Microsoft + Nokia = Dog

When Stephen Elop moved from Microsoft to run Nokia, many saw this as part of a cunning plan to prepare the latter for purchase by the former. There's no real evidence for that, although soon after joining, Nokia did place the Windows Phone platform at the heart of its future strategy, despite the many drawbacks of doing so, effectively betting the company on the success of Windows as the third mobile platform alongside Android and Apple.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Windows 8+TPM: Germany Warns of 'Loss of Control'

Last year, I wrote about some serious issues with Microsoft's Secure Boot Technology in Windows 8. It seems that the German government has started to wake up to problems with Windows 8, as this headline in Die Zeit attests:

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Most Dangerous Windows Infection of All

Readers of this blog don't need to be told about Windows' awful security record, or how, when news outlets talk glibly of "viruses", they actually nearly always mean Windows malware. But sometimes there are stories from this weird world that make even seasoned Windows-watchers like me shake my head in disbelief.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Stuxnet's Infection Of Chevron Shows Why 'Weaponized' Malware Is A Bad Idea

The Stuxnet worm that attacked an Iranian nuclear enrichment facility a couple of years ago was exceptional from several viewpoints. It is believed to have been the costliest development effort in malware history, involving dozens of engineers. It also made use of an unprecedented number of zero-day exploits in Microsoft Windows in order to operate. Finally, Stuxnet seems to be the first piece of malware known with reasonable certainty to have been created by the US, probably working closely with Israel. 

On Techdirt.

Of Open Source, Microsoft, India and Paraguay

One of the recurrent recent themes of IT in the UK has been how moves to open source by local and central government have been stymied by Microsoft - the most famous example being the Newham Council saga. Of course, that's not a problem unique to the UK: it's a pattern repeated around the world, as some recent stories highlight.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Microsoft's $844 Million Software Giveaway To Nonprofits: Pure Charity Or Cheap Marketing?

Microsoft has just released its 2011 Annual Financial Report. But alongside that document's dry facts about its $69.9 billion turnover, and the operating income of $27.2 billion, Dj Walker-Morgan pointed us to a more interesting publication, Microsoft's 2011 Citizenship Report: 

On Techdirt.

One Thing We Know about the Shady Rats

The news about "Operation Shady Rat" has naturally provoked much interest (as it was intended to....) After all, who could not fail to be impressed by claims like this?

I am convinced that every company in every conceivable industry with significant size and valuable intellectual property and trade secrets has been compromised (or will be shortly), with the great majority of the victims rarely discovering the intrusion or its impact. In fact, I divide the entire set of Fortune Global 2000 firms into two categories: those that know they’ve been compromised and those that don’t yet know.

Ouch.

You can read the rest of the McAfee post for more details - but not for an answer to the key question: who is doing this? You don't have to be a genius to work out that it's probably one of two large, countries situated in Asia, and personally I'd guess it's the one with lots of people in it, FWIW.

But that's not really what interests me here. Instead, I'd like to focus on this final part of the post:

Although Shady RAT’s scope and duration may shock those who have not been as intimately involved in the investigations into these targeted espionage operations as we have been, I would like to caution you that what I have described here has been one specific operation conducted by a single actor/group. We know of many other successful targeted intrusions (not counting cybercrime-related ones) that we are called in to investigate almost weekly, which impact other companies and industries. This is a problem of massive scale that affects nearly every industry and sector of the economies of numerous countries, and the only organizations that are exempt from this threat are those that don’t have anything valuable or interesting worth stealing.

It's a nice ending to a fascinating piece, but in one respect it's almost certainly not true.

That's because, like just about every similar piece describing massive intrustions of this kind, the McAfee doesn't actually say anything about the platforms that were affected, simply noting:

The compromises themselves were standard procedure for these types of targeted intrusions: a spear-phishing email containing an exploit is sent to an individual with the right level of access at the company, and the exploit when opened on an unpatched system will trigger a download of the implant malware. That malware will execute and initiate a backdoor communication channel to the Command & Control web server and interpret the instructions encoded in the hidden comments embedded in the webpage code. This will be quickly followed by live intruders jumping on to the infected machine and proceeding to quickly escalate privileges and move laterally within the organization to establish new persistent footholds via additional compromised machines running implant malware, as well as targeting for quick exfiltration the key data they came for.

