Thom Holwerda Archive

Sophos has published new research into the past six months of cyber crime. The Sophos Security Threat Management Report Update reveals that while there has been a vast drop in new viruses and worms, this has been over-compensated by increases in other types of malware, as cyber criminals turn their attention to stealing information and money. Most interestingly, new Trojans now outweigh viruses and worms by 4:1, compared to 2:1 in the first half of 2005. In addition, the continued dominance of Windows-based threats has prompted Sophos to suggest that many home users should consider switching to Apple Macs, to shield themselves from the malware onslaught.

Google has strong words for legislators who are currently mulling over net neutrality issues: the company will take any perceived abuse to the US Department of Justice. Speaking at a news conference in Bulgaria, Internet pioneer and now Google VP Vint Cerf said that the company will be 'happy' if legislators ultimately opt to support net neutrality principles, but in the absence of such support, the company will take a wait-and-see approach. "If we are not successful in our arguments... Then we will simply have to wait until something bad happens and then we will make known our case to the Department of Justice's anti-trust division," he said.

Apple recently added two new retail configurations to its MacBook line of consumer notebooks, both of which are now available at most of the company's stores. A new 2.0GHz white MacBook configuration packs an additional 512MB of RAM and 20GB of extra hard disk space, for a total of 1GB of RAM (via two 512MB SODIMMs) and 80GB of storage. The new model retails for USD 1449, or USD 150 more than the 2.0GHz white MacBook with 512MB of RAM and a 60GB hard disk. Both configurations included Apple's SuperDrive optical disc drive. Meanwhile, Apple has also introduced a new configuration of its black 2.0GHz MacBook, dubbed the 'MacBook Ultimate'.

"Software giant Microsoft has named the day that Windows 98 and Millennium users will no longer have support. On July 11, the two operating systems will have their final breakfast before being wiped from Vole's support brain. Although many expected Microsoft to stop supporting the quaintly antique software, the date for liquidation was uncertain."

When developping in a large team, you have to make convention about the use of tab in source code. This article suggests a better solution: rather than saying that a tab character (a 'hard tab') will move the cursor until the cursor's position is a multiple of N characters, we should say that a tab character is a delimiter between table cells. This has a nice side effect, since proportional fonts can now be used.

Good as well as bad news for Microsoft on the legal front. Their good news is that a judge has rejected Go Computing's claim that Microsoft used dirty tricks to keep it out of the operating system market. However, their bad news is that an EU committee ruled on Monday that Microsoft failed to comply with a landmark antitrust decision, paving the way for fines of up to 2 million euros a day, a source familiar with the situation said.

A few days ago we reported on the release of Cairo 1.2.0-- as it turns out, this also happens to be the first stable Cairo release with support for BeOS. Haiku's app_server uses a different 2D graphics library, Anti-Grain Geometry. Also, Haiku now has a driver for NE2000 compatible network cards. This means developers can now test the networking stack with QEMU, which emulates an NE2000 compatible card.

After six years of financial difficulties and reorganizations, Corel finally seems on track with promising first and second quarters in 2006 and a return to public trading. One of the first steps in this turnabout, according to Graham Brown, executive vice president of software development at Corel, was the jettisoning of the company's products for Linux, WordPerfect for Linux and Corel Linux.

"They said it at LinuxWorld in Toronto a few months ago. They've buzzed it at analysts, and now the press is saying it to the public. Novell says this is the year of the Linux desktop, and I'm familiar with evidence showing gains in popularity for Linux. Yet, I disagree that this is the year. Nothing is happening this year to make it, specifically, the year of the Linux desktop and I'm going to hypothesize what could change that."

Jave static analysis and custom bug detectors can be a very cost-effective way to improve software quality. By creating a detector for a known bug pattern, we can search for that bug pattern not only in the current code base for a specific project, but in any project, current or future. This article looks at how static analysis tools can change the way you manage software quality.