27043040
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
On the very day that Microsoft openly announces a bribe for people who will smear Android security on Twitter Microsoft has managed to revive Nokia's classic 2001 SMS of death bug. Users who are willing to complain in tweets about malware they have downloaded onto their phones will be given a free phone which doesn't even need a download to be cracked wide open. For the users that may end up with a windows phone, security researchers are asking "haven't they suffered enough?".
23583582
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
Bruce Schneier has a good article explaining how the Guardian released the encryption key for the Wikileaks cables and destroyed the main protection against release of informer's personal information. The comments in Schneier's blog fill in details of how exactly Wikileaks secondary file security protections were also bypassed. Now the Guardian has an article that Assange risks arrest by Australia over the latest leaks which include information about an Australian intelligence officer. they even say "We deplore the decision of WikiLeaks to publish the unredacted state department cables, which may put sources at risk," and go on to state that "The decision to publish by Julian Assange was his, and his alone.", something which seems clearly debunked in the analysis on Schneier's blog.
23524126
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
A picture of vodka fountains, indefinite Jaegermiester and sexual harassment is emerging from Microsoft. The former second in command at Microsoft UK was accused of sexual misconduct involving at least five separate women. A Microsoft internal investigation was unable to prove the allegations but decided to fire Simon Negus for having "behaved dishonestly, and thereby acted in a manner calculated or likely to destroy trust and confidence between him and Microsoft" and sue him £75k. Now Negus, who already as a new job as COO at Upstream Systems has struck back with a £10 million false dismissal suit alleging a culture of drunken parties and claiming that other (Male) management at Microsoft were so drunk they followed a female Microsoft UK manager into the ladies’ lavatories. I guess we can now guess why senior managers go away to Microsoft vowing never to buy anything and come back with signed contracts; presumably it was just lying there next to them in the morning and they were too afraid to ask what happened.
23511912
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
Facebook seems to be silently censoring some posts which include Google+ links. Google is not completely adverse to a bit of censorship but I don't think we've seen something nearly this outrageous yet. This seems to be a continuation of the Facebook war against Google which was covered a while ago on Slashdot. With almost no competitors, no right of redress and fewer big companies than even the US media, if Facebook begins censoring then the post Taco world will definitely be interesting.
22012062
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
Microsoft is preparing it's customers for plenty of outage time according to the Register, with a scheme for office 365 which will give customers some money back. The offer seems to be Microsoft's answer to Google offering a '100% uptime guarantee' (they even pay for maintenance time) The most interesting thing about the scheme is that you can have a one and a half day outage every month (or is that 18 solid days a year???) and still expect to pay half price. I wonder Microsoft have put the Sidekick management in charge of their customer's data.
Looking forward my expense forms have getting eaten by the cloud so I have to fill them in again.
17734810
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
Even with the pre-Christmas buying rush, the Register writes that Microsoft is already desperately offering a new buy one get one free offers similar to the ones they gave for the KIN.. According to the register article, "Windows Phone 7 devices can't even manage two per cent of the fortnight's sales.". These aren't official Microsoft figures, they come from online shopping sites, but since Microsoft official sales figures seem subject to manipulation (also discussed on /.) this is may be one of the better guesses we will get at the success of Windows 7 until well into next year. Also this strongly backs up other reports of deeply disappointing phone sales. Even Microsoft supporters have been wondering for a while whether it's time for Ballmer to go? If the sales reports are true then it looks like he may be pushed before he jumps.
13462998
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
Beef TACO is a Firefox extension which allows a mass opt out from tracking and targeted advertising by many ad networks. The Register reports that the original system TACO has become proprietary and has added new "features" best described as bloatware. I guess this should serve as a warning for users to always prefer software under a copyleft license where possible and best if any company involved has handed it over to a foundation such as the FSF or KDE e.V or Apache foundation which will guarantee that future releases will maintain their F/OSS character. If Google had chosen a license with better protection, such as the GPL, when they released their opt out tool this problem would have been much less likely. This also shows why forks are so important when software development begins to get messy.
6523297
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
In an earlier Slashdot story Microsoft claimed to have restored all sidekick data; however it turns out that only contacts and not photographs, notes, to-do lists, marketplace data and high scores have been restored for affected users; the "The Danger / Microsoft team continues to work around the clock" fixing he problem.. In the meantime, Microsoft's damage limitation strategy is to blame other vendors involved for the fault whilst claiming that it's other services such as SharePointare somehow different and failing to explain why there was no adequate backup of their user's data. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it seems that information is leaking. It's already clear that the failure must have involved doing an upgrade without an adequate backup however the implication was that this was because danger was a small company staffed by IT incompetents. In the meantime an alternative explanation has been doing the rounds. According to this story there was a backup and danger's engineers had already started to make an up to date backup before the SAN upgrade failure which destroyed all sidekick user's data. However, the backup was terminated on Microsoft Management decision (supposedly from Roz Ho, Corporate Vice President, Premium Mobile Experiences) If true then there is a common factor putting all Microsoft cloud services at risk. Microsoft Management.
5552839
submission
ex-nokian-beliver writes:
Nine years ago, Nokia was market leader who beat all, it guessed about the "mobile internet" and by 2005 it had already delivered Maemo, a Linux based platform with most of the ideas and potential of the iPhone. However, even now in 2009 and despite years of rumours Nokia has still to deliver a Maemo based phone, it's market share is declining drastically in key mature markets and it's symbian based smart touch phone, the N97 looks frankly pathetic. On the same day that Nokia made the classic sad Novell/Borland style losers move of announcing a partnership with Microsoft (not the first mobile phone company to do so, and a move that can only end in yet more lawsuits), we see that Nokia's lead in the key smartphone market is disappearing and major investors are giving up on the company. Where did Nokia go wrong? How can it be that Nokia's main rival Samsung will deliver a Linux phone before Nokia can?
Nokia has already had disasterous partnerships with Microsoft on DRM and music where Nokia's OVI store ("a complete disaster") has failed to deliver anything like the success of iTunes. Nokia's new Microsoft partnership is reminiscent of the desperate moves Ericsson made just before being forced into a joint venture with Sony. Does Nokia have any chance to salvage it's old market lead? How can Nokia recapture from Apple the kind of "cool" it used to enjoy? What kind of senior management change is needed to give Nokia back it's old edge? Can Nokia get it's marketing people out of the way, it's head out of Microsoft and actually start to produce things consumers actually want to use? How can Nokia escape from Microsoft's warm embrace?
