Digital music is set to take another kick in the teeth. Have you got any tracks you downloaded from the MSN Music service? If so, think again because on the 31 August Microsoft are going to turn off the license servers. This means that which you bought with your hard-earned will eventually become nothing more than digital detritus on your hard disk. Read more

The day after I left grammar school, in the summer before college, I started back at school but this time on the building site next door, constructing the school’s new extension. That job taught me a lot of useful lessons, such as how to drive a dumper truck, use F*** every third word and what page 3 girls look like.

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Alastair Crooke, the Director and Founder of the Conflicts Forum, has said that in his experience of negotiating with terrorists it is pointless to ignore groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, hoping they will go away. There is no nice, fluffy, occidentally inclined organisation waiting to take their place. It will be al-Qaeda who replace them and things will change for the worse. Much the same seems to be said about the adoption of Vista and Microsoft’s Open XML format.
Over the years there have always been headlines about such and such company abandoning Microsoft Windows, or Macs or Office. This time there seems to be more about firms deciding they are not abandoning Windows XP to move to Vista and there’s even an active movement to stop Open XML becoming recognised as an ISO standard.
Torpidity
In both cases the move – or more correctly, lack of move – is because of the control it would give Microsoft, who given their way would have us all wearing their digital burkhas. Some, such as America’s Auto Warehousing Company, have gone one step further and switched their entire organisation away from Microsoft products apart from where there are currently no alternatives. In those cases, the software is being rewritten and in the meantime run in a virtual environment. They found that the new Intel Macs run Windows blazingly fast, faster than any PC he’s seen according to AWC’s CIO Dale Frantz.
The AWC are a huge, full-service car spares, logistics and delivery company whose customers are the biggest names in the business. They cover the entire of the US and Canada. For an organisation of this pedigree to move to Macs must surely open Steve Jobs’ eyes to the potential Apple are missing while they concentrate on the consumer market.
Short-sighted
Their decision to use Mac OS X was taken after examining the alternatives, a decision that would scare other companies who erroneously see Macs as under-powered, over-priced and too geared to specific areas such as publishing and certain scientific communities. Apple have never shown great interest in attracting corporate business and gave AWC no help in the transition. This seems rather short-sighted considering the help Apple gives in other projects such as Virginia Tech’s Mac-powered super computer whose success led onto the US Army and others constructing Mac super computers.
Microsoft has brought this fatwa on themselves. Windows XP has been highly successful and runs on over 500 million computers. As long as those computers continue to function users have no real need to upgrade, especially as it will involve hardware and software costs. The company has also announced it will continue to supply bug fixes to XP until 2014 and possibly even beyond that. Many of the new security features built into Vista are available as free or low cost tools. The rest of the new operating system is just goodies rather than essentials as far as business is concerned.
Where this will end remains to be seen. As a long-term Mac user, Windows XP is the first Microsoft operating system I would consider moving to. As a book designer I can foresee a time when I will not be able to open Word documents because they are in Open XML format – in fact this has started to happen - and Microsoft provide no working translators. So much for them making it a “standard”.

ITPro and others have been crowing here about a supposed Mac vulnerability demonstrated at the CanSecWest conference. Get your facts right pur-lease.

There are a number of points the reporters missed out which rather change the whole scenario. Not the least that the cracking attempt was sponsored by Microsoft whose fanboys delighted in mis-reporting the supposed Mac hack.

So what exactly happened?
Much of the events have been kept secret but Engadget’s report here is more revealing than most, the comments following it tell the true story.

On the first day, a pair of MacBook Pros were set up with the competition being to access one remotely, get into the Users folder, open a file and act on its instructions. No-one managed to even crack into the Mac for the whole 24 hours. This was with just the simple on-board firewalls and security at factory defaults. Pretty much as most Mac users still use since they took delivery of their computers.

As the competition was to prove that Mac OS is as vulnerable as Windows, this rather defeated the aim, so the rules were changed. On the second day they made it easier. Hackers had to give a URL to the adjudicators who set the Mac to go automatically to the URL where the dirty deed was done.

Ah ha! So the Mac was vulnerable.
Well, actually no. What the URL used was an outdated Java routine that relied on an old browser plug-in. So the Mac itself wasn’t cracked. It withstood all attempts for 24 hours and even the “successful” hacker admitted it took them 9 hours on the second day. The item cracked was a third party plug-in, nothing to do with the Mac or its operating system which was never accessed. The winner only managed to access a user-level file once the door to the Mac had been left open.

