Focus On: Microsoft

After a year of testing, French virus experts have concluded that Microsoft Office is less dangerous than its competitor, OpenOffice. In the short term, this is great news for Microsoft... outside of Europe. More anti-open source FUD will delay some planned migrations. Longer term, OpenOffice will benefit, as France and Germany pour resources into securing the product they now rely upon. The race is, as they say, afoot.

Self-installing programs can be nice, when you invoke them by choice. But researchers have found thousands of viruses that execute after you innocently click a promising search link. Outraged users are demanding that Google, MSN and Yahoo do something about it. Luckily, Microsoft already has.

The admins at Microsoft IT make their anti-spam strategy brutally clear: They depend, first and foremost, on the anti-spam technique most riddled with inaccuracies, failures and outright corruption: blocklisting. Email Battles compares Microsoft's first-contact blocklisting technique with first-contact deferral. While both methods get you to the same net delivery rate, one is far more likely to deliver the mail you want.

A security hacker is unleashing an exploit every day this month. HD Moore claims he's doing it to highlight the fecklessness of browser security, but admits that he also wants to draw attention to his new blog. While both might be noble goals, IT managers scrambling to protect end-points left vulnerable by Moore's publicity initiative may be forgiven if they aren't impressed.

Antivirus builders protected Windows for years, allowing Microsoft to divert its development money to feature-bloat, in lieu of security. In fact, Microsoft's security bench was so empty that, once the decision was made to take over the security business, Redmond was forced to buy outside companies. Email Battles addresses a/v makers' mistakes and Microsoft's new attack strategy, and asks the really tough questions to boot, like, "What's with the name?"