I think its time that as an IT community, we explained to users that AV is bad

I've always had more problems with AV products that they've solved. I'd especially never put A/V on a server! (Unless it is a file server). What are people doing having access to upload stuff to your server anyway? Its like IE7 "secure mode" with win 2008. If you have server admins browsing for porn on your servers, then you have bigger security problems than malicious web pages. You only get viruses from two things: porn and warez. End of story. Block those sites from your corporate network.

AV slows down machines, incorrectly deletes files, installs itself into all the same hooks that viruses themselves use, and if you follow good defense rules elsewhere, then it is a non-issue (again except for end-user machines and file servers).

I'm tired of walking into a company, finding that A/V is the biggest performance problem with a server, and being thrown out like I'm raving mad. And stupid rules like PCI mandate this stuff.

The age of A/V is coming to an end. There are way more viruses being produced each year than researchers to defend them, and they are overwhelmed, and obviously making mistakes. Blacklisting has reached its limit: white-listing, lock-down, sandboxes, and secure OS design are the way forward. It will just take Luddites 10 more years to realize that.

I dislike these studies that avoid the concept of motivation

Yes, theoretical people could theoretically work better in teams. But in reality, engineers are an egotistical bunch, because that is the personality type that is best suited to solve problems. If they weren't motivated to solve problems and show off, they'd have become doctors or lawyers or something.

The problem is managers that don't know how to manage engineers. You can't expect every type of employee to function the same way. Some work best in coordinated teams, others work best when competing to find a solution. Manage engineers like engineers: set it up so they can compete, and you get a super-productive team racing to solve a problem.

NASA knew this back in the day, but seems to have forgotten....

Rock on jake...

Keep living the dream!

Right idea, stupid prices.

They need to drop the stupid limits and overage charges. If you are going to have a metered service, then you have to make it X dollars for Y GB, period. This is just a stupid way to get "consumers" to guarantee their revenue by selecting a "tier", then giving them extra revenue if the customer goes over. This is fricken stupid.

Saving the wrong companies

There are three big auto makers in the US, and dozens of foreign competitors. There are only two x86 processor makers in the world. If AMD goes down, Intel is back to being a monopoly. We are saving the wrong companies.

It has started

Next the will be manipulating rankings. Only a little at first, then increasingly so until the search engine becomes useless. As a publicly traded company you have to have quarterly revenue increase. The only way to do that is to keep earning more money, and as an advertiser you can't do that without ever more ads. Eventually you get to a point where you have so many ads your service is useless, then the next IPO comes along and kills you, until the same fate befalls them.

Re: Michael Habel

The problem is that over the last couple decades, corruption has been rewarded. You can't pick any leaders from successful companies without getting thieves. That is how they became successful. With a lack of regulation thieves prosper and so the prosperous are now by and large thieves.

Time to clear the old growth so that start-up out there with the technology that solves the energy crises can succeed.

Ok, I appreciate the fact that the DHS is not up to task,

But I *really* wouldn't put the NSA in charge of it. They have a complete conflict of interest. They're job is spying. They want things to be *insecure*. Look how they complained over the RSA thing. Now you are saying you should put *those guys* in charge of keeping America secure? I don't know, they know their stuff, but to ask someone to simultaneously be an aggressor and a defender sounds like they will do one or both jobs poorly. Lets let the NSA be the NSA, and assign cyber security to some new department, *not* DHS. Oh yeah, and break up DHS while you're at it.

Fix the economy...

take down the incumbents. Their tax revenue only looks nice until you see businesses that would spring up in their place.

Way to give consumers less choice

Go to hell.

@David Wiernicki

No, I am completely serious. Call me crazy, but I am starting to come around to Orlowski's point of view on this one. I loath monopolies, duoplolies, trioplies and any other form of non-competitive or anti-competitive business. I think all the major labels, cell phone companies, Microsoft, and all ISPs (except Cox communications, here in the US), should be broken up for racketeering. You have to clear the old growth for the saplings to survive.

But likewise, I believe that truly competitive players in a free market need to have their IP protected, and are entitled for compensation for the distribution of their works. Everyone knows the Internet ifs rife with piracy, and although an imperfect system, it has served to redistribute the wealth back to the people who were so long screwed by the labels ($20 for a CD with two decent tracks?)

But now that everyone has successfully exerted their fair-use rights, by downloading every record they ever bought in mp3 form, and everyone has moved on to out-and-out piracy of new works, perhaps it is time to start enforcing laws again, so we can have a truly free market.