Don’t forget there were two Macs in this competition.
The second Mac was set up the same as the first but with a slight change in the rules. To win, contestants needed to follow instructions in the file system root. To access this the hacker would have to gain administration and root-level privileges. Now that would have been something for Microsoft to crow about. Sadly for them, the bog standard Mac, running bog standard software at default settings repelled all attempts.

Macs by default, do not run at root level, it is actually quite a palaver to set up a root account. To install software or make changes to the operating system, Macs require an administrator password which gives temporary root access. Windows, on the other hand, does run at super user level by default (afaik) so once a hacker has opened it up, the whole computer is theirs. Vista has the “improvement” with its infamous warnings as depicted here.

Mac Users have got used to seeing strange downloads automatically appearing when they go to some websites. The resulting .exe files mean nothing to the Mac and are usually the result of going to sites where a message suddenly appears telling you your computer is vulnerable to spyware and would you like it to check things out for you. The download starts without permission but that’s all. On a PC it would probably join the growing malware, worms and viruses on unprotected computers.

But that’s old news.

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UPDATE
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Latest reports say it is a QuickTime vulnerability that allows a client-side Java error to execute arbitrary code when a Java-enabled browser visits a malicious website. Solution – turn off Java support (not Javascript) for peace of mind. And the vulnerability affects Vista too. More here.

Crazy as it sounds but have Microsoft fallen on hard times?

It’s a little different from the usual definition of being broke when they have so much money in the bank there probably isn’t enough “stuff” in the world for them to spend it on. Nevertheless, things are not looking up.

When Windows 95 was released, queues waited all night to buy it, even in countries where queues are more usually found between P and R. Some customers bought a copy before they had a computer to run it on. We haven’t seen anything like the excitement for Vista, nor has Microsoft made such a splash. No more paying the Rolling Stones a gazzillion dollars for a back catalogue track as they did with Start Me Up.

Pay for software?
In the past Microsoft have been able to rely on price being their advantage over Apple and others’ operating systems. They realised that no-one likes paying for software and hid the true cost of Windows in the purchase price of a new computer, riding on the back of ever-decreasing hardware prices. Following this course, there had to come a point where computers got so ridiculously cheap they became virtually free, as in the case of printers. Manufacturers would have to make their profits in consumables which is not likely to happen as electricity companies have captured that market. Similarly, most PC users stick with the operating system their computer arrives with so a new OS has to be something really special to generate direct sales.

When buying a version of Vista the true cost comes to light. PC World list eight ranging from a hundred quid for the severely cut-down version, up to £350 for the full Monty. Compare this with a copy of Linux and OpenOffice for free, or the single, full version of Mac OS X for £89 including delivery. Not only that, Microsoft dictate exactly where you can put your new software. Change the CPU in your PC and you have to get a new version of Vista. The words rip and off come to mind.

Obviously Vista use will increase as it is shipped on new computers but it seems Microsoft cannot compete on price alone especially as Apple reduced the cost of its own computers to match all but the cheapest PCs. When buying a computer the iPod generation may well look at a new Mac and think that as it runs all the other operating systems it might be the best one to go for. If they don’t like Mac OS X they can always run Windows instead and let’s face it, Macs do look cool. This could suit the rebellious nature of the young who look to grandad’s Mac rather than the Windows PC ma and pa want them to use.

Best of breed?
Another course open to Microsoft is to make their operating system the best of breed. It isn’t Mac snobbery that makes me think this is hardly likely to happen. Windows has been, at times, mediocre at best. Maybe not XP and Vista but I haven’t used it yet and note there have been several vulnerabilities found already and many devices and applications are unable run Vista until drivers are rewritten. At least DOS has gone for good, about 20 years too late.

Apple’s move in the 1990s to a modern operating system based on BSD Unix came just in time to save the company. The development tools, many of which come free with Mac OS X, have enabled Apple to create new applications rapidly and grow into completely diverse directions. They have turned from a computer company into a tight-knit, fast moving and fluid organisation who in a single bound have sewn up the music download industry. They are on-course to do the same for films, or at least compete with the best, and their next move will take them into direct competition with the likes of Nokia. Compare that with the monolithic nature of Microsoft, who, despite or because of enormous resources and hundreds of personnel, move at the speed of a pregnant yak.

