Bruce Schneier with some thoughts and possible demands regarding the recent security debacle at a large American credit card authorizer. Apparently, the data should not have been on their system at all - due to the high demands that credit card companies (at least in the documents) place on authorizers, Card Systems should actually be out with Mastercard and Visacard.
Women are still underrepresented in the US IT industry - blogged for Jutta.
Microsoft will enforce Sender ID:
Now Microsoft apparently wants to enforce the system on its own, because soon all emails to Hotmail users that do not come with Sender ID will be visibly marked for Hotmail users and thus labeled as potential spam.
Great. Very big strategy. The working group was dissolved because no agreement could be reached because the patent situation with Sender ID was not resolved by Microsoft - and now Microsoft simply wants to enforce it again.
But I think that in this case Microsoft is cutting into its own flesh: there have long been significantly better webmail services that also play significantly better in the network community. Hotmail has long since lost the importance it once had before being sold to Microsoft. Therefore, my prognosis is that not many people will be particularly impressed by this step. The victims are the Hotmail users and possibly their correspondents, who are stuck with an even inferior mail service anyway ...
OXlook - Open-XChange connects to Outlook - blogged for the company. Don't ask ...
No damages for image display in search engine thumbnails - which even received a sensible reasoning from the court, as the thumbnails are only temporarily stored for processing search queries. Although the reasoning is so logical that one almost expects the whole thing to be overturned on appeal and the Hamburg variant (search engines may only use images with consent - which would de facto make image search engines impossible, at least on the scale that would be useful) to prevail ...
I generally consider USB sticks to be unnecessary and silly. But the SwissBit Victorinox retroALOX 1GB has a high "must-have" factor.
I am neither the first nor the most original person to write about Franz Kafka blogged. But no matter how late I jump on the bandwagon, this is a blog that you really should read. And even a Megawattworm couldn't find anything to criticize about its intelligence.
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Smalltalk Compiler is an older but still good description of the compiler classes in Smalltalk-80 derivatives like VisualWorks Smalltalk and Squeak.
... writes Astrid Paprotta - lovely.
I admit that I also use Moleskines - the Red-Black ones are also quite nice, but they are too thick for me. Although the Moleskine could also be one or two centimeters smaller. They can also be used well with a ballpoint pen ...
State Secretary sees potential for improvements in software patent directive - while her boss lobbies for the Council's proposal in the European Parliament. Of course, they are so well informed by software patent opponents - as we could see how the government implemented the Bundestag's request ...
It seems like web spammers are learning a few new tricks. In any case, I stumbled upon links to myself that come from a WordPress blog consisting only of wild HTML snippets that seem to have been created due to searches for "house" - and then in the blogroll of the blog are various typical junk sites. So it could be that spammers are now building pseudo-sites with links and content that are supposed to flood the search indexes of systems like Technorati or the ping services.
Oh, and the Texas-Holdem guys have also learned a few new tricks - the URLs now have more changing server names and file names so that normal keyword filters no longer work quite as well and I am more often presented with spam for moderation - for a long time the stuff went directly into the trash because the guys were really too stupid ...
Annoying bunch.
