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Taking a second look atthe news so you don’t have to
Office Suites, Meet NBOR
Microsoft Office, StarSuite, and OpenOffice now have a little “right side of the brain” competition. Software engineer Denny Jaeger tapped into his alter ego’s creative pool (he’s also a composer and musician) to create No Boundaries or Rules (NBOR), software based on a new paradigm.
Jaeger backed up his convictions with nearly 10 years of coding and more than 60 patents. The result: affordable software that sits on top of standard operating systems and allows you to manipulate words and images in a completely intuitive way. No toolbars or windows. Everything takes place within the dreamscape/interface of “blackspace.”
At the moment, NBOR is being used in a few pilot programs. Will it succeed or will it flop? Only time will tell. Jaeger certainly hopes that NBOR will reshape how we work—and how we think about work and office applications. Developers, watch out: sometimes it’s worthwhile choosing the path not yet taken; sometimes there’s a very good reason why nobody bothered with it before.
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Security Comes First, Eventually
Last year Microsoft made a bold move: it announced that no one was to work on new code until a top-down security review was completed. Although security audits are nothing new, such a broad-sweeping high-profile code freeze made it clear that security was job one.
There have been some lower-profile efforts, however, perhaps an especially good thing in the case of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Early in February, OMB administrator for IT and e-government Karen Evans instructed 18 government agencies to fix cybersecurity problems before even thinking about upgrading IT systems. With good reason: by the end of last year only 61 percent of the federal system’s security had been certified and accredited. That means more than a third of the fed’s systems are potentially unsecured.
Time to get busy!
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http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/security/24856-1.html
Three Strikes and You’re Out
On Valentine’s Day 2003, the U.S. government revealed its cybersecurity intentions for the Internet: the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. Grand name, yes? The idea was essentially to provide e-mail alerts to home users and technical experts, warning them of imminent threats. Gee, no one ever thought of that before.
But the devil’s in the details (or in deployment). First, when it comes right down to it, the last thing most of us want is more e-mail—especially one telling us we’re about to get hit by a deluge of bogus e-mail from a worm or virus. Second, it’s taken almost a year to put what amounts to an e-mail newsletter into action. Speedy? We’d say not. Strike three? To add insult to injury, the service went live January 28, five hours after the fastest-ever MyDoom worm hit the net. Ouch.
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http://www.us-cert.gov/press_room/cas-announced.html
LOTR SneakerNet iPod Hack
To most of us, an iPod means an almost weightless object that can stash a month’s worth of songs (day and night, night and day). Their 15-, 20-, or 40-GB hard drives and high-speed transfer capability let you load music in less time than it takes to select your favorite playlist.
Well, it’s no surprise that Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson and his Weta Digital crew would view iPods Middle Earth style. While Jackson was in London overseeing the music score sessions, the crew from Weta (Jackson’s special effects shop in New Zealand) needed to keep him updated on the film’s progress. QuickTime files with the latest updates to Tower and King were put on a dedicated server at Weta and transferred to London via a secure high-bandwidth line. There, they were transferred to Jackson’s iPod, which was then delivered to his residence (where a fat pipe was unfeasible) a few minutes later via local courier. And the award for the coolest iPod hack goes to...
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http://www.apple.co.nz/hotnews/ipod_and_lotr.html
Originally published in Queue vol. 2, no. 2—
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