This is just a short post to announce that I’ve created a Yahoo! “pipe” aggregating the latest PowerShell related posts (in chronological order) from a whole bunch of different PowerShell blogs. I won’t list them here, because they are listed on the pipe page, and I don’t want to have to maintain the list twice …

PowerShell Bloggers – The Yahoo! Pipe

If you know of a PowerShell blog which you think should be added to our list (even if posts on it are infrequent) please feel free to drop me a line using the comment box. In fact, if you think I’ve linked to the wrong feed for one of the ones I did include, or if you would like to have your blog removed from the list … feel free to drop me a line for that too.

By the way, for those of you who are interested in these sort of things: the rationale for creating and using a pipe rather than simply subscribing to each individual feed is pretty simple:

1. The pipe filters out posts which aren’t about PowerShell, and lists at most two weeks worth of content
2. The pipe merges posts into chronological order for use in web syndication
3. Hypothetically, the pipe gives me the ability to include sites which don’t have RSS feeds (more on that some other time)

So, Privacy International has made official and extremely public what I’ve been muttering about for years: Google doesn’t care about your privacy. A recent study they published rated Google as the worst internet service. In fact, in light of the results, they actually called the study A Race to the Bottom – Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies=x-347-553961

We are aware that the decision to place Google at the bottom of the ranking is likely to be controversial, but throughout our research we have found numerous deficiencies and hostilities in Google’s approach to privacy that go well beyond those of other organizations. While a number of companies share some of these negative elements, none comes close to achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy. This is in part due to the diversity and specificity of Google’s product range and the ability of the company to share extracted data between these tools, and in part it is due to Google’s market dominance and the sheer size of its user base. Google’s status in the ranking is also due to its aggressive use of invasive or potentially invasive technologies and techniques.

I can’t really add much information that the news and reviewing
magazines, radio, and blogs have written … The bottom line is that Google’s gathering unbelievable amounts of data, and not providing users with any way to have most of that data deleted. According to Privacy International this is because_they don’t believe_ that they are collecting sensitive information ... even though they track your use of blogs, email, maps, and searches, as well as what links you click on, et. On top of that, their corporate culture leads them to mix together the login, cookie, and tracking data from all their different services without explicitly telling you they will do so, and they retain the data for years. Ultimately they have a “track history of ignoring privacy concerns” and their response to this report doesn’t make one think they’re taking it seriously.

Oh, and just as a postscript, this reaction from Kevin Bankston (an attorney at EFF) to Google’s new street view photos (streams of 360° photos taken from vans driving through dozens of major cities across the US):

There are a lot of people on the Web who are, I think, freaked out by this they find it kind of icky and uncomfortable, I don’t think Google has done anything illegal here, but I do think they’ve done something that’s exceptionally rude.

So David Morgenstern over at eWeek has an opinion piece claiming that “PC users should forget their outrage and come to understand that life isn’t fair. The Mac platform is more secure than Windows and will continue to be so.”

Just for fun, I’m not going to try to debate that. It’s absolutely true (as he points out) that practically all of the “in the wild” viruses, trojans, and other malware target Windows. Of course, it’s also true that practically all of the software in the world targets Windows. Yeah, there’s plenty of Mac software, and plenty of Linux software too … but numbers-wise …. Yah, anyway. I said I wasn’t going to debate that … instead, I’m just going to poke fun at his ridiculous arguments.

Still, no matter how much you might consider this comparison an unfair shot, it is real. The Mac is a better platform when it comes to security and malware attacks.

I’ve used Macs since 1984, and I’ve been infected by some malware twice. Two times.

Now, I’m sure many of you can echo what I’m about to say, but with longer dates. I got my first PC in high school, sometime around 1990. Since then, I’ve been running DOS and Windows. The closest I’ve ever come to being infected was when I put other people’s infected floppies in my PC to run a virus cleaner on them … or maybe when I had a look at the source code for the Melissa and “I love you” javascript bugs… I’ve literally never been infected. Sorry David. That’s not an argument about macs vs. PCs, it just shows you’re not very careful.

