It's possible there are other versions. But that's not my point. The version that has been discovered and documented runs on Windows, a fact that is probably deliberately not made clear in the articles.

To discover this is a Windows-only virus? That was the first thing that crossed my mind, what platform(s) are vulnerable? It sure as hell isn't clearly stated in any of the articles I read, you have to dive into the details of the Symantec white paper to notice that all the attack vectors were specific to Windows.

And how much does the tech journalism community and the security products & services industry, from Ars to The Verge, to Symantec, get paid to hide the fact this is Yet Another Windows (only) vulnerability?

I contacted Senator Warner's office about this, and frankly was blown off. That being said, I think we need a -law- that requires the Telcos to work out how to make Caller ID unforgeable. I've been challenged to 'show the RFCs and related standards that would support this,' but since the industry has shown no interest in solving the technical problems, I reluctantly believe that it'll take legal action (either law, regulation or legal liability) to force the issue.

On a related note, I also asked about the impact of all those CallerID violations I've filed over the years, and got no response back from that. In both cases, I was forwarded a letter from the FCC that basically quoted from their website.

This is a language that of course was designed very differently from the common C based languages in wide use today, and one for which there is a very large amount of publicly available code (but not on GitHub.) I've seen studies from large volumes of Ada code, both with respect to error rates and with respect to development and maintenance costs, that show a significant advantage for that language.

My personal mileage varies significantly. I still prefer Ada, which is a language that you'd probably characterize as having a lot of "boilerplate". An experience Ada programmer learns how to use that to his advantage in several ways:
    1. When you're on a large or long-lived project, readability of code (even your own, years later) is more important than writeability,
    2. The compiler checks consistency, and as you get better with the language you learn how to maximize what the compiler can check. (This is particularly true for strong typing, where in my experience the bugs caught by typechecking are caught on scalar types. You're a lot more likely to add 'count-of-apples' to 'count-of-oranges' than you are to actually try to add apples and oranges.) Thus as a designer, I'd concentrate on the algorithm, logic flow, etc, and let the compiler check things like parameter names/types. When the compiler and I both agreed that the program was right, it usually was correct.
    3. Syntactic error recovery. This is a big deal when first learning a language, and later when doing significant changes (e.g. refactoring). On a lot of compilers, a single syntax error made all the subsequent error messages both numerous and confusing/worthless (usually because the compiler made an incorrect assumption.) Ada compilers, particularly the hand-craft GNAT parser, got really good at providing meaningful error messages for the rest of the compilation after detecting (and recovering from) a syntax error.
    4. Better optimization. The more info the compiler can get and depend on, the better job the optimizer can do, mostly by limiting the assumptions about how data or control flow is used.

"boilerplate" can be your best friend, when you and the compilation system take advantage of it.

A lot of the mail I get that goes into quarantine or marked as spam comes from outsourced senders, where Domain.com uses some 3rd party to send mail on behalf of it. This can be ISPs, companies like Constantcontact.com or God-only-knows what else. Of course, the company who bought this service probably doesn't know or want to understand what the problem is, and the company that's doing the outsourcing has no real incentive to make sure their hosts (including SPF, etc) are configured properly.

HyperCard combined three aspects: (1) A easy-to-assemble set of graphical/user interface components; (2) a simple (simplistic) database; (3) a quirky programming language.

Possibly VB with Access provides a similar set of functions.

We should be able to produce something that allows end users to do some development for themselves, while acknowledging this is not a production-quality tool, but no matter what, people will take prototyping systems and try to deploy them to production usage.

I've used it for several different things, including catalog/library "decks", user interface mock-up with a bit of back-end semantics (for a system configuration function, to understand user requirements and usage models), and a potential front-end controller to a very simple 'robot'.

Good points.

I think the ability to run Windows applications was more of a psychological than practical advantage, particularly with the growth of web applications. VirtualPC ran pretty well on PowerPC for limited/occasional use (personal experience). With the exception of some (so-called) Web applications that require Active X controls (the worst offender being the S/MIME PKI module for Exchange WebMail), I haven't had to either BootCamp or VMWare/Parallels for the last 2-3 years.

That being said, many companies (my current employer included) continue to be a Windows-only world, arguing cost efficiencies (and ignoring the investment in keeping Windows secure.) I worked around a problem with their corporate SharePoint by setting the Safari User Agent string to Firefox :-)

Well, for a long time the PowerPC had some real advantages over x86, particularly for floating point performance. However Motorola lost its edge there, and the big problem with PowerPC chips was their power consumption, making laptop design and battery life much more difficult.

But that kind of sophistication is beyond most of the tech press, and I suspect beyond a lot of the people here who emote their hate for specific brands. (I admit to a very strong bias against Microsoft, so include myself in that set at least to some degree.)

What keeps someone at a job that might pay less than he could get for hopping?

1. Individual job satisfaction? (Yeah, laugh! That's a big part of the industry's problem! Proof: http://thedailywtf.com/ :-)
2. Co-workers, the company, the location
3. Benefits and incentives to remain

I guess as a Boomer, these might be old fart attitudes. But at least for many of the people I've worked with, they're significant considerations. Salary alone has rarely been the primary reason engineers change jobs. That's well-documented, here's one reference that tries to summarize the research: http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/04/d...

Mod parent up, please. In particular, the comment about industry being unwilling to invest in training is spot-on. I'm old enough to remember when it wasn't that way. (Example, how many remember getting training in Ada if you worked in the defense industry? Regardless of what you think of the language, 25-30 years ago that industry was willing to invest in its "human capital." )

dave

Arguably the Poles have known this since they routinely get invaded from both East and West, and in 1939, from both sides simultaneously...

Hurghada - odprawa paszportowa:
-Nationality?
--Russian
-Occupation?
--No, just visiting.

(from a friend in Poland.)

So I call "bullshit" on those claims. It shouldn't be that hard to test on iOS, and if you can find a Windows Phone, it should be easy to test there, too.

I don't know if anyone associated with this project adopted anything they called "agile" or not. What I was saying was that I have zero confidence in "agile" as I've seen it either defined or applied, for products that are (a) large, (b) complex and/or (c) have substantial infrastructure (versus user-facing) functionality. This project had at least (a) large, and probably (c) substantial infrastructure requirements (that might have been solvable by judicious selection of the right commercial products.)

It should be a feature that a waterfall project could be seen to fail early, but for the PM whose career is built on continuing the project past his tenure, there's no advantage to her/him to fail quickly.