The New Attack: Penetrate and Tailor

In its latest security report Cisco identifies a trend I hadn’t heard of before with malware writers: Closer inspection of those computers they’ve successfully penetrated to see whether there’s something interesting there, and then if there is targeting that company (or organisation) with a more tailored follow-up attack: Attackers can—and do— segregate infected computers into … Read more

User Determined Computing

I’m not sure it’s a new phenomenon, but Accenture reckons it is: employees are more tech savvy than the companies they work for and are demanding their workplace catches up. A new study by Accenture to be released next week (no link available yet; based on a PR pitch that mentions no embargo) will say … Read more

It’s Not the “Death” of Microsoft, it’s the “Death” of Software

Paul Graham writes an interesting obituary of Microsoft, killed off, as he sees it, by applications that sit in your browser. It’s just a matter of time, he says, before every application we need can grabbed off the server. This is the kind of established wisdom of Web 2.0 folks these days that prompts only … Read more

Starting A Computer That Won’t Start

If you have problems starting Windows XP because of a blue screen telling you (I forget the exact wording) that you need to run CHKDSK /f and disable all antivirus and disk management programs, here’s a possible solution. The problem is that while you’d love to run CHKDSK /f — which runs a check on … Read more

A New Way To Grab Stuff

The folks at EverNote tell me that version 1.0 for Windows is officially launched today: As you may recall, EverNote lets you place all of your notes and content (web clips, images, text, passwords, to dos, etc.) on an endless, instantly searchable, digital roll of paper. Our founder, Stepan Pachikov, likes to say that EverNote … Read more