Blackflies & Mosquitos - part deux

Hello from Eastern Canada - specifically Grippen Lake - the land of blackflies, mosquitos and, believe it or not, dial-up Internet access - yuch.

Below you'll see the newest Canadian innovation modeled by my mother-in-law, Evelyn. I'll be patenting this: Take a baseball cap, one of those plastic beer cups (blue is best), duct tape it on the ball cap and liberally spread "tanglefoot" over the beer cup. The color of the cup attracts the blackflies, they land, get trapped in the tanglefoot and Bob's your uncle.

"Software Assurance is for losers"

Really interesting article over at ComputerWorld (7/16/07) regarding Microsoft's Software Assurance program. In a nutshell the author says that "software assurance is for losers".

The basic problem is that customers who have signed up for SA are seeing that they aren't getting upgrades during the term of their SA agreement. So, it's obvious in those cases that it would have been better to not subscribe to SA and just acquire the upgrades once they were released. He specifically mentions that customers who subscribed to SA and expected to get Vista or Office 2007 got screwed.

According to the author, Forrester says 25% who subscribed to SA won't renew. That's big. Both from a revenue perspective and from a problem-to-solve perspective. The author's basic view is that product slips are costing SA customers more than non-SA customers because they are paying for the SA "service" and end up having to purchase the software anyway when it slips and becomes generally available after their SA contract expires.

Product managers and business owners at Microsoft aren't paying enough attention to "providing value for SA subscribers" and they should be...

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Microsoft

Black flies & mosquitos

Every once in a while I hear someone in Bellevue complain about a mosquito or two. Being from eastern Canada I've had an experience or two with mosquitos and, most unfortunately, "black flies". I happened to be cruising You Tube and found this CBC classic that I fondly remember from my childhood. I think of this video everytime someone complains about mosquitos.

Check it out:



Here's a live version by Mad Dog Mcrea...

Vulnerability in Windows Active Directory Could Allow Remote Code Execution

I know a lot of you (83%!) are running Active Directory so if you haven't looked at this just published (last week) security bulletin you should: Vulnerability in Windows Active Directory Could Allow Remote Code Execution. No point in allowing AD to be used by the bad guys, eh? Here's the summary from the article - I've underlined the scary part:

This critical security update resolves a privately reported vulnerability in implementations of Active Directory on Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 that could allow remote code execution or a denial of service condition. Attacks attempting to exploit this vulnerability would most likely result in a denial of service condition. However remote code execution could be possible. On Windows Server 2003 an attacker must have valid logon credentials to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts.

This is a critical security update for supported editions of Windows 2000 and an important security update for supported editions of Windows Server 2003. For more information, see the subsection, Affected and Non-Affected Software, in this section.

This security update addresses the vulnerability by validating the number of convertible attributes in the client LDAP request. For more information about the vulnerability, see the next section, Vulnerability Information.

If you have not subscribed to Microsoft's security bulletins via e-mail or RSS you really should do that...

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Microsoft, Active Directory