“At about 9:30 a.m. CST on Dec. 28, a power failure impacted an AT&T facility in Bloomfield, MI,” state and AT&T spokesperson. “This situation has resulted in intermittent disruption of mobile services for customers in some Midwest states.” The spokesperson went on to use the hideous word “impacted” a few more times in explaining that technicians had restored power and were trying to fix the network.

Bloomfield is way north of Detroit, MI, but the latter town may have been the site of some Level3 backbone problems that caused outages at a number of sites today, including Ars. A post at the SANS Internet Storm Center indicates that many of that site’s readers are fingering the Detroit area as the outage’s source and citing the Internet Health Report (which seems to indicate that things are fine right now) as evidence that Level3 is to blame. TechCrunch has a screenshot of the IHR when it was lighting up red for Level3, and some of the comments list a few of the other major sites that were down.

Bloomfield isn’t THAT far north of Detroit—about a 37 minute drive—unless they don’t mean Bloomfield Hills, which is what I suspect they actually mean, because Bloomfield Michigan isn’t even in an AT&T service area.

Anyway, while the above affected mostly cellphone users (our cell phones were dead for most of the day) it appears that there’s been a number of other problems in several Midwest states that affected the Internet as well:

Forum and blog posts, like this post on the Dataoutages New Blog, indicate that the network outages have hit several Midwestern states, with Indiana, North and South Dakota, and Ohio affected alongside the aforementioned Illinois and Michigan problems.

Personally I thought it was all the time I was spending watching porn on the Internet that was clogging up the tubes, but I’ll be happy to let you guys blame it on some other vague problem that has nothing to do with me.

Microsoft issued a patch for MS08-067 on October 23 and rates the severity of the flaw as “Critical.” for all previous versions of Windows 2000, XP, XP-64, and Server 2003. Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are apparently less vulnerable; Microsoft’s aggregate severity rating for these two operating systems is “Important.”

There’s a story within the rise of Conficker that I think is worth exploring. Microsoft appears to have dealt with this issue in textbook fashion; the company issued a warning, released a patch, and (presumably) rolled that patch into November’s Patch Tuesday. A significant amount of time—five to six weeks—has passed since Microsoft released its fix, yet PC World reports Conficker may have already infected as many as 500,000 systems.

It would be extremely fascinating to see data on how a patch spreads throughout the Internet once released by Microsoft as well as information on whether or not the severity of any particular flaw affects how rapidly users move to apply the patch. Events like this this raise the question of whether or not Microsoft should have the capability to push critical security updates out to home users automatically, regardless of how AutoUpdate is configured. I say home users for a reason; businesses and enterprise-class companies may still need to deploy the patch on a specialized timeline in order to ensure servers stay operational.

The idea of mandatory updates is unpopular with a lot of folks, myself included, but there’s a fair argument to be made here. Microsoft takes a lot of shit for having major holes in their OS, but a lot of those holes are patched within a reasonable time upon their discovery. Those patches don’t do any good if they’re not applied and the average PC user is not a technical support guy like me and probably won’t even be aware that he needs to apply patches, but he won’t hesitate to blame Microsoft if he gets infected. At the very least I could see an argument for setting the option for critical updates to be installed automatically as the default with the option to turn it off for folks who know what they’re doing. We already have a number of different software packages, mostly DRM systems, that update themselves automatically whether the user wants them to or not and a lot of folks seem to have no problem living with that situation (the rest of us just don’t use that software). I see a much stronger argument that can be made for Microsoft doing the same with critical updates than any DRM system.

The problem of unpatched systems has gotten bad enough that back in 2005 some ISPs started blocking infected systems from using their services and others have been breaking Internet protocols in controversial ways to try and combat the problem, but the best offense is a good defense and that means individual users keeping their systems patched and running current anti-virus software.  The question then becomes: Should Microsoft be allowed to at least force the critical updates on its users?

Still there’s a resistance to the idea that the Mac may be vulnerable to the same sorts of malicious software that Windows users are and that prompted Graham Cluley to ask in a blog entry Do you really need anti-virus on your Apple Mac?

It started with just a small pebble being dropped into a pond. Apple updated one of its support advisories on 21 November, informing its customers that they are recommended to run anti-virus software.

Most people would never have noticed this announcement. I didn’t at first. I only heard about it when I saw the guys from Intego mention it on their Apple security blog on 25 November. A couple of days later, recovering from a bout of man-flu, I blogged about a new piece of Apple malware and mentioned in passing that Apple were now recommending their customers run anti-virus software.

Today, however, that small pebble dropped by Apple has turned into a tidalwave of commentary - and we’re seeing lots of news stories about Apple urging Mac users to protect themselves with anti-virus.

So, do you really need anti-virus on your Apple Mac?

From there he goes on to list seven facts and the comes to the following conclusion:

So, back to my original question, do you really need anti-virus on your Apple Mac?

