Tag Archive for Microsoft

Who’s Suing Whom in the Telecom World?

Who's Suing Whom in the Telecom World?

Information is Beautiful has a great infographic showing who is suing who and the current state of telecommunications lawsuits. David McCandless at Information is Beautiful includes snippets of each lawsuit, which is helpful for understanding the overall picture. The diagram differentiates between ongoing and finished lawsuits with different arrows, while the size of the cubes represents the various company’s estimated revenue. In addition, if a company’s cube is red, it means its revenue is decreasing, while gray cubes represent companies with increasing revenues.

Who's Suing Whom?

The involved include a who’s who of the telecom industry:

  • Apple
  • Elan
  • Hitachi
  • HTC
  • Kodak
  • Microsoft
  • Motorola
  • Nokia
  • RIM
  • Samsung
  • Sharp
  • Sony Ericsson
  • Qualcomm

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

MTC Coming to Michigan

– Updated – 05/10/2018 – Microsoft moved its Regional Headquarters from Southfield Michigan to downtown Detroit. The new location is at Suite 500 of One Campus Martius (formerly Compuware Building), where the company unveiled its new Technology Center. The new 40,000-square-foot center will accommodate 200 employees from the Southfield Town Center location which will reportedly remain open.

MichiganMicrosoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) will expand its Michigan operations by creating a business consulting center in Southfield, MI. Crains reports that the Redmond, WA-based software company will be creating a Microsoft Technology Center, in the Southfield Town Center. Microsoft has used the MTC concept in other markets to help businesses use its products to solve problems, Additionally, it is a way for the companies to help each other,  Drew Costakis, director of the Southfield technology center told Crains.

MicrosoftOur new Technology Center is another expression of Microsoft’s longstanding commitment to the Detroit community, and we believe it will become a valuable resource for metro Detroit businesses,” said Mr. Costakis .“Because of its central location in southeast Michigan, the new facility is in an ideal location for customers throughout the region, enabling them to take advantage of all our technology offerings closer to home,” Mr. Costakis told the Oakland Press.

Microsoft Technology Center

We can do things at the high level to envision what to do with our software, we can collaborate on product designs, or even how to work from home,” he said.  “At the same time, we have a large partner ecosystem with companies such as HP, EDS, and Siemens. We can help our customers make connections as well.” Costakis explains “In Chicago, for example, where we’ve been there for a long time, it’s constantly booked.” Microsoft said its lease of the space began on August 1st.  the opening of the Microsoft Technology Center opening is planned for late fall.

Currently, there are eight Microsoft Technology Centers in the U.S.

Mr. Costakis would not comment on how many employees might be added for the expansion. Microsoft has 200 employees in Southfield Michigan. The software giant currently occupies approx. 40,000 square feet in the 1000 building of the Southfield Town Center office complex. The MTC will occupy space next to Microsoft’s existing Southfield office on the 19th floor of the building and occupy an extra 17,000 square feet. Microsoft has been a tenant of Southfield Town Center for 19 years

Mr. Costakis, a former automotive engineer, said it would be ideal to have a relationship with Lawrence Technological University across the Lodge Freeway.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Apple Has Most Holes

Apple Has Most HolesSecurity company Secunia is reporting that Apple (AAPL) software has the most security vulnerabilities. According to the recent Secunia Half Year Report 2010 (PDF) Apple has displaced Oracle as the company with the most security vulnerabilities in its software over the first half of 2010. Microsoft retains its third-place spot.

WiredApple logo points out that this does not necessarily mean that Apple’s software is the most insecure in practice. The report takes no consideration of the severity of the flaws, it points at a growing trend in the world of security flaws: the role of third-party software. Many of Apple’s flaws are not in its operating system, Mac OS X, but rather in software like Safari, QuickTime, and iTunes. Vendors like Adobe (with Flash and Adobe Reader) and Oracle (with Java) are similarly responsible for many of the flaws being reported. The top ten third-party applications, ranked by total number of reported vulnerabilities:

1. Mozilla Firefox
2. Apple Safari
3. Sun Java JRE
4. Google Chrome
5. Adobe Reader
6. Adobe Acrobat
7. Adobe Flash Player
8. Adobe AIR
9. Apple iTunes
10. Mozilla Thunderbird

Secunia logoTo illustrate this point, ars technica says the report includes cumulative figures for the number of vulnerabilities found on a Windows PC with the 50 most widely used programs. Five years ago, there were more first-party flaws (in Windows and Microsoft’s other software) than third-party. Since about 2007, the balance shifted towards third-party programs. Secunia predicts that third-party flaws will outnumber first-party flaws by two-to-one by the end of 2010.

