Blackmoor Vituperative

As if we needed another reason to switch to OpenOffice…

In the wake of at least one targeted attack that exploits a new flaw in Word, Microsoft is advising users to run the application in “safe mode.”

Running Word in the restricted mode will not fix the vulnerability, but it will help block known modes of attack, Microsoft said in a security advisory published late Monday. The software maker is also developing a security update for Word, which should be available on June 13 or sooner, as warranted, the company said.

(from ZDNet, Microsoft advises ‘safe mode’ for Word)

Someone in my family alerted me to this before I read it about it in the trade news, actually. Here is what I told her:

Get your company to switch to OpenOffice, and this sort of thing will cease to be a problem (OpenOffice can create, open, and edit MS Word files, but it is immune to the many, many security vulnerabilities of MS Office).

You would also save your company hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of dollars (depending on how many employees they have).

And if they switch their standard internal document format to OpenDocument, you will no longer be subject to Microsoft’s version extortion — you can be sure that you will be able to open those documents in any OpenDocument-compliant program for many years to come (OpenOffice is the most well-known, but there are several others, and it is a standard format that will be around for a long, long time — Microsoft changes its formats periodically so that people will have to buy upgrades in order to open old documents).

You would be a hero!

I sent a similar email to the “Workplace Productivity” department where I work:

Circuit City currently uses Microsoft Office for its office productivity software. I suggest migrating the entire enterprise to OpenOffice.org. The advantages of OpenOffice.org are:

• more cost-effective (open source = no licensing fees at all, ever)
• minimal user training (user interface is very similar to MS Office)
• increased security (MS Office is a notorious security risk; OpenOffice is open source, which means fewer security flaws, and any that are found are fixed almost immediately)
• backward-compatible (OpenOffice can read and edit existing Circuit City MS Office documents)
• forward-compatible (MS uses closed-source proprietary formats which can and do change with each version of their software; OpenOffice uses the ISO standard OpenDocument format, ensuring that Circuit City’s documents will remain accessible in the future)
• greatly simplifies Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements (open source)

The response from both quarters was effectively the same. I can’t say much more about that without insulting my family and the place I work.

I have long been of the opinion that religion — more specifically, Protestant Christianity as it is practiced in the USA, the religion with which I am the most familiar — is fundamentally anti-life and anti-human. In other words, evil.

It’s just an opinion. Many reasonably-intelligent, well-intentioned people disagree with me, and I do not think less of them for it. However…

Imagine a vaccine that would protect women from a serious gynecological cancer. Wouldn’t that be great? Well, both Merck and GlaxoSmithKline recently announced that they have conducted successful trials of vaccines that protect against the human papilloma virus. HPV is not only an incredibly widespread sexually transmitted infection but is responsible for at least 70 percent of cases of cervical cancer, which is diagnosed in 10,000 American women a year and kills 4,000. Wonderful, you are probably thinking, all we need to do is vaccinate girls (and boys too for good measure) before they become sexually active, around puberty, and HPV — and, in thirty or forty years, seven in ten cases of cervical cancer — goes poof. Not so fast: We’re living in God’s country now. The Christian right doesn’t like the sound of this vaccine at all. “Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful,” Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, “because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.” Raise your hand if you think that what is keeping girls virgins now is the threat of getting cervical cancer when they are 60 from a disease they’ve probably never heard of.

(from The Nation, Virginity or Death!)

With the attitude that the current US administration takes toward spying on its own citizens, and the poor record that the US government in general has with abiding by the limits imposed on its power, if there’s one word that ought to give every American (and resident alien) the willies, it’s “biosurveillance”. It conjures up the nightmarish of convergence between biometric identification and universal surveillance — a convergence that gets nearer to reality every day. However, the Department of Homeland Security is actually trying to live up to its mandate with this project. The goal of this surveillance is not the American populace, but the biosphere around us.

If bird flu erupts in the United States, the Homeland Security Department’s access to real-time data will be vital in spotting its emergence.

With that in mind, DHS is developing the National Biosurveillance Integration System to track and combine data it will receive electronically from several agencies’ public health, food, animal, air and water monitoring systems.

The ambitious system, designed to give DHS a national biosurveillance picture, is a critical piece of the administration’s strategy for responding to a pandemic such as avian flu. But the technology, policy and culture change associated with the system will present challenges for DHS.

The system is designed to aggregate and integrate information from local, state and federal agencies’ bio-monitoring systems and combine it with data from the intelligence community, said Kimothy Smith, DHS chief veterinarian, chief scientist and acting deputy chief medical officer.

(from Government Computer News, DHS lays the groundwork for biosurveillance

That’s pretty darned cool.