The answer is yes.

It’s worth noting that Mr. Cluley works for Sophos, a company that produces anti-virus, anti-spam, firewall software packages for both big and small businesses, so it’s possible he may have a conflict of interest in promoting anti-virus software on the Mac. The fact that Apple has recommended the practice and that Mr. Cluley has been active in anti-virus research for some time prior to joining Sophos should help balance that out. That and the seven facts he lists make a pretty good argument.

The threat for Apple users is still relatively small compared to what Windows users face, but if Apple continues to gain market share then it won’t take long for it to grow. Of course the best defense is being educated about the threats, but for a lot of people that’s a commitment they don’t seem to be able to make.

Whatever mojo it takes to run Linux in a stable fashion is apparently beyond my reach. I’ve managed to get things to a point where I only have to worry about applications quitting for no apparent reason as opposed to the whole system crashing for no apparent reason and I’ve been able to live with that fairly well, but when the system locks up because I canceled a file requester... I dunno. That just seems like asking a bit much.

I’ve been working on a project here at work converting the Internet kiosks we have set up for the folks out on the floor from Windows to Ubuntu. Recently someone pointed out that there’s some profiles for Kubuntu that would do most of the work for me so I downloaded the latest version (8.10) and installed it on the test machine I’ve been using. It installed fine, but when you login it never makes it through the whole login process without locking up completely. It starts showing the little icons starting with the hard drive and then as it’s fading the others in it just stops. If I install the previous version (8.04) it seems to let me login just fine. Does that make any sense to anyone? I’d expect that sort of problem if we were going from version 8 to version 9 or version 10, but we went up by .6 of a version number. That’d be like if you were running Windows XP and then installed Service Pack 2 and your system no longer let you login. Actually it’d be like you wiped the hard drive and installed Windows XP with Service Pack 2 already in it and it refused to let you login cause I did a clean install of 8.10 of Kubuntu. Hell, it seems like you’re rolling the dice just letting the system updater run.

And a lot of this is just my frustration venting at the moment. I don’t have a choice here at work. I’m going to have to work with this OS like it or not so I’ll sit down and pour through the dozens of log files in /var/logs and see if I can figure out which one might tell me what the fuck is going on and try to learn something, but I’m really starting to hate Linux. Or at least Ubuntu. Stupid shit happens that doesn’t make any damned sense on stuff that should be rock solid and trying to find out what’s going on and why is exceedingly difficult. It shouldn’t be that way. This is supposed to be the better OS.

Ubuntu 8.10 includes Xorg 7.4, which has improved support for input device hotplugging. This takes Linux one step closer to completely eliminating the need for Xorg configuration files. Network configuration gets a big boost in this release with the addition of Network Manager 0.7, which adds support for managing 3G and PPPoE connections and configuring static IP addresses. The new version of Network Manager also has a more complete end user interface that exposes a variety of other configuration features.

Ubuntu 8.10 also includes the Dynamic Kernel Module Support system, a framework created by Dell that will automatically recompile kernel modules when kernel packages are updated. This will hopefully reduce breakage of VirtualBox and other applications that rely on third-party kernel modules.

I should take a moment here to update you folks on my own experiences with Ubuntu as I’ve written at length on the troubles I’ve had with it. I recently restaged my work laptop once again with a fresh download of 8.04 after an experiment left my system hosed so badly that I didn’t know where to start to try and fix it. The first thing I did after the install was run the update manager and install all the patches and then run EnvyNG and have it install the ATI drivers for the Thinkpad’s video card. The only additional software I’ve added since, other than official patches, has been Adobe’s Flash plugin for Firefox. The result has been a very stable system, much more stable than in the past at least. Firefox will still lock up and “gray out” on me for short periods of time every now and then, but it isn’t crashing anywhere near as frequently and the crashes due to the video drivers seem to be a thing of the past. My already receding hairline is quite pleased by the lack of pulling it has had to endure as of late.

That said I’ll probably give it a few days, if not weeks, before attempting to upgrade to the 8.10 release. At the very least I want to be sure EnvyNG is available on the new version to ease the installation of the video drivers if it should be necessary to reinstall them. You folks who aren’t afraid to upgrade to 8.10 right away are welcome to report your experiences in the comments if you wish.

At PDC today, Microsoft gave the first public demonstration of Windows 7. Until now, the company has been uncharacteristically secretive about its new OS; over the past few months MS has let on that the taskbar will undergo a number of changes, and that many bundled applications would be unbundled and shipped with Windows Live instead. There have also been occasional screenshots of some of the new applets like Calculator and Paint. Now that the covers are finally off, the scale of the new OS becomes clear. The user interface has undergone the most radical overhaul and update since the introduction of Windows 95 thirteen years ago.

