Bad Windows

Microsoft has been busy these past few days reminding the world that it really is an organization of monstrous proportions and its tendrils reach from the humblest consumer desktop right up to the level of super-computing. Its message is clear: The company has no intention of giving up any of the markets in which it competes to open source operating systems like Linux — at least not without the mother of all fights.

Perhaps provoked by Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth’s pronouncement that “we want to put Ubuntu and free software on every single consumer PC that ships from a major manufacturer, the ultimate maverick move,” Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) saw fit to shed some new light on Office Starter 2010, Ina Fried, over at CNet, reports. This free edition of its Office software — which will not include PowerPoint but will have crippled versions of Excel and Word — will be given away with consumer machines in an effort to poison the well for competing open source productivity suites like OpenOffice (which includes a PowerPoint-compatible presentation application and full-featured spreadsheet and word processing programs.)

Read more at ServerWatch

More than a year after doomsday reports hinted that the Conficker worm would bring down the Internet, one-in-10 Windows PCs still have not been patched to plug the hole the worm wriggles through, new data shows.

And 25 of every 1,000 systems are currently infected with the worm.

According to Qualys, a security risk and compliance management provider, about 10% of the hundreds of thousands of Windows systems it monitors for customers have not yet applied Microsoft ‘s MS08-067 security update. MS08-067, an out-of-band release that shipped in October 2008, patched a bug in the service Windows uses to connect to file and print servers.

Just 11 days after Microsoft delivered the emergency update, antivirus vendors said a worm, variously tagged as Conficker and Downadup, was using the Windows vulnerability , as well as other methods, to aggressively attack PCs and build a massive botnet. By January 2009, some security firms estimated that Conficker had compromised millions of PCs .

Read more at TechWorld

Microsoft has come under heavy criticism for its role in the standardisation process for its Office Open XML (OOXML) standard at the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO). In a blog entry on the second anniversary of the specification’s adoption as an ISO standard, Alex Brown, convenor of the Office Open XML (OOXML) Ballot Resolution Meeting at the ISO, has stated that Microsoft is failing to implement commitments on transforming OOXML into an open ISO standard. He summarises the situation thus, “It seems to me that without a change of direction the entire OOXML project is now surely heading for failure.”

Read more at H-online

Microsoft initially started this patent crusade about 3 years ago, and after the initial wave of accusations the Redmond giant seemed to slumber. All was well for a while. Sure, we all felt as though Novell, Xandros, and Linspire had sold their souls to Satan, but we didn’t really care. There were no real effects of the deals seen. Microsoft claimed that 235 patents had been violated, but to date they have yet to say who violated those patents and in what way. To me, this seems like a massive FUD campaign. What has not yet been asked of Microsoft is this: who will you hold responsible should the Linux kernel itself contain the IP violations? Are you really going to go to tens of thousands of kernel contributors, take all of them to court, and then proceed to sue all of them? Such an action would completely destroy Microsoft’s public image, and I don’t think that’s the type of blunder from which you could recover.

Read more at eleven is louder