What does the future hold?
Where are Microsoft now? Their .Net ambitions seem unfulfilled, the XBox has an uncertain future, tablet computers are hardly a daily sight, their iPod-beater seems beaten already and Microsoft Office is facing severe competition. The latter coming from two completely different directions, one in the form of OpenOffice and its derivatives adopted by governments around the world fed up with paying the Windows tax; the other from Google who also beat Microsoft when it came to search engines. Google’s free software is all that many computer users need, open source software supplying the rest. The latest move with Office using Open XML, a new proprietary file format, albeit one they have put up for ISO acceptance, is hardy likely to gain more users and especially as older versions of Office will not be able to open its files. The very similar OpenDoc format has ISO approval already and is native in OpenOffice.

In Dickens’ Hard Times, Thomas Gradgrind promotes a philosophy of rationalism, self-interest and fact above fanciful and imaginative pursuits until circumstances changed his view and he devoted the rest of his life to helping the poor the sick and the needy. It all sounds a bit like the latest I’m a Mac/PC ads and what became of rich old Bill.

What is wrong with you Windows guys? Your favourite software developer spends a gazzillion bucks on making a nice, shiny, new way to operate your computers and all I read are moans. Has anyone written an I Love Vista blog.

As a devout Mac fanboy this comes as something of a shock. Probably the best article about Vista so far is by Joe Hutsko, a Mac-using reporter who switched to Vista to see what it is like. Joe delves deeply into the shiny (everyone says Vista is shiny) new interface and runs with it for several weeks before making his decision on which OS to stick with. His even-handed description shows which is better in certain areas and where the biggest weaknesses are. It’s often the little things that make the difference. For example, it appears that Vista has no system-wide spell checker and thesaurus, surely a pretty big omission for a modern, new OS.

Interestingly, page one of Joe’s article has links to related content including one leading to a discussion on a bog-standard message board, asking which is better, Mac or Microsoft. Except the discussion, hosted at msn.com, won’t run on Macs. A deliberate policy along the same lines as excluding Macs from Local Live aerial views, which used to run perfectly well on the beta version.

There’s a recent CNN interview with Bill Gates on YouTube where he lists Vista “innovations”. It goes like this:

Interviewer: “Frankly a lot of what I see here seems to mimic a little bit OSX. Were you going after a specific look there, the Mac look?”

Gates: “No, no, no. Actually we’re ahead a lot. There’s whole areas where we’ve innovated like Media Center and Tablet that no-one else is doing. And Parental Control, that’s the first time that’s been done. Even in this photo area we’d love to have you compare how we’ve made it easier for you to make a DVD, edit high definition movies…”

I must remember to check whether Apple’s iDVD and iMovie, now 4+ years old, can still create and edit high definition movies. And next time I’m in System Preferences I’ll see if the Mac’s Parental Controls have been removed. It all adds weight to this scurrilous movie comparing Vista and Mac OS.

However… I would like a copy of Vista. Not just a namby-pamby cut down version but the full blown thing. Why Microsoft insist on releasing at least three versions is a mystery to me especially as they are all more expensive than Mac OS’s one, or two if you count the server version. Vista’s DRM and copy protection seem draconian as well. Nevertheless, I would like to run Vista on my next computer. This will, almost certainly be another Mac and I’ll almost certainly use a virtualisation solution to run both OS’s side-by-side.

Unless, that is, someone gives me a Windows laptop to play with and I’ll happily blog away about Vista in an unbiased way, no moans and groans like the Windows fanboys all seem to have about it. Maybe ITPro has one gathering dust at the bottom of an old filing cabinet?

There is always a silence when I am asked for my passport. Usually it’s for security purposes to establish identity, along with a request for a utility bill, which is paid paperlessly on-line so non-existant, equally non-existant is a DSS benefit/pension book. No matter that I have a pocket full of credit cards, driving licence, library ticket, RAC membership, blah, blah, blah. They are never counted as being good enough even though they give access to my total liquid wealth.

The reply I give is never expected – I don’t have a passport, never needed one and cannot see any point in spending the best part of £100 in getting one. After living all my life in holiday resorts, what am I going to do on holiday? The beach is at the end of the road, as are shops, historical buildings, art galleries and all the bars, theatres and clubs I need. The surrounding county supplies the greenery, forests, vineyards and open countryside, plus I’m self-employed, work from home and pretty chilled -out all the time.

