Word has it that there are ten different updates coming for Windows systems, one of which is classed as “critical”. The news comes directly from Microsoft’s “Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification“. It breaks down to seven updates for Windows, one for Exchange, one for Microsoft Services for UNIX and one for (ISA) and Small Business Server. Make sure you have auto-update turned on or run Windows Update manually after Tuesday.

In Virus news, they never miss a trick when looking for a social engineering tactics to find new ways to encourage gullible users to install Malware. The latest is an E-mail claiming to have information about Michael Jackson committing suicide. Following the E-mail link in an unpatched Internet Explorer will result in the installation of the Trojan horse program borobt which opens your computer to all manner of malicious behaviour. As normal, this problem only affects Windows computers, Mac and Linux are not affected.

Nokia has released some phone software that allows users to create simple template based “pages” for their mobile phones which can then be picked up by other phones via Bluetooth. The idea is intriguing and if picked up by other phone makers could be of interest to both business (sort of a phone swappable business card) and personal (a good way to find “prospects” in the clubbing scene) users.

The software is free, and can be found here. According to the drop down list on the download page the software is available for the 3230, 6260, 6600, 6620, 6630, 6670, 6680, 6681, 6682 and the 7610. If your still confused about how it works, they have a nice flash demo on the main page.

With technologies like 3G slowly becoming more mainstream and smart phones becoming more prolific, I can see this sort of functionality extended beyond the short range of Bluetooth and wireless. The possibilities are endless. Imagine being able to look up a business number in the phone book and enter that number into your phone to get a look at small page detailing their offerings before you call. It isn’t there yet, but give it time.

It may not be a bad idea to watch your incoming Google search hits more closely then usual over the next week or two to see how you are affected by one of the biggest changes to their search system since its inception. The changes, going under the codename “the Bourbon Update” has mostly taken place already but final tinkering will no doubt be ongoing. There are a plethora of reasons for the update but most seem related to improving organic search quality and reducing fraudulent results which is ironic since Google in my opinion and based on our own search statistics, are already way ahead of the other search engines in these regards. However it would be fair to say that not everybody has been happy with the results of the update and there are many reports online of previously popular sites losing much of their Google traffic. Hence my suggestion that you watch your Google stats closely over the coming weeks to find out how the changes affect you.

Our incoming Google referrals have risen by 4% in the last few weeks, so right now I’m pretty happy with the changes, but our growth has been totally organic and we’ve not engaged in any potentially shady methods to increase our ranking having basically just followed our own SEO tutorial. Also the number of external sites linking to, or mentioning us has grown gradually but dramatically over the past year, so I wasn’t expecting us to be adversely affected. It seems that one of the worst things you can do nowadays to hurt your rankings is to have your number of incoming links increase dramatically in an unusually short period of time, (something that is often a strong indicator that you are engaging in questionable tactics to gain Pagerank). That is however not the only thing you can do to get yourself in Google’s bad books so watch your Google referrers in the coming weeks to see how your sites are affected, you may find you will have to take some action in order to restore your traffic to pre-Bourbon levels. A good review of the Bourbon update can be found at dotcomicide where they suggest that the changes are to better detect the following questionable practices:
– Non related Links. (Links from sites that have nothing to do with your content.)
– Duplicate Content. (Affiliate sites and sites which copy the content of others are likely to be adversely affected.)
– Fraternal Linking. (Cross linking sites on the same host or in some other way related.)
– Run of Site Links (Links to you from every page on another site.)
– Low Quality Reciprocal Links. (Links swaps with sites that in Google’s mind are SPAM or very low quality.)
The above factors are not new to the search engines, they are just receiving more attention from Google then previously. The best SEO advice I’ve ever seen is mentioned on that site and can be best worded as: “put yourself in Google’s head” which is something I’ve been suggesting to clients for some time now. Basically if you think about your site from the search engines perspective, you can get a good idea of those things that will adversely affect your ranking, as well as those things that can improve it.

Microsoft IE 6 is old and full of security holes. Not a week goes by that someone says, on one forum or other that I us, “I have to use IE 6 at work”. Well okay there are employers with great confidence or cavalier attitudes. However, people who can switch are doing so fairly quickly and Firefox is starting to get a decent percentage of the market.

Microsoft, as recently as November denied it would update Internet Explorer 6, and wait for IE 7, which was initially planned to be available only with the next release of Windows (codenamed Longhorn) but yesterday they released a tabbed browsing toolbar via MSN for their browser according to C-Net. Of course this is nothing new as Maxthon has offered this as an add on shell built over the IE browser for a long time now. What this doesn’t do is fix any of the underlying problems IE has.

The foolish among us will mistake this for a browser update. It isn’t. Don’t be fooled, go get Firefox. Internet Explorer 7 will not even be available for users of anything older then XP SP2, so users of Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000 will have to use Firefox or Opera to get a decent fully featured secure browser.

[Franki: Interesting to note that for the first time ever, Firefox is scoring above Internet Explorer on HTMLfixIT. See the usage stats to the right of what you are reading.]

Big Brother — in the form of your employer looking over your shoulder — is getting bigger and stronger, according to C-Net.

The percentage of large employers monitoring outbound email and phone call volume now appears to be over fifty percent, up from less than ten percent less than five years ago. Keystroke logging software can tell your boss what you thought about saying to him/her, even if you later changed your mind and deleted the comment.

Recently many companies with products that are, or could be classed as Adware/Spyware have been threatening legal action against any company that classes them as such. Symantec, apparently aiming to beat Hotbar to the punch has filed suit against Hotbar asking Hotbar to be declared as Adware and to enable Symantec to treat it as such.

This quote from the Symantec seems to sum it up best:

Symantec is not seeking damages as part of the suit. Symantec is petitioning for a declaratory judgement by the court affirming Symantec’s assertion that certain Hotbar program files are indeed adware and can be treated as computer security risks.

Until there are strict guidelines defining Spyware and Adware, we should get used to these sort of cases. In other news, it seems that Hotbar has also had it’s right to use the Truste seal of approval according to Eweek.

There had been discord between Apple and the Open Source community over their joint but forking efforts to advance the KHTML rending engine behind such browsers as Konqueror and Safari, but that’s all over now. Along with the recent announcement that Apple was going to Intel for chips, comes news that Apple has reformed their Open Source efforts and released the Webkit Open Source project aimed at improving collaboration and sharing on the browser technology.

This is more important to the web developers than it might seem. Right now there is a general perception that there are only two real browser technologies to develop for, Internet Explorer and Firefox/Netscape Mozilla GECKO. It is important to remember Opera and the KHTML browsers as well as several smaller players as well. Market share isn’t really a good reason to develop for only a limited number of browsers because as Firefox has proven recently, market share is unpredictable and can change at the drop of a hat. We as developers want to follow Sun’s Java mantra of “Write once run everywhere” where the use of open W3C standards means that all browsers can correctly render the page in question. For that to become reality developers need to start following the standards rather then coding for a particular browser and Internet Explorer needs all of it’s rendering bugs fixed. If Konqueror and Safari succeed in aligning their code base and standards support, they could together grow to encompass a significant part of the browser landscape and ensure that developers become aware that the only way to write web pages is by the standards rather then by the browser.