Cornficker: A ‘Digital Pearl Harbor?’
Hide Your Women and Children – Time to Hit Your Electronic Bunkers
Is the New York Times trying to scare me?
Their coverage today of the Cornficker internet worm had some of the following hot licks:
Hot Lick 1 -
Worms like Conficker not only ricochet around the Internet at lightning speed, they harness infected computers into unified systems called botnets, which can then accept programming instructions from their clandestine masters. “If you’re looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships steaming toward us on the horizon,” said Rick Wesson, chief executive of Support Intelligence, a computer security consulting firm based in San Francisco.
Hot Lick 2 -
“I don’t know why people aren’t more afraid of these programs,” said Merrick L. Furst, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech. “This is like having a mole in your organization that can do things like send out any information it finds on machines it infects.”
Hot Lick 3 -
Computer security researchers expect that within days or weeks the bot-herder who controls the programs will send out commands to force the botnet to perform some as yet unknown illegal activity.
Microsoft to Cut 5,000 jobs
First Mass Layoff in Company’s 34-year History
From Bloomberg this afternoon:
The reductions, about 5 percent of the workforce, will take place in almost all areas and help save $1.5 billion a year, the company said today in a statement. Microsoft also posted second- quarter sales and profit that missed projections, prompting the company to pull its full-year forecast.
I’ve Got a Job for Bill Gates
Another major city daily newspaper is dying, but this one may have a chance because of its city’s most famous citizen.
The demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wouldn’t be good for Washington state – or the whole Northwestern U.S. for that matter. Redmond, the headquarters of Gates’ Microsoft Corp. is part of the Seattle metro area. One of the largest corporations in the world, and arguably the most important tech company in the world needs to be located in a healthy, vibrant city. Part of that mix is a genuine arm of the Fourth Estate, a healthy daily newspaper.
Gates has an opportunity here. He has the personal wealth to swoop in and be the angel investor that keeps journalism in Seattle. Today, we may say that a “healthy daily newspaper” is integral to a world-class city, but Gates has the opportunity to turn that notion on its ear. Gates is a visionary, a strategist. A man like Bill Gates – with an imagination and understanding of technology and the power of the World Wide Web – matched with an equal sized pocketbook has the opportunity to incubate the future of daily journalism in his own back yard.
Most rich guys would swoop in and try to remake the P-I in some sort of image of themselves, hence perhaps sacrificing objectivity and information for opinion and fluff. After hearing this interview with Charlie Rose, where Gates talked about his commitment to information and education – and affordable access to both, Gates may be the man to view the P-I opportunity not only as a way to be civic-minded, but as a way to make a bigger impact on society and create the business model that in the least saves the utility of the daily newspaper.
What I would hope Gates wouldn’t do is turn the P-I into an arm of Microsoft. Sure, MSNBC could be involved in some way, but in creating this new business model for daily journalism, the entire world of technology and ideas about communication needs to be considered. Gates, “semi-retired” from Microsoft is in a better place in his life to do this. Several years ago, I fear the P-I would have become part of the Microsoft franchise or brand and the journalistic integrity would have suffered, even if only in perception. No, this should be a Bill Gates project, not a Microsoft project.
I might suggest that as a bridge, perhaps the first place to look to save a few dollars and a few trees would be to begin with a scaled-back model regarding print circulation. It’s probably not a public service to go completely electronic at this stage. What about all the oldsters who do not have internet access? What about the people who can’t afford internet access? A lot of these folks can still afford 50 cents to a dollar a day to get a good quality newspaper. I might also suggest that the last place to look for savings should be the newsroom. It might be the first place to look for performance management, but content is King and content comes from people reporting, thinking and presenting.
Mr. Gates: To borrow some language from another venerable northwestern firm, “Just Do It.”
The Switch Is Final: Now Completely Weaned From Microsoft Internet Explorer
A few weeks ago I declared that I was finally completely fed up with Microsoft. Fed up with the constant security holes, the locking up and crashing of Internet Explorer, and I found out that Microsoft had been hiding the very issue that was plaguing my IE browser.
I switched to Firefox. Click on the graphic above and you can too. All I can say is flawless. Install was easy. I got rid of the shortcut to IE on my desktop and set Firefox as the default browser. All of my bookmarks were intact and I’ve only had to install one or two “add-ons” for my regular browsing habits.
