The New York Times has a very interesting story here .

Apparently the lads at Google have poached employee’s from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, Sun’s JAVA team, and then hosted the Mozilla Developer Day on the Google campus. They are aware that Microsoft has turned its attention on search technology, so in response, they appear to be looking into returning the favour. Since Mozilla is open source and the code is available to all, it may well be that the “Google browser” might be a modified version of Firefox or the Full Mozilla suite.

Or it could all just be hype and Google are just grabbing anyone smart that they can get their hands on. Only time will tell. I suppose a Google browser would be cool, but I’m pretty happy with Firefox now, so I’m not sure I’d swap.

Regards

Franki

The battle has started between those interested in software innovation and those interested in lining their pockets to the detriment of everything else. The battlefield is the patenting of non specific ideas.

To give you an idea of the problem, say for example I had patented the idea of burning a flammable substance and using the resultant released energy to “do stuff”. Do you have any idea how many people would have to pay me money? Even if I had never actually researched the process, or created a product, anyone using energy derived from fire for heat, cooking, power generation or to power a car would owe me cash.

That is what’s happening today in the software industry. Big companies are patenting the building blocks of applications and using them to build or ensure market share dominance. It needs to stop.

To that end, the guys at the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) have filed a brief to the US court of appeals to have ambiguous patents declared invalid. If a patent isn’t totally explicit about an “idea” then it should not be valid.

The other question is the validity of software patents at all. Is it acceptable to allow someone to patent double clicking a mouse button? or an online to-do list? Well guess what? Microsoft already have both of those “ideas” wrapped up. Here is another way of looking at it, nobody in their right mind would try to patent selling stuff, but if you do it online, there is a risk you will be sued for patent infringement because online shopping has been the target of a patent or two as well.

Read about the first salvo in this war at TheRegister.

Microsoft has revealed plans to have windows update check the licenses of your Microsoft software.
Ostensibly it’s to allow people to double check that their software is legit, but who knows where it will really end.

The question is, if an employee runs windows update, and Microsoft finds out that there are a couple of other systems in the building with the same serial number, would that make it likely that the company would get a visit from a Microsoft audit team? I suspect it might, and that’s a bit of a worry because it may just be because they used a disk image to install and didn’t change the serials. Not every road leads to pirates, but try telling Microsoft that.

Microsoft has a deplorable security record, they should definitely not be doing anything to discourage people from using their service, but then again, when have they ever failed to put their foot in their mouth in the past?

I suppose we should be happy about this new development, the more people Microsoft annoy, the more will go looking for alternatives and end up running Linux, and that’s always a good thing. Read more at TheInquirer.

Regards

Franki

Firefox has broken all of the previous Mozilla download records. The preview release of version 1.0 has hit the 1 million mark in under 100 hours since its release.
That is 6 days earlier then they were aiming for. So now they are going for 2 million.

Help them out and get Firefox, the best browser on the Internet.

Regards

Franki

Without getting into details, this looks to be a biggie..

The link is here. and TheInquirer has covered it here.

Basically, in certain circumstances, a machine with XP and Service pack 2 can be completely compromised with no real effort.

Regards

Franki

HTMLfixIT has been pushing Firefox for a long time now, as have many other such sites. The good news is that the quest for a better browser is working.

News.com have an article detailing how both w3schools and Cnet themselves have seen Open Source browsers like Firefox jump in usage from 8 to 18 percent this year alone. Both sites are very popular and are good indicators for how the Firefox revolution is going. Although it should be noted that both sites (and HTMLfixIT itself, which also shows similar figures) are more tech related sites, and therefore the visitors would be more informed then the general net population. Still, it’s fantastic news.

There is an interesting quote from that article, from Martin Taylor, the general manager of Microsoft’s platform strategy:

Firefox isn’t yet a focus for Martin Taylor, the general manager of Microsoft’s platform strategy, who is in charge of Microsoft’s response to Linux and open-source software. But he suspects it will come under discussion in coming months.

“Firefox is creeping up, getting more attention,” Taylor said in an interview on Wednesday.

Hmm, I guess that means Microsoft plans to do a smear campaign ? who knows, and who cares? With Internet Explorers security record, I doubt anyone would believe them anyway.

So, now to plug the best browser on the net. Get your free copy of Firefox here, and learn how to really enjoy the net.

Regards

Franki

News.com have the story and you can find the new search engine here. We are already in it, so I’m happy regardless, but I won’t be giving up on Google any time soon. 🙂 Time will tell if the new engine steals users from the other big guns. It does have some cool features not found in other engines, like the images that are displayed in the search results.

The problem as I see it, is that I’m not sure how much I’d trust a search engine owned by one of the worlds biggest online shopping companies. To me that is kind of like asking Microsoft if their products are better, cheaper or more secure then their oppositions, meaning that nobody in their right mind would believe their answers without checking it out for themselves.

Regards

Franki