By my reckoning of the installed bases for each platform, there should be many more exploits for the Mac. Depending on how you calculate the number—2, 3, 5 or whatever percent—shouldn’t there be that corresponding percentage of viruses on the Mac in these lists?

... Scripting News listed the site’s readers by browser. Firefox was the largest (49.76 percent), and Internet Explorer came in second (23.43 percent). However, Mac-only browsers Safari and Camino were next in line (21.31 and a guesstimate of 2 percent, respectively).

Well, I didn’t want to debate exact numbers … but now you’ve got me riled up. It’s preposterous to even mention the visitor logs of a single website when discussing computer market share … (more…)

Microsoft made several big announcements today at MIX07…

CLR in Silverlight

The most exciting announcement I’ve today is that Silverlight will include the Common Language Runtime (CLR) on both Windows and Mac … which means that it will allow development using any .NET-supported languages. They’re even including the open source Dynamic Language Runtime and thus IronRuby (which like IronPython is also open source).

On top of that, these features, plus support for Language Integrated Query language (LINQ) and cross-platform debugging capabilities, are available now in the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha (and will be released more publicly after Silverlight 1.0 comes out this summer?).

Silverlight Streaming

They also announced today that they will offer a media-hosting service for free called Silverlight Streaming! In a move that targets both Adobe’s flash and other media-hosting sites like YouTube and Revver … they will allow developers to stream high -quality video (up to DVD quality) into their Silverlight apps from Microsoft’s servers without any restrictions on branding or embedding (including use in “rich internet applications” — i.e.: outside the browser).

The current package in pre-release offers only 4GB of storage and unlimited bandwidth delivery of up to DVD quality video (700 Kbps), but their plan calls for Microsoft to provide hosting for unlimited Silverlight content and up to a million minutes of free video streaming at 700 Kpbs per site per month … that’s over 5,000 Gigabytes of bandwidth)+*+700+Kbps)+in+gigabytes of streaming per month, for free! They’ll also offer unlimited streaming for a fee, or free, but supported by advertising…

Jasper and Astoria CTPs

Astoria builds on ADO.NET and WCF to allows you to expose a data service for the web which can be consumed via HTTP and since it uses standard HTTP verbs (GET, POST, DELETE, etc) you can even make it accessible as a REST-style resource collection with unique URIs … and simple formats like JSON or plain XML ...

Jasper is another ADO.NET incubation project … aimed at dynamically typed .Net languages like VB.Net or IronPython … it dynamically generates data classes (instead of requiring manual, static configuration … or even code generation which must be kept up to date). It’s built on the Entity Framework (which was postponed until some time in 2008 … after Orcas ships), so it supports rich queries and object-relational mapping and automatic databinding.

Ozzie speaks on Services and Clients…

The orchestration of announcements has many people buzzing about strong leadership and strategy … and the keynote by Ray Ozzie left no doubt about who’s behind that, highlighting the work Microsoft is doing to integrate all the various aspects of their strategy. Ozzie pitched Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) 2.0: web and hosted services which have “grown to embrace the uniquely valuable role of the client.”

IE 8 will require Standards Mode

In a move that only the undisputed king of browsers could hope to pull off, Microsoft has announced that they’ll be requiring web developers to opt in to standards-compliant web design … feel free to take a moment to check for flying pigs.

They’re also planning on making the IE object model more interoperable with other browsers and provide more client-side APIs — including local storage for AJAX apps and more extensibility in the form of a plugin API. Look for it in 2008.

It’s common knowledge that San Jose, San Francisco and New York City are among the highest paying places for software developers to work. And it’s generally common knowledge that these places are also among the most expensive places to live … Delatores has done some interesting math based on the cost of living and salary data and discovered that four of the top five cities (based on the purchasing power of an average software developer’s salary) are in Texas!

Even more interestingly, San Francisco, San Diego, New York and Oakland are all in the bottom five!

Of course, the problem is that these are statistics… You know what Mark Twain used to say about statistics?

