One Shot Design

Just when it appeared Windows and its associated services were looking more stable month after month, Microsoft chose June to tackle a plethora of vulnerabilities including no fewer than 14 that its security engineers believe could be exploitable within the next 30 days.

Read the article at Betanews.com

I reluctantly had to undergo a corporate workshop on Office 2007, but to be honest, I was pleasantly surprised: The office now features a PDF export filter and allows to easily add slick graphical effects. I’m thinking: hey, this is what OpenOffice should have been like!

Microsoft seems to have taken heed of customers complaints and from the competition (hint: Apple) to produce a cleaner, leaner interface. Microsoft’s Office Open XML is a ZIP-compatible compressed meta-format and became an Ecma standard in 2006. Obviously, the 48 years-old non-profit Ecma International industry standards organisation lists Microsoft amongst its ordinary (financially supporting) members. Needless to say, Office 2007 doesn’t export to Sun’s OpenDocument format.

Officials from the European Union are said to be enlisting the help of rival browser vendors in their anti-trust dealings with Microsoft.

According to a Wall Street Journal report the European Commission has begun speaking with hardware and software vendors, including rival browser companies such as Opera, on ways which Microsoft can allow for competition on Windows systems.

Read the article at vnunet.com.

Ubuntu already featured by default security enhancements developed by the U.S. National Security Agency, but version 9.04 of the Linux distribution now brings seamless file encryption for added protection of critical data. When activated, the option automatically mounts the encrypted home folder without asking for a password, and the user can browse and work with files at normal speed. Should the encrypted folder need to be recovered, there is a hash passphrase.

This new feature could prove useful should the computer gets stolen: in case critical data was not already encrypted through Keepass or Truecrypt, the thief won’t be able to read anything from the home folder. File encryption is not virtually unbreakable, so for added security one should combine all those different layers of security.

This should be something mandatory for all government laptops, which are particularly at risk.