But somebody in the comments asked the obvious question: "Were the initial intrusions all on Microsoft OS machines? Also, was a particular browser targeted?" To which the answer came:

All the malware we’ve seen was Windows-based. There were a variety of vulnerabilities used

Think about that. This massive breach of security, and loss of possibly highly-sensitive information, was all down to two things: the abiding thoughtlessness of people opening attachments, and a range of flaws in Microsoft's software.

So the statement that "the only organizations that are exempt from this threat are those that don’t have anything valuable or interesting worth stealing" is not true; another class would be those wise enough not to allow any of their personnel to use Microsoft products. We may not know definitively who the Shady Rats are, but we certainly know what they *really* love.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter and identi.ca, or on Google+

Re-using PCs: Remploy's Radical Route

One of the problems with the rapid pace of development in the world of computers is that the latter become out of date and slightly slow compared to the latest speed fiend. Moreover, the computer industry is predicated on the idea that everyone upgrades their systems every year or two, and marketing is largely geared to that end.

On Open Enterprise blog.

UK Cyberwar - or UK Cyberwallies?

One of the most embarrassing features of the dotcom era was a habit of putting “cyber” in front of everything to make it look hot and trendy (disclosure: I did it too, but I was 15 years younger then...). Don't look now, but it's back:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Microsoft: "Linux at the End of its Life Cycle"

Regular readers of this blog will know that I've tracked the rather painful history of attempts to increase the deployment of free software in Russia, notably in its schools. Well, that saga continues, it seems, with doubts being expressed about the creation of a Russian national operating system based on GNU/Linux:

Иногда приходится слышать, что идея национальной программной платформы содержит в себе логическое противоречие. Ведь если такая платформа действительно будет создаваться на базе СПО, то такое программное обеспечение будет более чем на 90% произведено не в России, а за рубежом. Соответственно, и НПП у нас получится, скорее, какая-нибудь американо-германо-индийская, а не российская.

[Google Translate: Sometimes we hear that the idea of a national software platform contains a logical contradiction. After all, if this platform really will be created based on the ACT, then this software will be more than 90% are not produced in Russia and abroad. Accordingly, the NPP, we will, more likely, some kind of US-German-Indian, not Russian.]

That story will doubtless run and run. But what interested me was the accompanying quote from Nikolai Pryanishnikov, president of Microsoft in Russia; it's a corker:

"Компания Microsoft выступает за технологическую нейтральность и считает, что выбор ОС должен быть обусловлен исключительно качествами самой ОС, ее экономической эффективностью, стоящими практическими задачами, безопасностью, а не идеологическими соображениями.

С нашей точки зрения, наиболее эффективным для развития инновационной экономики в стране представляется не создание аналога существующих ОС, на что уйдут огромные средства и много времени, а взяв за основу наиболее распространенную ОС, проверенную российскими спецслужбами, создавать собственные приложения и решения, вкладывая при этом средства в перспективные научные российские разработки. Нужно иметь в виду, что Linux не является российской ОС и, кроме того, находится в конце своего жизненного цикла".

[Google Translate: "Microsoft supports technological neutrality and considers that the choice of OS should be caused solely as the greatest operating system, its economic efficiency, standing practical problems, safety, rather than ideological considerations.

From our point of view, the most effective for the development of an innovative economy in the country seems not to create an analogue of the existing OS, which will take huge amounts of money and time, and taking as basis the most popular operating systems, proven by Russian security services, to create custom applications and solutions, investing in this funds in promising scientific Russian developments. We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle."]

The idea that "Linux is at the end of its life cycle" is rather rich coming from the vendor of a platform that is increasingly losing market share, both at the top and bottom end of the market, while Linux just gets stronger. I'd wager that variants of Linux will be around rather longer than Windows.

Update: the Russian publication CNews Open, from which the story above was taken, points out that Russia is aiming to create a national software platform, not a national operating system. Quite what this means seems to be somewhat unclear:

даже российским участникам сообщества сегодня по-прежнему трудно понять, что конкретно представляет собой российская национальная программная платформа

[Google Translate: even the Russian participants of the community today is still difficult to understand exactly what constitutes Russia's national software platform.]