You can’t simply take a salary and multiply it by the cost of living … because you don’t spend your whole salary on the cost of living. In most cost of living calculations nearly 30% of your spending is on housing — that includes investments like buying a home even though you will recover most of that money (or even turn a profit) when you move. You also spend some money on items that are basically fixed cost items: computers, phones and internet access, cars, luxury items … and generally speaking — anything you can buy on the internet . You also save some of it (you do save some of your money, right?) and maybe you give some of it away …

Perhaps a better metric would be to find some common ground for what you have to buy to live: an apartment or a mortgage, food, utilities, transportation, health care, and even entertainment … then find the localized cost of that, and subtract it from your average salary numbers. But hey, I’m no economist.

Kaspersky Lab is engaged in the worst form of attention mongering: spreading fear and uncertainty through misleading headlines.

They’ve posted a virus news article which claims that they’ve “discovered” the first virus for the iPod … which has been picked up and further exaggerated in what I consider some of the worst reporting ever.

The horrible TTN article actually states that “researchers at security firm Kaspersky Lab developed a virus which can infect Apple’s popular portable media player, the iPod” and goes on to note that the so-called virus only affects iPods running iPodLinux …

In fact, this is not a virus, but merely a proof of concept of some ELF infection code which, when executed on a linux computer will infect ELF files. The fellow free0n (who does not, as far as I can tell, work at Kaspersky []) really didn’t do a whole lot more than port the code to iPodLinux and modify the messages being displayed.

Not an iPod virus.

The “iPod Oslo” doesn’t copy itself into ELF files, it merely causes them to display a message instead of behaving as they should, so it barely classifies as an infector, and certainly cannot spread to other files, meaning you must (manually) execute the infector on each machine you want to infect. As a proof of the concept that programs can be written which could infect files on iPodLinux it’s not a bad start … but it’s certainly not what we would consider a virus.

In other words (for those of you not following the technical jargon): it doesn’t copy itself into other files, therefore, it’s not a virus. It’s also not a worm: it doesn’t copy itself to your computer when you plug in and synchronize the iPod (which is certainly something that would be scary). Finally, it’s not a trojan (it doesn’t masquerade as something else), and it doesn’t even include a mechanism for copying the infector onto the iPod from your computer … nor for executing it once it gets there. It’s simply a proof-of-concept: a virus could be written for (iPod) Linux. Yeah. I think we all knew that — the only question there is: do you have to be running as root in order for it to work?

On top of all of those things that it does not do there’s one more thing: It doesn’t run on your iPod. That is, unless you’ve hack your iPod and installed iPodLinux … this program and it’s potential future variants will not even be able to run on your iPod even if you manually copy them onto it.

But Kaspersky said it was

Just to be clear: although TNN made it worse by crediting Kaspersky with developing this program, it’s very clear that both the original blog post by the Kaspersky Lab employee that “discovered” the application and the news release both identified this as an iPod virus … and while they were careful to mention that it doesn’t pose a real threat, and that in fact you have to first install Linux on your iPod … the bottom line is that Kaspersky and TNN created deliberately misleading headlines to draw attention to a story that I wish I hadn’t even bothered to read.

One of my myriad email newsletters had a link this week to this Techworld article, entitled: Microsoft admits OneCare flaws … which is basically an article about a couple of blog posts by the AntiMalware Team and the OneCare Team

Corporate communications on spaces.live.com? Really? My company has the whole domain blocked off as being a “Dating/Social” site and prevents access from within the corporate internet…. is that really where you want to make your official Mea Culpa statement? Of course, maybe that’s the point — not only is it on MSN spaces, it’s the first post on a blog that’s been dead since January … maybe they were hoping nobody would notice. And the other blog is even worse: it hasn’t been active since at least October of last year, and then suddenly, this Hello World post

Which begs the question: do news people really leave a blog in their RSS reader after 5 months of inactivity, or did someone at Microsoft email Gregg Keizer, Computerworld and ask him to have a look at their blog and write a story about it? What ever happened to Press Releases? I mean, I’m no “regular Joe user” but if you paid money for OneCare … is this how you expect them to issue apologies and promises to do better? It seems overly informal to me.

(more…)

It’s been awhile since I posted something this unrelated to programming, gadgets, or my life, but I’m rather amused by the latest news about Canadian mad scientist Troy Hurtubise of Project Grizzly fame. This is the guy who tested his grizzly-proof suit by jumping in front of a 5-ton pickup truck going 30 miles an hour and claims to have invented the Angel Light in a dream, allowing him to see through walls, kill goldfish and destroy electronics … and the “God Light” which he thinks can cure cancer...

