News Items

A new study of Europeans show that Germans have the highest average IQ at 107. Discuss.

Grabbing a few bytes off of an unsecured WiFi connection can cost you in Illinois.

After managing the response to Slammer, MyDoom and others, Mike Nash is taking a sabbatical from his role as head of the Security Technology Unity.

Atlas (the Ajax implementation from the ASP.NET team) has support for plugging maps into your applications. See how easy it is with this sample.

New release of the "Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure" (aka Rotor) is now available for download.

Windows Vista isn't just for managed developers, there's a lot of joy for native (and COM) developers as well.

Learn about the APIs available through Windows Live. Create messenger bots, gadgets and more.

News for Friday, March 24 2006

AJAX hype or hot?

Is space travel the new fountain of youth or is it making our Astronauts prematurely old?

Ajax-based Word replacement from the founder of MP3.com.

Addwaitya the tortoise has moved on from his home at the Kolkata zoo. He was believed to have been 255 years old. He credited his longevity to not smoking, moderate drinking and brisk walks (0.1 m/s).

High-ranking monkeys ignored the messages provided by lower-ranking monkeys, but "listened" to other high-ranking monkeys. There's a message there for all of us.

Sure, the knife, the saw and the compass are important, but where's emacs in the list?

StopBadware.org have released their first reports on deceptive and/or harmful software. Kazaa, Mediapipe, SpyAxe and Waterfalls 3 are the first culprits named.

Office will not be available to consumers until January 2007 to align the release with Windows Vista. Expect more announcements like this as the effects of new VPs spread.

Mike Harsh (PM for WPF/E), "The WPF/E package also contains a small, cross platform subset of the CLR and .NET Framework that can run C# or VB.NET code. Yes, we are bringing C# programming to the Mac."

A significant vulnerability has been discovered in the Sendmail open-source e-mail application that could allow attackers to take over control of any devices running the affected software. The group cautioned all users of the Sendmail 8 version of the product to move to the new iteration, Version 8.13.6.

Yet another attack targeting Internet Explorer (5, 6 and the Technical Preview of 7) has been given the "extremely critical" label. Fix on the way, try not to download anything until then.

News for Thursday, March 23 2006

Microsoft's MIX 06 conference in Las Vegas got underway Bill Gates opening keynote highlighting "Atlas," a new tool that simplifies the creation of AJAX-enabled sites using ASP 2.0.

And I thought airports were getting safer...

Online payment company PayPal is preparing to offer a service that will let consumers make purchases or money transfers using simple text messaging via mobile phones, the company said on Wednesday. Txt $50 2 me. kkthxbye.

Steven Sinofsky, current head of the Office division of Microsoft, is expected to be named to succeed Jim Allchin as head of Windows. Those are two of the most different groups at Microsoft, and the result could be interesting.