You sometimes wonder if in a world of management speak stating the obvious is genuinely seen as a clever thing. Over at

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/04/09/virtualization-rsa-malware-tech-virtualization08-cx_ag_0409virtual.html

Someone is (being paid for!) saying if malware controls the virtualization host it will have access to all the virtual machines and their data without the virtual machines knowing!!! Well I never, that’s as if someone bugs the telephone exchange you won’t find the bug on your handset and they’ll hear all the calls not just the ones on your phone.

Who’d have thought it? Well who’d have thought you could get paid for telling people something quite that obvious.

Then again someone is probably being paid for the comment “Rather than the usual pattern, where we deploy a technology and wait for it to get hacked, wouldn’t it be cool to try and secure it first?”

Wow, someone should suggest to the O/S people to try adding some security when they design things. OK, you may think Microsoft didn’t but I think you’ll find they just didn’t do it very well. They didn’t design it to be full of holes (except maybe any employees who moonlight for anti-virus companies).

And “wouldn’t it be cool”??? Surely doing the obvious is the opposite of cool, what we used to call “sensible”.

I am assuming the people designing virtualization software are putting some security in there and that it will be considerable more secure than end user systems just because it is not designed for end users. It can’t be tweaked with downloaded screen savers and won’t have clots (oops, busy, non technical people) opening dodgy emails.

In these days of (stories of) obese students, classroom thuggery and global warming comes a story of good news on all fronts:

http://www.itpro.co.uk/news/184326/york-school-virtualises-desktops.html

This seems to be an ideal solution. Talking to teachers about IT I always hear stories of support and administration nightmares and talking to kids about IT in schools I hear of slow boots, crashes, sneaky ways of getting to play games & competitions to see who can make the machine most unbootable. Thin clients should make the support and admin easier (once the initial learning curve is mounted),

Apparently! A colleague has just changed to BT broadband and his intelligent, fault sensing modem dropped down to 500K as the optimal fault free speed. He was not impressed as he was getting around 2M from his previous ISP. However some googling around led him to the “bell wire fix”. Although your signal travels down miles of carefully twisted and balanced pair around the house it runs adjacent to the “bell wire”, an extra cable designed to provide power to electro-mechanical bells on half hundred weight bakelite telephones. This acts as an aerial and… let’s stop pretending I understand RF and just say it