Ben ik nou gek? Word ik gewoon oud? Of ligt het toch niet helemaal aan mij?

This is Google’s motto “Don’t be evil” however more and more it seems to be applicable to you and not to Google. The latest news is that the Street-view vehicles are also registering WLAN’s and MAC addresses while mapping your neighbourhood. Big issue in Germany (here’s a German article from newspaper ‘Der Spiegel’) where this was discovered.

Now the most appalling and worrying is that Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said internet users shouldn’t worry about privacy unless they have something to hide. Right. “Don’t be evil” also includes to not collect data that could facilitate any evil.

Whahahaha… it had to happen one day. A problem with an anti-virus update marks a false positive and puts the file in quarantine. The OS can’t load the file anymore and… oops… reboots… and…. reboots…. and… reboots… This is actually a great feature. Rebooting windows is like 80% of normal usage and it is now fully automated.

Fixing it can be a bit hard… since the computer is rebooting all the time. McAfee could create a bootable windows CD that restores the missing file from the system but.. hey wait.. no they can’t do that. You can’t distribute a proprietary OS like windows for free… Maybe they can create a Linux boot CD to restore the windows file… Something to contemplate: using Linux to revive a windows machine.

Oh whow.. now here’s a very nice report of a recent successful XSS-attack on apache.org. No don’t worry it isn’t a huge hole in the Apache webserver… just a very clever attack. Well.. they did obtain SVN credentials so maybe the attackers could have changed the sources and inject a backdoor…

The attackers were able to penetrate at system level due to usual end-user fuck-ups like using the same account & credentials on the web applications as well as shell access to production systems. One-time passwords did prevent the attackers to gain full access to the entire infrastructure. It’s a nice read.

Oh wow.. many people I’ve spoken about the Oracle/Sun merger didn’t like the idea but also at former Sun not everyone seems to be happy about it. As always with mergers like these the most gifted and talented people are the first ones to leave. Those who actually matter don’t have to put up with management crap. Just pack up your ol’ bags and throw ‘m down at some other company who is delighted with your arrival.

So the latest rumours are now confirmed: James Gosling (father of the programming language Java) is bailing ship… who will be next? Who will stay behind? What will the impact be on Sun’s former assets like Java, Solaris and MySQL?

Oracle has already taken another approach with many of the assets they got from Sun. Former Sun Solaris, now called Oracle Solaris, used to be free (as in free beer) but Oracle Solaris has a 90-day trail period. After the trail period you’ll have to obtain a license from Oracle. Sure, you can still use OpenSolaris but unfortunately all (or most) future development to Oracle Solaris is closed source so these features and fixes will not end up in Open Solaris.

1 april's fool

Oohh.. I hate it… I hate it… I hate it… It’s all too obvious.