Misc. Ramblings

Many of the people who work at Microsoft are smart and insightful. I know this because some of them have their own blogs and you can see for yourself. I also know that Bill Gates did not become a billionaire by hiring dumb people.

So one must wonder why, after all the hoopla about stopping everything to do security scans of their software, we continue to get the buffer overrun security threat of the week (see MS Security Bulletin MS03-024).

On average, there is almost one security bulletin per week. No, not all of them are considered "critical", unless you happen to bitten by one of them, but I'm really concerned about known problems with unchecked buffers.

I haven't done any analysis of the number of these programming errors versus how many were being found prior to their review, but I seem to recall there is audit software to check for these problems. If this is true, then why are there any buffer overruns at this point?

I can only conclude that as long as MS doesn't take this seriously enough to audit all of their software that this will continue to happen.

Hence, this can but only accelerate the rate of Linux adopters who want to get off the security merry-go-round that MS seems to be on.

Speaking of Acceleration. Verizon finally got around to increasing my ADSL speed to 1.5mb/sec yesterday. Of course, I don't actually get that in real use, but I've been averaging about 1.2 to 1.3mb/sec and that is a noticeable increase over the 768kb/sec I was getting before.

So, as I've noted before, if you are a Verizon residential user at 768, call Verizon tech support and ask them to check if your line is qualified for the higher speed, if so, request the upgrade as there is no additional charge (at least here in Hawai'i) for the higher speed.

As to yesterday's post about my pager, the second tier tech support has not contacted me so far. I will give them until the end of today, if they haven't contacted me by then, I will terminate my pager service.

Aloha!