As predicted, Microsoft’s efforts to license the new SenderID anti-SPAM technology is causing all sorts of problems with the Open Source community. Microsoft want their alleged intellectual property to be made part of the new industry standard on mail authentication. The problem is that their “license” is not compatible with the GPL and other Open Source licenses. What that means is that some of the biggest MTA ‘s (mail server applications) in use on the Internet may not be able to use the new technology. I suspect Microsoft hopes that will encourage people to buy their own mail server software, or perhaps they consider it a potential lever to use against OSS (Open Source Software) sometime in the future.

Sendmail, Postfix, Courier and other Open Source MTA’s have licenses that basically make anyone using the software a “sub licensee”, something that may well be incompatible with Microsoft’s IP license. As it stands right now, Sendmail have created a testing milter plug-in for SenderID, but did so without any license with Microsoft.

(more…)

Microsoft have said in a recent filing to the SEC that it expects sales in 2005 will not be able to keep up with previous years, and that Open Source Software (OSS) is one of the reasons for the less than optimistic forecast.

I find that rather odd that only a week ago, Paul Roworth, Microsoft Australia’s platform strategy manager said:

The perceived threat from Linux is only a misconception and has no validity.
Linux, receives far too much publicity because the truth is that Linux is not challenging Microsoft’s leadership position in the marketplace.
Microsoft’s losses are generally sensationalised; low profile wins by Linux are over-rated, all of which contributes to the misconception.

Is it just me or do Mr Roworth’s statements contradict somewhat, what MS have said in the SEC filing?

It isn’t just “losing” to Linux or other Open Source that is hurting Microsoft, the “threat” of Open Source is almost as bad. Any smart company (or government) that wants a better deal from Microsoft has only to install OpenOffice.org or Linux of some sort on a few machines and Microsoft will drop their pants to make sure they keep the companies business. That aspect is seriously cutting into Microsoft’s profit margins on the big deals. (Ironically not many of those companies are realising just how badly they were being overcharged before. If Microsoft can happily make massive price cuts to compete with Linux, doesn’t that mean that they’ve been overcharging in the past?)

(more…)

Google has added some much needed new features to their adwords service. For those of you out there that are webmasters, and make some additional revenue from putting Google adwords ads on your site, these changes are very welcome.

The first of the changes is the best one (in my opinion). You can now have more then one ad block her page, (to a limit of three). Some pages are so long, that they would benefit from more then one ad. (on many of our pages, the ads are so small that most people don’t notice them at all.)

(more…)

For those who need tutorials I have noticed that the Jasc website now have these. Go to http://www.jasc.com/support and then the learning center link on the left or use the others, whatever you need.

We used to have to go to the Paint Shop Pro users group for tutorials before, I don’t know exactly how long Jasc have been doing them themselves but I have just discovered them.

There are a couple of upgrades, Don posted news of these. They are still at the Beta stage at the moment, but I think I am going to be very interested in version 9 as I really like 8.

The Telegraph in the UK has released a story about the downsides to using Internet Explorer, and the benefits of upgrading to an alternative. (In this case the alternatives discussed are Mozilla and Firefox).

So there you have it folks, the US government suggested you get rid of Internet Explorer, dozens of security experts around the world have suggested the same, Microsoft’s security chief has admitted to using Firefox, Internet Explorer 6 has had over 160 flaws found since it was released, and now even Journalists are getting sick of an Internet infested by virus’s, spyware, spam, Trojans, worms all manner of other net nasties, all of which have at some time in the past gotten into peoples PC’s because of Internet Explorer or a program that uses parts of it. (like Outlook Express).

I’ll say it again folks, try Firefox. If you don’t like it, they will give you a refund. (that was a joke, Firefox is free, so it wouldn’t be much of a refund.)

Regards

Franki

I just came accross the Gmail Giving Tree – Welcome site. I have been wanting to give Gmail a whirl for a bit now. A couple of groups I belong to have people who have received invites. I have not. I am curious if anyone has had experience with the giving tree concept. What bothered me is that there is no privacy policy on this site.

The Register Has just done a review of Windows XP service pack 2, and found it somewhat lacking.

In short, The Reg found that SP2 doesn’t turn off enough services, the firewall doesn’t block outgoing connections, and Internet Explorer and Outlook Express still have security issues. Worst of all, they still have not made admin rights limited to only an administrator account (as opposed to all users having admin rights), that one thing alone would have made a huge difference in security.

(more…)