Queue flame war, and apologies, but I am a *true* capitalist: a free market is a well-regulated one.

(Sarah, copy Andrew. I'd buy him a round to hear what he thinks about that. Thanks love :-* )

Ok, its time

I'd prefer to see the Big 4 completely go out of business first, but it seems like we need to regulate the Internet at some point. Although its great to kill the big labels, we'll never see smaller ones succeed if there are no mechanisms in place to protect IP.

You give them too much credit

"Autorun's convenience has long been offset by the risk it poses"

A ridiculous statement. It was insecure by design, should never have happened, was impossible to turn off, and Microsoft deserves every bit of shit they get for this. In fact, I believe they should be held civilly if not criminally liable.

Microsoft is freakin stoopid

Their own sites don't even render. As a web developer, I have to say their own web controls don't even render. How could they do this? What idiots. "We embrace standards, to the point that our own shit doesn't even work". WTF right hand meet left hand...

Javascript, SVG, Sorted.

Now if only MS would support it =S

The FTC had it right

1) Force MS to remove the browser from the OS

2) Break up MS into web, Office, and OS divisions

3) enjoy being able to use an OS where a browser crash doesn't bring the whole thing down

Now we just need to make it happen. Next eye on Google, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, and every other giant company with anti competitive practices and crap customer service that only survives because its rivals are just as bad.

If the EU does it before us, then cheers to them.

Re: MS & Adobe get stuffed.

Count me in on that.

Micro sattelite?

Am I going to have to do the probability math? Were going to have to break down the number of satellites (not junk), figure out their statistical trajectories and velocities relative to each other, find the volume of space that each would occupy during a given period of collision time. Crap, my brain hurts. Surely someone has done this already? BTW, thanks for the impact force and total volume of space. Those posts help, unlike this inertia crap. Yes all you fricken wankers, you've proved that you know basic physics. Way to go.

Anyway, jumping to motive/opportunity, I am sure the Russians didn't lie about this thing being out of fuel X number of years in advance just so they could crash it into something, but what about launching micro-satellites to dock and steer it into another sat? We've heard about the US launching micro-satellites in the news recently, albeit photo satellites. Who says the newly assertive Rusians didn't want to prove they had the same capability? Especially by taking out an important US satellite over Russian soil using a plausibly deniable "dead" asset"? I'd like to see what the heavens-above people have to say about it. Did the orbit this was in during the collision match the orbit they tracked and predicted? Or was it maneuvered into place during the last pass? And how accurate is the tracking?

I've heard allot of worry about satellites being taken out by debris, which makes sense, being >= 10000 paces of debris, but that match changes when you predict a satellite-to-satellite collision? 100000^2 vs <1000^2 LEO sats?

A single anomaly does not indicate a healthy, competitive, or innovative system

God YES! Common sense in the news! People *not* lying to me for a change. What is this bizzarro world? Day-of-reckoning? Whatever it is, I will take it.

They got all their cards compromized...

And all they did was reset the PIN numbers!!!??!? Put this in DailyWTF

God I love the US vs UK flame wars...

They single-handedly make the Reg worth reading! Let me try one out:

"US citizens are a bunch of SUV driving, McDonalds eating fatties, who don't know squat about geography, and charge gung-ho into every war indiscriminately killing everything when just a little good old British charm would do the trick!"

Ha that was fun. How about another?

"UK residents are just a bunch of tea-drinking sally pissants who gave all their rights to the labour governemnt, and are upset about handing the role of global empire to the Americans!"

That should get everyone charged up! Now all we need are some South Africans, Kiwi's, or Ozzies the jump in... anyone?

Re: What's next?

Nope, this is pretty much it. They will be able to keep an eye on everything in low earth orbit. Spin the thing around, and they can probably track everything in geosynchronous orbit as well. Sounds like a pretty good plan to me. And I even hope the Chinese get their own. The more transparency the better. Its only when one country thinks it can get away with something another country won't notice that things really get scary.

Wow, a music-related article I can comment on?

Cool!

So *all* memory is virtual?

Yeah, I bet that isn't a big performance hit (chuckle). This is frickin stupid, the disk responds in milliseconds. DRAM responds in nanoseconds. That is a 1,000,000 X performance hit. Why even bother anyway, with new solid state storage we might not even have disks anymore.

