-reform  red-hat  osrm  osdl  microsoft 
september 2005 by jmason
Maybe the IETF Won't Publish SPF and Sender-ID as Experimental RFCs After All
MS' "embrace and extend" of SPF records may render the RFC unpublishable
spf  sender-id  anti-spam  ietf  iesg  microsoft 
august 2005 by jmason
stuff.co.nz: Microsoft find spam bill hard to swallow
Microsoft's Ryan Hamlin calls NZ opt-in antispam law "too broad", and demands that it be watered down so as not to impinge on "the amazing vehicle of e-mail marketing". WTF?!!
microsoft  new-zealand  opt-in  opt-out  anti-spam  laws  spam 
august 2005 by jmason
GROKLAW: Hey. This First-to-File Thing Is Scary
Microsoft and Apple demonstrate the folly of a 'first-to-file' patent system
microsoft  apple  ipod  patents  first-to-file 
august 2005 by jmason
Dan Bricklin: what if VisiCalc had been patented?
a must-read. 'I .. have real problems with how they are affecting the software industry which has other means of protection and incentive that have proven successful to society.'
dan-bricklin  swpat  patents  visicalc  microsoft 
august 2005 by jmason
SecurityFocus: Interview with Dan Kaminsky on Microsoft's security
very good interview, covering MS, the professionalisation of black-hats, and spyware
dan-kaminsky  microsoft  security  unix  linux  exploits 
july 2005 by jmason
Open source: Are Microsoft and other holdouts about to crack? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com
good article on the OASIS situation, explaining how "open standard" != "implementable by open source" necessarily, and discussing how to fix this
oasis  standards  patents  microsoft  apache  ibm 
july 2005 by jmason
Ray Everett-Church: MSFT’s Ultimatum on Sender ID
Ray rips into MS big time; 'I have constantly watched Microsoft attempt to bully and coerce the world into adopting its myopic view of email authentication'
email  anti-spam  sender-id  spf  spam  microsoft 
june 2005 by jmason
Microsoft pushes spam-filtering technology | CNET News.com
MS will be mandating SPF or Sender-ID records come November, by marking as "junk" mails that don't use them
spf  sender-id  microsoft  anti-spam  spam  hotmail  msn  false-positives 
june 2005 by jmason
Dan Crevier's Blog : My first patent!
hilarious. MS developer gets a crappy obvious patent, posts jubilant weblog entry, comments hilarity quickly ensues
patents  software  microsoft  funny  schadenfreude 
may 2005 by jmason
IEBlog: What have you guys been doing since IE6?
one-line summary of the IE team's answer: "our team got split up". great!
msie  browser  firefox  microsoft  windows  project-management 
february 2005 by jmason
Richard Clarke rips Microsoft over security
MS' response is classic: basically "er, well, we wrote some *books* about how to do it"
microsoft  software  security 
february 2005 by jmason
Schneier on Security: GhostBuster
MS' rootkit detector: if files look different based on whether you're running from disk or from a known-safe CD-ROM, chances are that there's hostile code on the hard disk. very clever!
rootkits  security  microsoft  ghostbuster  trojans 
february 2005 by jmason
The Reg: Ethical fair trade - you knew it made sense until MS embraced it
MS compares itself to third-world peasant farmers; hilarious. Don't miss the "how much tax does MS pay?" question at the end
fairtrade  intellectual-property  microsoft  pr-bloopers  software  world-trade 
december 2004 by jmason
Pei Wei's personal comments on Eolas vs Microsoft, and the Viola prior art
Pei says he informed the patent filer of Viola's prior art before the patent was granted
eolas  microsoft  patents  plugins  software  viola  www 
december 2004 by jmason
nat friedman: Microsoft has become a depressing place to work
'Gates keeps lamenting that talented people are losing interest in IT ... but what if he's got a dark window on the IT world not because software is failing to attract bright developers, but because *Microsoft* is failing to attract bright developers?'
industry  microsoft  software 
october 2004 by jmason
OSIA to Gartner: Get A Clue over Desktop Linux
"If Gartner's conclusion that pre-installing Linux encourages people to steal copies of Windows were correct, then we can extend this tenuous logic by stating that pre-installing Windows in turn must clearly encourage people to pirate application-level so
gartner  linux  microsoft  operating-systems  piracy  windows 
october 2004 by jmason

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