Let's hope things become a little clearer in due course: with its wealth of top-class programmers, Russia has the potential to become a key player the free software world.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Is GCHQ Frighteningly Clueless or Fiendishly Cunning?

I'm very sceptical about the concept of “cyber attacks”. Not that I doubt that computer systems and infrastructure are attacked: it's just their packaging as some super-duper new “threat” that I find suspicious. It smacks of bandwagon-jumping at best, and at worst looks like an attempt by greedy security companies to drum up yet more business.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why GNU/Linux is Unmatched – and Unmatchable

Users of free software are nothing if not passionate. Most of them care deeply about the code they use, and will happily plunge into the flamewars that flare up regularly across the Web. The core focus of those arguments is well established by now: against Mac fans, it's about the virtues of true openness and freedom; against Windows fans (do they still exist?) it's about those, as well as security, speed, stability, etc. But there's another aspect that rarely gets discussed, and yet it represents one of GNU/Linux's greatest strengths: the breadth of hardware platforms supported.

On The H Open.

Grokking Green IT - and why Open Source Helps

One of the pardoxes at the heart of computing is that for all its power to improve the world, in one respect it is doing the opposite, thanks to its apparently insatiable appetite for electricity. As we are becoming increasingly aware, most electricity produced today has serious negative consequences for the environment, and so the more we use and depend on computers for our daily lives, the more we damage our planet.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Goodbye Becta – and Good Riddance

Not quite on the scale of cancelling the ID cards project, the news that Becta would be shut down was nonetheless further evidence of the coalition government's new broom whooshing into action. Although there seems to be a wide range of views on whether this is a good or bad thing – see this post and its comments for a representative selection – for me Becta was pretty much an unmitigated disaster for free software in this country, and I'm glad to see it go.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Enter the (Big) Dragon

As part of my continuing service to report on the fascinating developments in the Chinese chip sector, I pass on the following:

It's official: China's next supercomputer, the petascale Dawning 6000, will be constructed exclusively with home-grown microprocessors. Weiwu Hu, chief architect of the Loongson (also known as "Godson") family of CPUs at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), a division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also confirms that the supercomputer will run Linux. This is a sharp departure from China's last supercomputer, the Dawning 5000a, which debuted at number 11 on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers in 2008, and was built with AMD chips and ran Windows HPC Server.

It won't come as a surprise to readers of this blog that China's new supercomputer will be running Linux - over 80% of the world's big machines do. What's fascinating is that this is being built out of that home-grown Loongson chip - the one that Windows doesn't run on. As the same article explains:

The arrival of Dawning 6000 will be an important landmark for the Loongson processor family, which to date has been used only in inexpensive, low-power netbooks and nettop PCs. When the Dawning 5000a was initially announced, it too was meant to be built with Loongson processors, but the Dawning Information Industry Company, which built the computer, eventually went with AMD chips, citing a lack of support for Windows, and the ICT's failure to deliver a sufficiently powerful chip in time.

That means that as China builds more and more of these, and pushes the technology further and further, it will be Linux that benefits, not Windows, and Linux that spreads...

China + Loonson + Linux: this is one to watch...

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

What Took Wired So Loongson?

I've been writing about the Loongson chip for three years now. As I've noted several times, this chip is important because (a) it's a home-grown Chinese chip (albeit based on one from MIPS) and (b) Windows doesn't run on it, but GNU/Linux does.

It looks like Wired magazine has finally woken up to the story (better late than never):

Because the Loongson eschews the standard x86 chip architecture, it can’t run the full version of Microsoft Windows without software emulation. To encourage adoption of the processor, the Institute of Computing Technology is adapting everything from Java to OpenOffice for the Loongson chip and releasing it all under a free software license. Lemote positions its netbook as the only computer in the world with nothing but free software, right down to the BIOS burned into the motherboard chip that tells it how to boot up. It’s for this last reason that Richard “GNU/Linux” Stallman, granddaddy of the free software movement, uses a laptop with a Loongson chip.

Because GNU/Linux distros have already been ported to the Loongson chip, neither Java nor OpenOffice.org needs "adapting" so much as recompiling - hardly a challenging task. As for "releasing it all under a free software license", they had no choice.