Anyway. His latest publicity stunt is a trip to stand around looking like Robocop in downtown Toronto, in hopes of getting a military contract to produce Starship Trooper-like suits for the Canadian military. While this seems like the perfect occasion for a series of jokes about the Canadian Armed Forces, what I really want to know is: What happened? Supposedly he was going to do this on Saturday, and yet the only mention of it (other than the original Hamilton Spectator news) is on the usual silly news sites which are just reporting on the Hamilton story.

Well, since there’s no further news, feel free to watch these old Discovery Planet videos: Fire Jeep, and Fighting Fire with Fact, and read about how Berkeley’s got the perfect partner to this suit working in their robotic exoskeleton.

Technorati Tags: ProjectGrizzly, BulletProof, FireProof,Science, Technology, Canada, Hurtubise

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced that his for-profit company, Wikia Inc., is ready to give away not just MediaWiki (the software which runs Wikipedia) but also the hosting you need to run it. And even further, if you run what they consider to be a popular website, you can even have the advertising revenue from your wiki.

The only catch is that they appear to be sort of forcing the GNU FDL on you, which could cause problems for people who would prefer some other license (like a Creative Commons license, perhaps?) and although Memory Alpha was able to get a different deal, one doubts that anyone else would — Memory Alpha is a 7-Million hits per month site which brings in some serious ad revenue.

At any rate, Wikia’s OpenServing service will be giving away hosting in a MediaWiki derivative in exchange for links back to Wikia. Not just that, but according to this article on eWeek they are hoping to become a sort of unified hosting based on open source website software such WordPress and Drupal. In fact, they’re open to suggestions, so if you are a web software developer and have some other open source software you’re willing to help them install and maintain on their servers … they want to hear from you.

The American fascination with rebates, coupons, sales and other forms of tiered price discrimination has finally reached college tuition rates, and the results are not pretty. Marketing companies have been dreaming up ways of selling the same product at different prices to different people for years, and now college boards are getting in on the act: hiking prices on average of 81% in the last ten years, and offsetting this by hiking tuition aid over 130% ... but is it a tool for socialism, or discrimination?

Full story at IHT

Early in 2000 the board voted to raise tuition and fees 17.6 percent, to $23,460 (and to include a laptop for every incoming student to help soften the blow)...

Within four years the size of the freshman class had risen 35 percent … Applicants had apparently assumed that if the college cost more, it must be better…

Ursinus also did something more: It raised student aid by nearly 20 percent, to just under $12.9 million, meaning that a majority of its students paid less than half price…

Basically, they raised tuition and fees 17.6 percent, but raised student aid by nearly 20 percent … so the average student may actually be paying less. But more students come, because they think they’re getting a great deal on an expensive school, and since it’s expensive, it must be good.

Average tuition at private, nonprofit four-year colleges in the United States — the price leaders — rose 81 percent from 1993 to 2004, more than double the inflation rate, according to the College Board, while campus-based financial aid rose 135 percent.

So basically, they’re raising tuition just to make things look more expensive, but they’re raising financial aid even more, so it’s not actually more expensive? Well, maybe not. The numbers here are based on a percentage of the original figures, so even 135% of the former tuition aid is apparently less than 81% of the tuition price.

Poor and lower middle-class families are hypothetically paying the same or less, but upper middle-class and rich families are paying the full price. However, not all grants are need based, most schools use at least some of this “aid” money to attract brighter students by offering GPA or test-score based grants. And of course, you have to take into account that some poor students, unaware of the tremendous amounts of available tuition aid, simply stay away and attend state schools.

It can be argued that everyone studying at a private liberal arts college is getting a discount… officials say they offer an education costing tens of thousands of dollars more … Swarthmore spends about $73,690 a student. But its tuition, room, board and fees in the last academic year were little more than $41,000.

Actually, both public and private universities spend more per-student than they charge. The difference is that at a private school, the costs are covered by private endowments from rich alumni … and at public schools they’re covered by the tax payers.