The Wall Street Journal reported last Friday that Microsoft has a special list of clients who receive security fixes before the general public. The only disclosed recipient thus far is the United States Air Force. The concern is that if anyone can intercept the update, analize it for the flaw being corrected, and beat the general release, then they have a gaping flaw that can be exploited on a major league level.

Let’s stop and think a minute. Microsoft updates software with patches every day. Not everyone goes for the latest update (indeed, how many users are still on Windows 98 as we speak in 2005?). Further, the updates are freely released. So the same risk exists with every update, just on a slightly smaller scale. If Microsoft didn’t pre-test the release — and they sometimes don’t install well — and instead sent that release to the general public to test, there would be hundreds of thousands of unhappy people when the install failed.

What major software maker wouldn’t want to release a beta or any update if they have the time to do it. Early reports were off-base (no pun intended) on this one, as this is probably a good thing. Read this later report to get a more objective view of the program and it’s value.

A security researcher in France was just busted and given a suspended 5000 Euro fine for publishing security exploit information for Tegam Viguard antivirus. Tegam was not happy about the published research and instigated legal action that resulted in the suspended fine. The prosecution alleged that intellectual property laws were broken by the researcher. This is not good news for Security Research in France and sets a worrying precedent for the rest of the world. The same argument that is often quoted when discussing gun control applies here. If you take all the legally owned guns, then only criminals will have guns. Likewise, if you make finding and publishing security flaws illegal, then only criminals will look for flaws, (they are not likely to publish them though.). Zdnet has the full story.

The Judge in California totally (and intentionally) blew by the question of journalistic confidentiality ruling that stolen information is just that, stolen information. Regardless of who has stolen information — journalist or not — they need to divulge from whence it came. This is exactly what we said previously.

A C|Net article quotes the judges opinion which states that in this case the confidential information “is stolen property, just as any physical item, such as a laptop computer containing the same information on its hard drive (or not) would be… The bottom line is there is no exception or exemption in either the (Uniform Trade Secrets Act) or the Penal Code for journalists–however defined–or anyone else.”

The judge did allow time for an emergency appeal before compelling the disclosures.

Sources say that Yahoo is readying a text only advertisement vehicle that will compete with Googles AdSense product. The AdSense product allows smaller web sites to display ads served by Google that are triggered by keywords contained in the page on which they are served. To date, no other advertiser is competing with a significant stake in this market.

We have offered AdSense ads on our site, but have not found it to be highly productive, despite daily ad views of between 3000 and 5500. We do better on donations (see link at bottom of this page to donate) to offset the costs of running our site. We have not sought out impression advertisements thus far, mainly due to the sales effort required, so something like AdSense makes that part of it easy because they bring the advertiser to you.

Will competition in this area increase revenue to the host sites? Do Yahoo and Google each try to pay a little better than the other to get more placements? Or does this cut in half a fixed amount of revenue for advertising?

Currently Yahoo offers sites an opportunity through it’s affiliate programs. We do not find any mention of this program at Yahoo presently, so I presume rollout may be a future thing.

Microsoft-watch have an interesting article about Microsoft’s new push for patent reform in the US. This is in a way to be expected. Although Microsoft are one of the biggest patent holders, they are also one of the biggest targets for patent infringement lawsuits, and so they want to change the rules. They are totally correct, the rules and implementation are both broken, and Microsoft’s suggestions are for the most part solid, but I can’t help but find their action suspect and wonder if they are not just trying to change the system to limit action against them, while leaving them open to use their own patents to carry on as usual. This is however a double bladed sword as I suspect that if Microsoft gets their reforms, a good many of their own patents will be invalid along with the rest.

The whole reason the software patent system is silly and broken is simple. If the giants who created TCP/IP (the underlying protocol running the Internet), HTML and the WWW, (Web pages), E-mail and the GUI (Graphical User Interface) had decided to patent and license their ideas, what would Microsoft, Linux, IBM and co have had to build from? I’d guess IBM would be the only player on the market now as Microsoft and most others were at that time, fairly small companies and couldn’t develop applications which had big patent licensing costs. Microsoft and everyone else freely use all the real innovation underpinning the Internet for free, but every time they come up some an idea, no matter how simple, trivial or obvious, they seem to feel the need to patent it immediately and sell licences. It is very sad that in the world today, money trumps everything and very few seem to do anything beneficial for IT without expecting fistfuls of cash in return. Imagine if the guys that created the Internet had had the same philosophy.

At the current rate, in the coming years it will become so expensive to licence all the patents necessary to write a basic application, that the application will have to be priced so high that the developers won’t be able to sell it. Only truly innovative inventions should be patentable, just taking a real world scenario and getting a patent for applying that real world scenario to the Internet does not qualify for a patent. That is part of what is wrong with the system and even though Microsoft is getting stung by lawsuits and is asking for changes, they are as big an offender with regards to stupid patent applications as any.

Wireless broadband offered city wide, or even in rural areas appears to be a growing trend. This is a good thing as it makes broadband accessible and affordable in most cases. Since the roll out of wireless in Grand Haven, Michigan in 2004, other cities have followed suit. Now, according to this article, Japan appears to be aggressively pursuing wireless not only in populated areas, but in more remote areas as well.

Two things made Grand Haven a particularly attractive spot for wireless broadband:
-There is a large state park there with weekly and daily campers who want to stay connected.
-There is a significant population of boaters who slip in the marina’s there (and can even use wireless up to ten miles off-shore).
Because this creates many monthly users, the ability to pay for the sytem may exceed that of areas with more stable populations.

Wireless has many advantages including the lack of needing to invest in the infra-structure of phone lines and/or cables to carry signal to each end user. The down side is that you create some security risks using wireless over a large area.

I am reading with interest accounts of Mount St. Helen’s eruption yesterday (photo of eruption). In 1980 when it erupted, I was nearby in the following week. I visited Moscow, Idaho, and the ground was covered in volcanic ash several inches thick. It looked like it had snowed.

It is good to see that they have increased the use of technology to monitor activity around the volcano so as to minimize risk of injury and death. An October 2004 C|Net article explains how remote cameras, sensors and GPS units constantly monitor to volcano to follow what is going on.

When I left the area in 1980, I packed up several large zip lock baggies of the ash to bring it back for friends and a college science teacher. Imagine the difficulties I had at the airport as a long haired college kid going through the security x-ray when four or five zip lock baggies of white powdery substance shows up. Of course after some explanation they offered to give me more of the stuff and I got on the plane.