Friday stuff

[yendi]

Working from home today, as Elayna's school system is off.

Reminder: shadesong is walking in AIDS Walk Atlanta this Sunday. Sponsorship info and other stuff is here.

Read this interview with Bill Gates. I swear, he sounds like Dubya at times. The IE security issues? All the fault of the people downloading third-party stuff. And MS is all about providing choices. Oh, and IE is the most secure browser ever!

Browsing Amazon today, I saw one of those random lists on the side with a familiar icon, followed it, and saw that they now sell Rio Grande games! Not all of them, alas (no San Juan), but they have Puerto Rico and Carcassonne! The prices are okay, although the free shipping makes them competitive against Boulder and Funagain. But what's really nice is that the various relatives who shop off my wishlist for $winterholiday can now buy them for me (I received Settlers of Catan and two expansions last year, so I do hope it's a trend). I also hope that adding more adult games to Amazon is a continuing trend.

Celebrity Poker Showdown Season 4 has begun! The first episode was great (no spoilers, but the winner really impressed me). And the next one has Tony Hawk and Dennis Rodman -- Xtreme Poker! And later shows have Neil Flynn (from Scrubs, Dave Navarro and Shannon Elizabeth (both returning), and Doogie Howser!

Alas, the Ken Caminiti news isn't surprising: looks like drugs were the cause of his death.

Finally, the teaser trailer for The Ring 2 is out! That link is directly to an .mov file, so only click when you're not at work and have decent bandwidth.

mmm, Jet Girl.

Comments

[random-girl.livejournal.com]

Hi - I don't always agree with "Uncle Bill" as people in the Puget Sound call him, however, he does need to get at least part of the message out there: all the security issues aren't just us, and there's a reason we get hit a lot. That isn't to say we don't have security issues. I have been added to a few security aliases here and as was stated in Ghostbusters "I have seen shit that will turn you white." However, we are starting to catch more of that internally since I got here, which is pretty freaking cool, because as an employee, I gotta use all MS stuff. It's nice to know my machine won't be rebooting itself as much anymore.

But back to the security front. I work on a product that has a UI interface, a back end, a console portion, and a few other nuts and bolts under the covers. The majority of bugs (security and otherwise) are in the UI. I work on the UI portion. The reason the majority of the bugs are found there, is that everyone has to use the UI to get everywhere else. Windows is like that -- despite creeping gains of Linux, Mac, and a variety of other cool and useful platforms (I miss working in my Unix environment)Windows is still the most commonly used platform, and IE the most commonly used browser (per the statistics we have for testing, anyway). As a result, you're going to find literally shitloads of bugs in our product, and people will find them faster than in others because we're targeted first because of the popularity--you can kill more birds with a virus in our stuff than in say, Firefox.

Add in the fact that because we are such a common product, that we are (in fact, required by law now to anti-trust judgements) forced to work with 3rd party software...which can and does open holes in the somewhat militaristic protection we put in place on Windows and IE. For example, some programs only document opening ports in weird places not immediate to the standard user, who then wonders how an attacker got in. Existing Firewall programs fight with our installed firewall settings, causing users to manually muck with both (leading to fat-finger and mis-calibration errors). Should we work better with other firewall programs? Probably. Should we stop selling our basic protection with Windows? No. We got kinda slammed for not providing protection in earlier versions, with people succumbing to various viruses, etc. We're at least trying to make it harder for people with AOL to get the "virus of the week" and probably the next rev will be friendlier to people who actually understand software, to prevent fat-finger or miscommunication errors in config.

We have an internal initiative which is actually matching the marketing blurbs (which has taken all of our breaths away, as marketing is usually as far from anything technically useful or applicable as the sun and the moon, usually), which is to make our software more secure. Do I still have to bribe developers with chocolate to fix bugs? Or chase them into the restroom until they realize I'm not going away to address issues? Yes. However, more of those issues are security related.

Apparently, Uncle Bill wants to stay in business.

Anyway, I figured I'd weigh in with my two cents (which, looking back at what I've written, is probably more like a $1.50).

[coffeeinhell.livejournal.com]

DAMN! I saw Celebrity Poker Showdown in the menu when I was flipping through before I went to bed last night, and I didn't even look at the info because I assumed it was another repeat.

Ah, well. It's not like they don't rerun them a lot. And TiVo will find it for me!

But still. Damn.

[yendi]

Those are valid points, and if that was the arguement that Bill was making, I wouldn't be quite as frustrated. I'm just annoyed, in particular, that he's simply pretending that the IE problems themselves don't exist (i.e., that MS has simply done nothing wrong at all), when there are plenty of mistakes being spread around.

There's also the fact that many of the loopholes that he blames on "third parties" are third party software using MS proprietary APIs.

Thanks for the response, though -- things that I sometimes take for granted (like the fact that M$ is more virus-prone than other platforms as at least a partial function of its popularity) need to be reiterated, as does the fact that folks aren't above holding M$ to a double standard on things like firewalls.

[yendi]

It's on a bunch of times soon. The new eps are actually on Sunday nights, but since I have conflicts with that one, I Tivo a later broadcast. It does seem that this season wasn't quite as well-hyped.

[miintikwa.livejournal.com]

Hey babe-

I'd like to sponsor 'song, but I can't afford the $25 min. Are you still doing the paypal bits for her?

email me at deyaniera@gmail.com?

Danke!