IE6 was unsecured for 284 days in 2006

Slashdot posted a link to a washingtonpost article compiling the number of days IE6 had open exploit code with no fixes from Microsoft. The result is more than 9 months (284 days) of the year, the IE6 browser had known unpatched security flaws. There was also another 98 days without fixes to IE flaws that criminals were using to gain personal and financial data.

Could a customer sue Microsoft over his losses because of the lack of support for the browser? While Microsoft enforces Internet Explorer as the default browser in all it's operating systems, this causes the majority of people to go with the crowd and use what's already there. And with the results given from the article, I think Microsoft should be held legally accountable for the loss of millions of user data, and in the future, they have a choice of either removing IE from their system, or showing one of those scary warning signs they have to the user saying "We do not guarantee the confidentiality of the information you send and receive over the internet if you use our Internet Explorer" Just like what they did when they lost the lawsuit against Sun for licensing their own modified JRE.

Windows Vista did not steal Mac interface...

From the begin of the Windowing systems, people claim that Bill Gates copied Apple interface and credited it for him self. Now with Vista soon going in for public, many are also saying it's a copy of Mac OS X, while the Microsoft fans are talking in pride about the innovative Vista interface.

New York Times have this video demonstrating the clear differences between the two, for you to watch and judge. Click here to watch it. Enjoy.

Again, MS Word Code Execution Exploit

A third MS Word code execution exploit has been posted that allows code execution on the victim PC by opening the infected word document. While Microsoft have not yet publicly confirmed the vulnerability, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued a warning in this regard. More on the story comes from eWeek.

Another day, another zero day flaw in Microsoft

Just one day after the zero day flaw in Word was announced, another zero day flaw has been discovered in Windows Media Player. The flaw resides in the WMVCORE.DLL library that handles .ASX files. Microsoft have not yet released a fix for the problem, and did not even report it.

Click here for the source and some details on how this flaw works, and how to protect yourself against it.

Google Book Search rival from Microsoft

BBC News that Microsoft have launched the Beta release of their Book Search service, currently including book collections from the British Library, the University of California, and the University of Toronto. 3 other institutions are coming in 2007 as well.

All scanned books currently are non-copyrighted, but later on copyrighted material will be added, Microsoft says, and will also be incorporated into the general Live.com Search engine. Looking at the new Live Beta service head to head with Google, I could easily say right now Google search time is much faster and stable. Very often I do encounter Live keeps searching forever, or at least longer than I can tolerate! The dynamic load content on scroll down idea from Live does not seem to be convenient much, at least not with my 256 kbps connection. Browsing the book has been also made easier in Google Book Search, where you can use hot keys to flip pages, and you can open two pages in parallel. Page loading also in Google is faster, however, very often if I do flip too many pages in Google the browser crashes.

Regardless of all the differences now however, the favor will be to the side who has the better book collections, and who succeeds to deal carefully with the copyrights issues involved in it.

Microsoft to run Windows on OLPC

Few months back, Mr. Bill Gates opened fire on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which is a charity project aimed at providing low cost $99 laptops for the poor children, to allow them access to the technology. Gates attacked the project, which is powered by their rival Google, saying in parts of his speech: "If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you’re not sitting there cranking the thing while you’re trying to type,” . Very strong comments that have certainly hurt the feelings of all those dedicating their time, effort, and money to that project, and all the poor children who were starving to reach their hands to it. His comments on the crank manual powering mechanism to overcome electricity shortage as a Wind Key made it even worse. The comments Gates made caused major criticism and as some people described it, it shows clearly that "Bill Gates loves the poor, but loves Microsofr more". Details of his previous speech can be found here.

Now that the door is open, and Microsoft received their sample units of the project, they are trying to get Windows, which is hungry for resources on the laptop. Bill doesn't know when to stop taking everything as a game that he has to win, even when it comes to serving the poor. When he wasn't a participant, it was a total cranking machine, and now he wants to have his brand on it. More on the story here.