Unless that is the point. If this guy is anticipating RAM-like non-volatile storage, than maybe there is a point, but without even being able to anticipate what the hardware will look like, performance tuning would probably make whatever architecture he has come up with irrelevant.

Sorry, but unless there is some hugely important fact that the writer left out out of the story, then I call BS on this one.

(I would like to see a serious challenger to WIndows though! BTW, a Russian condescendingly talking about "communist" Linux is some hilarious irony!)

RIP Vista

Alas, we hardly knew you. Thank Christ for that.

I hope they get...

One big fucking class action suit. Gamers are entitled to get their money back for buying a deliberately broken product.

@Scooty

I agree, its the only way. XSS is the vulnerability. Close it now.

The sooner we all speak the same language...

The sooner we will stop killing each other over misunderstandings.

Of course we will still kill each over over other things...

No kidding getting TraceMonkey to work is hard...

JavaScript is the biggest piece of shit language that ever escaped from the university lab! Trying to compile it is going against the entire design of the language. That being said, we all have to use the fucking language, so at least this is a step in the right direction.

A better step would be ECMA Script 2.0. And by that I mean the *real* 2.0 that would have fixed this crap, not the bastardized 2.0 that looks like what we will eventually have to deal with. Untyped language proponents: GO TO HELL!

@adnim

Very eloquent. Trusted=open in my book. With the TCG, it sounds like the keys will be in the hands of MS, Intel, and the government, not mine. Perhaps a Linux implementation will set things right, but from what I understand, hardware will be configured not to talk to any other hardware that won't protect against piracy, so maybe a Linux implementation can never happen.

Will there be open-source and closed-source hardware now too? I doubt China will be crazy about TGC unless they have their own set of keys.

WOW! Great article

Even Gartner doesn't get it! The problem is not the breakdown of Moore's law, or the problems of parallization. Those problems only affect physics simulates and such. For you average every day user (and website), the problem is memory capacity, memory speed, and most importantly, disk speed and caching. Tim gets that! Why can't everyone else?

How about they pulled the damned thing out of the OS

I am tired of my "multitasking" operating system breaking because one instance of IE hangs. Fuck MS.

Right direction, but...

All of these are good suggestions that will help. But as someone who has helped write government software, and bailed when they knew what was good for them, the biggest problem of writing software is the laws that it is coded around! The law is in inconceivably complex beast that isn't even understood when it is passed, and takes successive rheams of judges and court cases to determine its interpretation. And each successive government changes it every four years! In the law there can be no basis for software, as the latter requires strict and rigid interpretation of *very* simple rules in order to execute.

Software as it is today is inherently incompatible with law. Or should I say law is inherently incompatible with software, take your pick.

Seriously the time has come

to disable all XSS. I don't know why anyone ever allowed this in the first place. Whatever the domain in the title bar of your browser - that should be the only domain that you browser can contact for that page - period. No cross domain iframes, and certainly no cross-domain javascript. Sorted.

(queue flame war with people telling me all the useless shit that will break if we did that....)

WTF is click-jacking?

This is an IT rag, right? Could you include at least a half-assed attempt at a technical description? I feel like I read an article about nothing, aimed at my grand-mom.

Fuck puzzles...

Aren't there enough real challenges out there? If you need some mental stimulation, try:

1. Creating a hobby electronics project

2. Reading a book (or ten)

3. Getting a compiler and writing a program that does something useful

4. Learning to weld

5. Learning a language

or any one of a million other uses of your spare time that will *actually* teach you to think, while *simultaneously* helping the world. There is no such thing as "structured learning", only structured training...

Windows improvements?

The biggest boon to network security since then has been the success of WIFI! DUH! Nobody gives a damn about security, but they do like to use their laptops from the living room, so in the time between Nimda and now, everyone on the planet has bought a wireless router, and put their computers behind that. With wireless routers comes NAT, and with NAT comes the best firewall you can get, i.e. not having a public IP.

As anyone would recall, Nimda, Sasser, CodeRed and the other worms mentioned in the article were all self-propagating to open ports and public IPs. Those public IPs don't exist any more, so no one has bothered to write a worm, or if they have, it didn't go anywhere, because it could only infect servers, which were already hardend. It sounds like this Conficker worm spreads by removable media, which makes it sound more like a virus to me, anyway. (notwithstanding that it doesn't sound like it actually writes itself into any .exe's)

Good job!

Good luck Obama!

So Balmer has no clue what he's doing?

How is that any different than the last 7 years or so?