First, however, it’s important to note what Windows 7 isn’t. Windows 7 will not contain anything like the kind of far-reaching architectural modifications that Microsoft made with Windows Vista. Vista brought a new display layer and vastly improved security, but that came at a cost: a significant number of (badly-written) applications had difficulty running on Vista. Applications expecting to run with Administrator access were still widespread when Vista was released, and though many software vendors do a great job, there are still those that haven’t updated or fixed their software. Similarly, at its launch many hardware vendors did not have drivers that worked with the new sound or video subsystems, leaving many users frustrated.

While windows 7 doesn’t undo these architectural changes—they were essential for the long-term health of the platform—it equally hasn’t made any more. Any hardware or software that works with Windows Vista should also work correctly with Windows 7, so unlike the transition from XP to Vista, the transition from Vista to 7 won’t show any regressions; nothing that used to work will stop working.

Which should do a lot to ease concerns about whether or not one should upgrade if you’re already running Vista. So what is changing? The user experience itself:

The biggest visible result of all this is the taskbar. The taskbar in Windows 7 is worlds apart from the taskbar we’ve known and loved ever since the days of Chicago.

Text descriptions on the buttons are gone, in favor of big icons. The icons can—finally—be rearranged; no longer will restarting an application put all your taskbar icons in the wrong order. The navigation between windows is now two-level; mousing over an icon shows a set of window thumbnails, and clicking the thumbnail switches windows.

Right clicking the icons shows a new UI device that MS calls “Jump Lists”.

[...] Jump lists provide quick access to application features. Applications that use the system API for their Most Recently Used list (the list of recently-used filenames that many apps have in their File menus) will automatically acquire a Jump List containing their most recently used files. There’s also an API to allow applications to add custom entries; Media Player, for example, includes special options to control playback.

That’s just one of many major changes to how the desktop works and, frankly, I think a lot of the changes are going to be very popular. They have several screenshots in the article so it’s worth a read just to see what’s changing. The ability to “peek” at windows and the desktop is very cool and I can already see it being useful when I blog.

Windows Vista Team Blog : Introducing Windows 7

And, as you probably know, since we began development of the next version of the Windows client operating system we have been referring to it by a codename, “Windows 7.”  But now is a good time to announce that we’ve decided to officially call the next version of Windows, “Windows 7.”

While I know there have been a few cases at Microsoft when the codename of a product was used for the final release, I am pretty sure that this is a first for Windows. You might wonder about the decision.

The decision to use the name Windows 7 is about simplicity. Over the years, we have taken different approaches to naming Windows.  We’ve used version numbers like Windows 3.11, or dates like Windows 98, or “aspirational” monikers like Windows XP or Windows Vista.  And since we do not ship new versions of Windows every year, using a date did not make sense.  Likewise, coming up with an all-new “aspirational” name does not do justice to what we are trying to achieve, which is to stay firmly rooted in our aspirations for Windows Vista, while evolving and refining the substantial investments in platform technology in Windows Vista into the next generation of Windows.

Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore “Windows 7” just makes sense.

As you know if you’re an SEB regular, I actually like Vista despite my initial dislike of the name itself. Which I suppose makes me a kind of maverick. Which I suppose makes me like John McCain. No wonder everyone hates me.

Anyway, I find the name Windows 7 to be very agreeable. It’s simple and doesn’t try to evoke a vaguely defined “experience” that the product will supposedly provide me. It’s Windows and it’s the 7th version. Short, to the point, and not wishy washy.

You mention the return rates being high. Has that been the case with the Wind as well?
We have done a lot of studies on the return rates and haven’t really talked about it much until now. Our internal research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux. People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don’t know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it’s not what they are used to. They don’t want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks.

Currently MSI is using SUSE for the MSI Wind and they’re looking at trying a couple of other distros including a tailored version of Ubuntu styled to look like Mac OS X to see if they’ll go over any better, but I found it interesting that a lot of the reason for the returns wasn’t that SUSE wasn’t working just that people didn’t want to learn it.

As an interesting side-note, the instructor for my college networking essentials class doesn’t like Ubuntu at all. He calls it “Dumbuntu” because he thinks it’s been dumbed down too much. As I recall he’s a big fan of SUSE.

The ramifications are pretty significant. If you live in a house and not a big apartment building, your identity is pretty easy game with such a tool. Getting embarrassed by more or less targeted advertising (“We found from your searches that you are interested in naked teenagers wearing rabbit ears? Do WE have a deal for YOU!”) is almost the least worry (though if I got a call from the home business woman in the video clip, I’d be furious at having my privacy invaded, rather than show an interest in her stuff!) But there’s even worse possibilities - what if somebody finds our that you are looking for legal advice, or something similarly crucial to be kept private? Information about an illness, or depression for example?

At the moment, the searches seem to only allow tracking back from websites -> via search terms -> to the orignator of the query. But how long until the direction is reversible? Do we all have to become hackers and hide behind sophisticated software just to browse in peace?