Secunia also makes a case that effectively updating third-party software is much harder to do; because Microsoft’s Windows Update and Microsoft Update systems will offer protection for around 35% of reported vulnerabilities, patching the rest requires the use of 13 or more updating systems. Some vendors—Apple, Mozilla, and Google, for example—do have decent automatic update systems, but others require manual intervention by the user.

Steve Jobs

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Free Antivirus Rules Market

Free Antivirus Rules MarketOPSWAT, Inc. a provider of integration technologies to software developers and vendors recently released a report on the use of antivirus applications. According to the report, free products control 42% of the product market, and vendors that primarily offer a free product have a 48% market share.

The top 10 Windows antivirus applications for January to May 2010 according to OPSWAT were:

  • avast! Free Antivirus 11.45%
  • Avira AntiVir Personal – Free Antivirus 9.19%
  • AVG AntiVirus Free 8.6%
  • Microsoft Security Essentials 7.48%
  • avast! Antivirus 5.4%
  • Kaspersky Internet Security 4.48%
  • Norton AntiVirus 4.24%
  • ESET NOD32 Antivirus 3.84%
  • avast! Antivirus Professional 3.5%
  • McAfee VirusScan 3.26%

opswat AV market share graph 2010

This data indicates that free products account for 42% of the market. From a vendor perspective, European vendors, total just over 50% of the market which include:

  • AVAST,
  • Avira,
  • AVG,
  • ESET,
  • Panda,
  • BitDefender,
  • G Data and
  • Sophos.

Whereas US-based vendors, make up just over 30% include:

Vendors that primarily offer a free product have a 48% market share.

The top 10 Windows antivirus vendors by market share for January to May 2010 according to OPSWAT were:

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According to the firm’s website, OPSWAT collected information from tens of thousands of volunteers out of the 50 million endpoints that use the OESIS Framework and the free Am I OESIS OK? online utility with which end users can check the interoperability and quality level of their applications.  I have said this before, with other fun factoids like this, the adoption rate of the vendor’s tools may skew the results. Nonetheless, it is notable that

  • Microsoft, not usually seen as a security vendor has captured a significant share with their recent anti-virus solutions and could be a legitimate challenger to pure-play security players Symantec and McAfee.
  • Symantec and McAfee who are often seen as the top choices in the U.S. do not do well in this list. This data seems to show that AV competition is alive and well in the highly fragmented consumer sector.
  • The fragmented marketplace may help keep innovation active in the AV market, which is a good thing in the face of the increasing variety of threats from malware.

So despite the claims of this or that vendor to dominate a market based on sales numbers, the OPSWAT data seems to show that end-users have developed a degree of trust in free antivirus applications to keep them secure as they do with paid antivirus.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Java Help

-Updated 11-12-13- JavaRa 2.3 is now available to remove Java. The new version fixed several bugs and further improved localizations.

-Updated 08-28-10- Earlier this month Lunarsoft, the publishers of JavaRa, released version 1.16beta of JavaRa. According to the FAQ’s some of the added features include:

  • A new system of reading registry keys into the program,
  • A new system of reading languages,
  • x64 support,  and
  • Bug fixes.

More info and download here. The beta tag should not scare you off, because according to the FAQ’s the program itself isn’t in beta anymore because it is quite stable. Beta is still used because some fixes and x64 support haven’t been tested extensively yet.

Java HelpA recently unearthed feature that has been built into Java since Java 6 Update 10 allows developers to easily distribute their applications to end-users. Sun introduced a feature called Java Web Start designed for developers to install software and execute a program from a website. KrebsOnSecurity reports the feature allows criminals to remotely execute malicious code on the user’s computer.

AVG has discovered this exploit in-the-wild attack that takes advantage of this feature to redirect the unsuspecting web users to a Russian website that serves a crime-ware kit that bombards visiting browsers with exploits. After a delay,  Sun issued the patch. According to ZDNet, Sun does not mention the disclosure or the attacks in the release notes accompanying the patch, but they have been able to confirm it does cover the flaw in question. Even after applying the update, users may still be vulnerable. After installing updates to the Java Runtime Environment (JRE),  the update installs a whole new version of itself without removing the old installations.

Lifehacker points out JavaRa, a utility that removes the old and obsolete versions of JRE while leaving files that are necessary for the current version to run. The utility also removes other bloat and registry entries to ensure that Java still works on your computer without all the extra files cluttering up your hard drive. JavaRa is free but does require administrative rights to run because it makes changes to the registry. JavaRa works on just about every version of MSFT’s Windows. Once you have the app downloaded, just run the app and tell it to remove old versions of the Java Runtime Environment. The app will spin for a while and then let you know the old versions are gone. The app will also:

  • Remove the startup entry that makes Java run when Windows starts,
  • Remove the Sun Download Manager.
  • Check to see if there are updates available for the installed version of Java.

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So far JavaRa is a free, simple, portable download for Windows that just works and will make a great addition to your flash drive toolkit.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.