By the same token, I have been a “computing professional” for over 20 years and have never used a Windows computer. When I started out Windows 1 and 2 were, well… complete rubbish. CPM and GEM, the Mac-like graphical operating system, were leagues in front. Then a move to Mac proper kept me ahead of Windows-using contemporaries for 10 years until Windows 98 made the operating system look at least a little interesting. So much so, it ran in an emulator on my computer for a while. That is the total extent to my Windows experience and from what I observe at a distance Microsoft seems to go out of its way to make life difficult for their customers. Plus there is nothing I need to run on Windows I can’t run on my Macs.

That is, until last weekend when Microsoft changed how Local Live operates. Until then, I have been using it’s excellent birds-eye views to look at potential new property to buy. Where Google Earth gives a reasonable over-head view of the land, albeit from a high altitude, it’s coverage of the areas I’ve been searching has been patchy. There must be a permanent bank of cloud hovering between the satellite and the south coast of England. Whereas Local Live was able to zoom in close to houses, almost to the point of seeing fish in the garden pond and washing on the line. Ideal for house-hunting, it became the home page of one of my web browsers.

So it came as a shock to find Local Live no longer works, not just in one browser but seemingly, all Mac browsers. This is including Opera, Netscape and derivatives and even Internet Explorer. Most just show two search fields and at best produce a map but only if both fields are completed. So entering, for example, Birds-Eye View and a postcode, gets a list of all the frozen food retailers and a tiny, useless, location map. Finally, I discovered that there should be some toolbar showing. Firefox, with some persuasion, was able to display this but all Local Live produces now are black screens with pushpins where the aerial view used to be.

The same thing has happened with iView Media Pro. It used to be a British, Mac-only media browser and cataloguing tool. Microsoft bought it, made it cross-platform and ruined it in the process so that it crashes all the time, corrupts catalogues, makes poor thumbnails and is generally less usable than the two versions preceding it.

Sounds a bit like Vista.

Vista will make the Net slow and gooey. So says Paul Mockapetris, who invented the Internet’s Domain Name System, in an interview with CNet. According to Mockapetris, Vista’s adoption of IPv6 will double DNS traffic leading to brownouts and shutdowns because DNS servers are already running close to capacity.

This is because the current IPv4 protocol used to stream data packets, was designed primarily for ethernet. It doesn’t guarantee delivery or prevent duplication of data and it is only able to address a little over 4 billion unique addresses. It may sound a lot but is soon whittled down because many are reserved: 18 million for private networks, 1 million for multicasting and so on. Then there are the huge numbers of computers, cell phones and devices all needing their own individual address. Basically, IPv4 has run out of numbers so IPv6 has been devised.

NAT, network address translation, has helped to keep IPv4 running. In the early days of Broadband in the UK, BT supplied every ADSL set-up with 5 unique IP addresses, actually 7 because the first and last were reserved. Nowadays, DHCP, the dynamic host configuration protocol, is more usually supplied with at most 1 static IP address for the DHCP router which allocates a private IP address for each device on it’s internal network, sending data to the correct one using NAT.

This is all very good until computers need end to end connections to run web or FTP servers, or use UDP to send small datagrams to each other. As any on-line gamer can tell, it was often better in the old days when games were played modem to modem rather than across Internet links, with varying ping times.

IPv6 increases the number of addresses to a total that literally words cannot describe, except to say that everyone alive in the world today could have 50 octillion each. The problem is that most DNS servers aren’t using IPv6 even though the US government has specified they must by 2008. Mockapetris thinks that when Vista is introduced the DNS servers will be hit by double the amount of traffic as Vista first checks which protocol to use before putting through its request in the correct format.

Not all industry pundits agree with this, saying that while traffic will be higher, it isn’t going to crash the ‘Net. Microsoft’s view is that Vista will only query DNS servers twice when necessary. If the server isn’t capable of IPv6 it won’t respond.

However, for those of us who run modern operating systems (hum hum) that have been capable of IPv6 for some years this has not necessarily been so. Until fairly recently, when more servers became IPv6 capable, DNS look-ups could cause a big slow down in connectivity as Mac OS X first questioned the server for IPV6 before dropping back to IPv4 once the IPv6 request times out. It also explains mysterious dropped connections from a server that cannot support IPv6 when PHP or other server-side applications only know how to deal with IPv4 addresses. Turning off IPv6 was often the cure for network slowdowns. We even ran our own DNS server in-house for a while. Not as difficult as you would think, or not under OS X anyway.

As Vista is due any day now, err… early next year…whenever. We won’t have long to wait to see if Mockapetris is right.