But at least Wired got it right about the potential impact of the chip:

Loongson could also reshape the global PC business. “Compared to Intel and IBM, we are still in the cradle,” concedes Weiwu Hu, chief architect of the Loongson. But he also notes that China’s enormous domestic demand isn’t the only potential market for his CPU. “I think many other poor countries, such as those in Africa, need low-cost solutions,” he says. Cheap Chinese processors could corner emerging markets in the developing world (and be a perk for the nation’s allies and trade partners).

And that’s just the beginning. “These chips have implications for space exploration, intelligence gathering, industrialization, encryption, and international commerce,” says Tom Halfhill, a senior analyst for Microprocessor Report.

Yup.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Windows Does Not Scale

Who's afraid of the data deluge?

Researchers and workers in fields as diverse as bio-technology, astronomy and computer science will soon find themselves overwhelmed with information. Better telescopes and genome sequencers are as much to blame for this data glut as are faster computers and bigger hard drives.

While consumers are just starting to comprehend the idea of buying external hard drives for the home capable of storing a terabyte of data, computer scientists need to grapple with data sets thousands of times as large and growing ever larger. (A single terabyte equals 1,000 gigabytes and could store about 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica.)

The next generation of computer scientists has to think in terms of what could be described as Internet scale. Facebook, for example, uses more than 1 petabyte of storage space to manage its users’ 40 billion photos. (A petabyte is about 1,000 times as large as a terabyte, and could store about 500 billion pages of text.)

Certainly not GNU/Linux: the latest Top500 supercomputer rankings show that the GNU/Linux family has 88.60%. Windows? Glad you asked: 1%.

So, forget about whether there will ever be a Year of the GNU/Linux Desktop: the future is about massive data-crunchers, and there GNU/Linux already reigns supreme, and has done for years. It's Windows that's got problems....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

'Foreign Policy' Should Stick to its Home Turf

Foreign Policy has published some good features; this isn't one of them:

Although the newest oil rigs, which cost upward of $1 billion apiece, might be loaded with cutting-edge robotics technology, the software that controls a rig's basic functions is anything but. Most rely on the decades-old supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software, written in an era when the "open source" tag was more important than security, said Jeff Vail, a former counterterrorism and intelligence analyst with the U.S. Interior Department. "It's underappreciated how vulnerable some of these systems are," he said. "It is possible, if you really understood them, to cause catastrophic damage by causing safety systems to fail."

Sorry, old chap, but "open source" and "security" are orthogonal, independent axes. And this, from the same article:

"The worst-case scenario, of course, is that a hacker will break in and take over control of the whole platform," Jaatun said. That hasn't happened yet, but computer viruses have caused personnel injuries and production losses on North Sea platforms, he noted.

suggests we're talking about *Windows* systems, not "open source". So, pretty much 100% wrong. (Via @cdaffara.)

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Glad They Chose Windows?

I doubt it somehow:

Many potential buyers of laptops priced under $300 in the U.S. had an unpleasant surprise over the weekend: The machines would not be eligible for a free upgrade to Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 operating system.

Wal-Mart and Best Buy attracted plenty of buyers during a promotional offering of laptops priced under $300. Some of those laptops sold out just one day after the offers began. The prices were respectable considering the generous features, including large screens, better graphics and DVD drives, which are not typically found in most low-cost netbooks.

However, the laptops came preloaded with the Windows Vista Home Basic operating system, which does not include a free upgrade to Windows 7 in the U.S. Instead, consumers will have to shell out about $120 to upgrade the operating system.

So, that's a $120 hidden cost of choosing Windows: nice move.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter and identi.ca.

GNU/Linux Tops TOP500 Supercomputers Again

The fact that GNU/Linux totally dominates the top 500 supercomputing list is hardly news, but the fact that it has managed to *increase* its market share yet further is.

Here are the results for June 2009:

GNU/Linux 443 (88.6%)
Windows 5 (1.0%)
Unix 22 (4.4%)

and here are the figures for six months ago:

GNU/Linux 439 (87.8%)
Windows 5 (1.0%)
Unix 23 (4.6%)

Notice that plucky little Windows, from that small and hopelessly out-gunned company up in Seattle has bravely managed to increase its share by precisely 0%: an impressive result considering the millions of dollars it has spent trying to break into this market.

Snarky? Moi?

Update: More details about the top 20, and GNU/Linux's dominance here.

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