It’s hard to believe it’s already been 6 weeks since my daughter’s birth. (that’s April 11th if you’re looking to add her birthday to your calendar) Though I’ve technically been on paternity leave, I’ve really worked at least half that time from home. It’s been a real blessing to work somewhere that cares enough about its employees to allow so much time off. For me, it’s also been wonderful to be able to experience every moment of her first month and 1/2 of development. That will be something I will miss next week as I head back to work full-time. While my time will certainly be limited, I’m going to attempt to keep everything rolling along on the blog. Speaking of which, I just updated to WordPress 2.2 today. It looks like everything is working properly, but if you find anything that’s broken, please let me know. I’ve also abandoned the captcha plugin for the time being as it was getting too tedious to maintain through upgrades. I’m sure that will would have come as a welcome change to at least a couple of people. I’m also working on integrating a flickr applet into the site so you can all see my humble attempts at photography. Hopefully, I’ll get time to post some interesting non-baby photos as well. (it becomes time consuming to organize your photos when your library grows beyond 20GB)
OCR, eEye demo Vista/O2K7 hack
OCRegister blog: Gadgetress – post: Hacking Vista: Easier than you’d think
I thought I would post this for any of the non-techies that happen across my site. In case you’re thinking about upgrading to Windows Vista because it’s more secure, you might want to take a look at the video on the link above. The guys at eEye show just how easy it is to use the old trojan horse tactic to hack a computer running the latest OS from Redmond. In this case the attackers use an attack script disguised as a word document to take control of the target computer. I do have to wonder if UAC was enabled on the example target, but either way it shows what is still the largest vulnerability on any computer. It’s the human behind the keyboard. This is the critical piece of information that Tamara C. misses on her blog. That’s one security problem not easily fixed by software.
More MS fearmongering
Microsoft says Linux, other programs violate patents
The Redmond spin machine is at it again, claiming that open source software such as Linux may infringe upon patents held by the company. I would consider this claim to be possible, but unlikely. Of course only time will tell, but I suspect that this is merely the latest attempt at scaring executives away from using open source products. To some extent I think this tactic is having an effect. I have talked with several CIOs and senior IT managers that have expressed concerns with using open source in the enterprise. However, I think most competent managers evaluate a software product on it’s merits more than marketing hype and corporate FUD. (the competency part, well, that’s a whole other story…)