Conflicker. Scramble, Panic and Spending; It’s Embarrassing

On April 1, the Conflicker worm was supposed to do something and the news media hyped it up. It didn’t do anything. It is now but that’s not making the news. Real tech stories rarely make the news; they’re too boring.

I have to say that I’m upset with the scramble, panic and spending that occurred. Many IT companies saw this as an opportunity to make their clients spend money. They used the media flamed panic to fatten their own pockets. It’s embarrassing.  IT departments in larger companies fanned the flames of panic too, by working over-time, unplugging computers and not allowing remote workers to work during the “crisis”. That’s embarrassing too.

Why? Because it means that they weren’t doing their jobs. Our job in IT is prevention. The patch for the security issue that Conflicker uses has been available for nearly a full year. Every IT person that panicked is an IT person that KNOWS they’ve been slacking and putting the network at risk. That’s unacceptable.

I’m going to ask you for a favor now. If you know of a company that got Conflicker, if you know of a company whose IT person sent them into a panic over Conflicker, please refer them to us. We could use a few new customers and those are businesses that could use an IT professional that respects their business enough to care for it every day.

Mainstream Support Ends

This month, we pass a significant milestone for the 2002-2003 era products. Microsoft offers mainstream support for its products for 5 years. At the end of 5 years, the support scales back; at the end of 10 years support scales back again to almost nothing. This is not unique to Microsoft all software vendors have similar programs and restrictions.

The products that have fallen over the cliff into extended support are:

• Exchange 2003 & Outlook 2003
• Server 2003 & SBS 2003
• Windows XP
• Office 2003

You are probably using some of these. What we have lost for support options are some of the free stuff.

Requests to change product design and features

Non-security hotfixes

Complimentary support (phone and online support options) included with your licenses, licensing program, and other no-charge support programs

 

What this means in lay person terms is that if a feature stops working, whether or not it is due to a security fix, there will not be a repair for it; it’s just broke. We can also no longer call and get free support for issues with these products that do have fixes available. Support calls to Microsoft for these products cost $250 per question before 6pm and $500 after 6pm week days.

Why do software companies do this? Because things change. When these programs were written they weren’t designed to work with the current hardware; it wasn’t designed to tolerate other current software; there weren’t the same security issues that there are today and of course because they released new products a couple of years ago and so all of their support, engineering and development staff is focused there. Over time they lose the brain trust necessary to keep the old things working and you just can’t train new people on old stuff.

We’re still well versed in the old stuff but our job gets a lot more difficult when we lose vendor support and this results in an increase is associated support costs.

DreamSpark for Students

Bill Gates was the keynote speaker at this years Government Leader Forum. It’s one of those public-private partnerships. In his address he announced a huge new initiative: DreamSpark.

DreamSpark will provide any student with free Microsoft development software. The offering includes everything from web site, to SQL, to Game Studio. Then it goes one step further and offers vouchers for the certification exams that go along with each product so the student can prove they know what they know.

Bill Gates has always complained that there aren’t enough skilled developers. And he’s always preferred to hire people that are creative, and not necessarily holding degrees in computer science. That’s because software and website development is part skill and part art. If you aren’t an artist you’ll never be a good developer. It takes vision and creativity.

Students can sign up themselves but it would be better if the school they are going to participated in the program too. Here’s where they sign up.

Looking to sign your school up for DreamSpark?
DreamSpark High School provides professional level development and design tools to students enrolled in an accredited, secondary educational institutions at no charge. Register now and give your students access to all the great software and training DreamSpark offers.

• Sign Your School Up Now

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Internet Explorer 8 – Released quietly

Internet Explorer 8 was released without fanfare. It’s a nice improvement in the browser experience. I’ve been on the beta version for what seems like forever and I am enjoying the new features. In this release of IE8 there are both user and administrator improvements.

Why such a quiet release? Probably because IE8 requires more processing power and some of the new features are dependent on web designers to implement. Because of the processing power requirements we’ll only be recommending IE8 for newer computers. Anyone with a newer computer should update right away. You’ll notice faster browsing and more stable web apps.

Here’s a quick look at what’s new:

Tabbed browsing: IE7 introduced tabbed browsing where each new page opens in a tab rather than in a new IE window. IE8 improves upon this by separating each tab into an individual process on the back end. This means that a single web application can fail or hang and all of the other tabs will stay running. No need to restart IE8, just reconnect to that particular site. 

Web Slices: A web slice is new programming concept whereby a portion of a website is available as a slice. Slices appear on your toolbar and receive updates as the website is updated. This will keep you from having to visit a website to get the latest update.

Here you see that on my toolbar Weather at 48073 is bold. A webslice becomes bold to alert you that there is new content.

When I click on the webslice I get the latest information instantly without having to visit the website.

Web Accelerators: A web accelerator is a type of shortcut to something you might want to do in another application with the content of a webpage. In this example, I’m visiting the Ford Field website because I want to get directions. I find the address on their website, highlight it and normally I would then paste that into another webpage, like yahoo maps. Cut and paste has been how we’ve gotten information from one application to another forever but now we have accelerators. So when I highlight the address text a little blue arrow appears letting me know that there’s an accelerator that might help me. In this case I right click and instead of just Copy, I also have Map with Live Search. When I choose that option a map appears for the address that I’ve selected.

And More: There are also many, many, many additional security features built-in. One of the most talked about is called In-Private browsing. In-Private browsing scared Google into creating their own browser. In-Private browsing prevents websites from tracking any information about you. Currently websites query your browser for information like where you were before you came to their website, what your IP address is, what browser you are running, what you recently search for, etc. Google depends on this information to make it’s advertising valuable to buyers. In-Private browsing also prevents you from tracking any information about what your employees have used your computer for. So if you have a problem with an employee spending time on personal email, facebook, myspace, ebay, or pornography you would have no way to prove it because the browser will not record any of it, as it does now.

In-Private browsing is off by default but anyone using IE8 can easily turn it on. This is meant to protect you but it can also be used for ill. Before installing IE8 then we will be asking you, if you want to allow your employees access to In-Private browsing. If you don’t we can make it unavailable by using Group Policy from the server.

 

This is just a quick shot of why you might like IE8. I think it’s a nice upgrade and has new features that everyone will enjoy. It’s faster than previous browser too. But you need a computer that is no more than 2 years old to run it. Otherwise the new security enhancements and stability features will overwhelm your computer.