According to InfoWorld, last week Microsoft stock hit its lowest price since October 2002, and that was after Steve Ballmer sent an e-mail to reassure Microsofties that although the company’s stock price is falling, the sky is not. Fortunately for the world’s richest man, Bill Gates sold off $500 million worth of stock in February when the price was still relatively high. Microsoft spokesfolk call it “prudent portfolio diversification”.

Wi-Fi software stack specialist Devicescape has released its “Advanced Datapath” 802.11 driver stack to the open-source community under the GPL.

Just because Microsoft refuses to support ODF (Open Document Format) never meant that someone wouldn’t write a plug-in to enable Microsoft Office users to read and write ODF documents. Well, it’s happened.

In an interview with Groklaw‘s Pamela Jones, the OpenDocument Foundation Inc.‘s co-founder and president, Gary Edwards, said the Foundation will be presenting Massachusetts with an Office plug-in that will allow Office users to open, render, and save to ODF files, while also allowing translation of documents between Microsoft’s binary (.doc, .xls, .ppt) or XML formats and ODF.

In the interview, Edwards said that the Foundation has “completed testing on an ODF Plugin for all versions of MS Office dating back to MS Office 97. The ODF Plugin installs on the file menu as a natural and transparent part of the open, save, and save as sequences. As far as end users and other application add-ons are concerned, ODF plugin renders ODF documents as if it were native to MS Office.”

Edwards hopes that this plugin, which also supports accessibility add-ons, will end any further debate about whether ODF is suitable for government use. Microsoft has continued to take pot-shots at ODF as being unsuitable for business or government users.

(from Linux-Watch, Coming soon: ODF for MS Office)

Frankly, I’d be just as happy if MS Office simply died, but I guess this is good for people who work in institutions which stupidly refuse to switch to OpenOffice.

I added a couple of new software entries to Useful Links:

I want a freeware utility to… and Open Source Freeware.

What’s New in Firefox 1.5.0.3

Firefox 1.5.0.3 is a security update that is part of our ongoing program to provide a safe Internet experience for our customers. We recommend that all users upgrade to this latest version.

(from Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.3 Release Notes)

Clue for the clueless: if you are using any other web browser, switch to Firefox. If they use any other web browser where you work, tell them they ought to switch to Firefox. If anyone you care about uses any other web browser, be a friend and strongly suggest that they switch to Firefox.

Seriously, switch to Firefox.

Future government-issued travel documents may feature embedded computer chips that can be read at a distance of up to 30 feet, a top Homeland Security official said Tuesday, creating what some fear would be a threat to privacy.

Jim Williams, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s US-VISIT program, told a smart card conference here that such tracking chips could be inserted into the new generation of wallet-size identity cards used to ease travel by Americans to Canada and Mexico starting in 2008. Those chips use radio frequency identification technology, or RFID. […]

Williams’ remarks at an industry conference are likely to heighten privacy concerns about RFID technology, which has drawn fire from activists and prompted hearings before the U.S. Congress and the Federal Trade Commission. One California politician has even introduced anti-RFID legislation.

Many of the privacy worries center on whether RFID tags — typically miniscule chips with an antenna a few inches long that can transmit a unique ID number — can be read from afar. If the range is a few inches, the privacy concerns are reduced. But at ranges of 30 feet, the tags could theoretically be read by hidden sensors alongside the road, in the mall or in the hands of criminals hoping to identify someone on the street by his or her ID number.

(from CNet News, New RFID travel cards could pose privacy threat)

Just one more step toward universal surveillance.

A New York applied research center today released its first version of an online toolkit designed to help government agencies use Extensible Markup Language for managing Web sites.

The product, called the XML Toolkit, can be found at www.thexmltoolkit.org. Researchers at the Center for Technology in Government (CTG) at the State University of New York at Albany have been formally investigating and assessing the use of XML to replace HTML. HTML is the predominant language used to define and structure the layout of a Web document.

The center formed a partnership with the Governor’s Office of Employee Relations and the Office of the Chief Information Officer for a test project. In January, it presented results of the project in which five participating state government agencies established business case analyses and prototype Web sites using XML. The results led to the development of the online toolkit.

Using XML can improve workflow and decrease the time, effort and costs related to Web site management, according to CTG officials. The center converted its Web site to an XML format several years ago and dramatically reduced the effort necessary to manage the site, officials said. The site expanded from 1,300 pages to 5,000 pages in five years.

The toolkit offers a library of resources needed to manage a Web site with XML. It provides tips on how to create Web pages using XML, different approaches to setting up XML on a Web server and examples of codes for specific functions and results.

It also provides useful tools for XML development, publications related to the task and other hints. A feedback section enables visitors to comment on the library and provide their own resources, code samples and tips.

(from Federal Computer Week, Center unveils online XML toolkit)

I haven’t tested this yet, but I plan to. It sounds really interesting, but I have a feeling that for someone of my skills, it’s not any simpler than simply creating a XHTML/PHP site the way I currently do.