OpenID84 items tagged “microsoft”
Google and Microsoft Cheat on Slow-Start. Should You? Fascinating optimisation tricks by some of the big websites, which violate the RFC governing the TCP slow-start algorithm in order to perform better in the common case. 
3rd December 2010, 7:03 pm
S.Korea ends Microsoft’s online shopping monopoly. The crazy rules mandating Active X based encryption for government and e-commerce sites have finally been dropped, after the Korea Communications Commission found them “unfit for a new Internet environment involving smartphones”. 
5th July 2010, 8:21 am
We all think of Java as a boring server-side language now, but the initial idea behind Java was that software developers could write applications in Java rather than writing them for Windows, and that those applications would work everywhere, thus defanging Microsoft’s desktop OS monopoly. Microsoft took various steps to prevent that from happening, but they lacked a tool like App Store that would enable them to just ban Java. Apple has that card to play, so they’re playing it.
— Rafe Colburn 
10th April 2010, 6:42 pm
Internet Explorer Platform Preview Guide for Developers (via) Lots of SVG and CSS3 stuff, no mention of canvas here either though. 
16th March 2010, 6:36 pm
An Early Look At IE9 for Developers (via) Surprisingly, no mention of SVG or canvas and only a note in passing about HTML 5. 16th March 2010, 6:11 pm
Negative Cashback from Bing Cashback (via) Some online stores show you a higher price if you click through from Bing—and set a cookie that continues to show you the higher price for the next three months. It’s unclear if this is Bing’s fault—comments on Hacker News report that Google Shopping sometimes suffers from the same problem (POST UPDATED: I originally blamed Bing for this). 23rd November 2009, 9:24 pm
IE 6 and 7 hit by hack attack code. IE6 and 7 have what looks like a buffer overflow vulnerability caused by a strange intersection of CSS, innerHTML and large JavaScript arrays. No exploits in the wild yet but it’s only a matter of time. 22nd November 2009, 3:38 pm
Major IE8 flaw makes ’safe’ sites unsafe. IE8 has an XSS protection feature which rewrites potentially harmful code in HTML pages—I think it looks for suspicious input in query strings which appears to have been output directly on the page. Unfortunately it turns out there’s a flaw in the feature that can allow attackers to rewrite safe pages to introduce XSS flaws. Google are serving all of their pages with the X-XSS-Protection: 0 header. Until the fix is released, that’s probably a good idea. 22nd November 2009, 3:34 pm
Look at Sony, or Microsoft, or Google, or anyone. They still don’t get it. They’re still out there talking about chips, or features, or whatever. Or now they’re all hot for design. But they think design means making pretty objects. It doesn’t. It means making a system of pieces that all work together seamlessly. It’s not about calling attention to the technology. It’s about making the technology invisible.
— Fake Steve Jobs 28th September 2009, 10:40 pm
Given the security issues with plugins in general and Google Chrome in particular, Google Chrome Frame running as a plugin has doubled the attach area for malware and malicious scripts. This is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take.
— Microsoft spokesperson 
24th September 2009, 4:49 pm
Microsoft backs long life for IE6. Oh FFS... “The software giant said it would support IE6 until 2014—four years beyond the original deadline.” 
14th August 2009, 2:53 pm
Farewell to Mashup Editor. It’s not just Microsoft Popfly that’s shutting down—Google Mashup Editor will be gone in four weeks time (this was announced in January). You get to keep your code, but I don’t know enough about Mashup Editor to know if the code is usable once the system has shut down. 17th July 2009, 1:05 pm
Popfly Shutting Down. Yet another reminder that building stuff on a closed-source platform (especially a hosted service) is risky business, even from a vendor as large as Microsoft. This certainly won’t help them make the case for Azure. 
17th July 2009, 9:32 am
Microsoft was slowing development of new versions of Internet Explorer in the hope that Web-based applications would not be able to compete with Windows applications, and Windows applications would keep people locked in to the Windows operating system. Thus XHTML2 was developed with no expectation that the leading Web browser would ever implement it.
— David Baron 8th July 2009, 8:30 pm
From Microsoft: C# and CLI under the Community Promise. Microsoft’s assurance that it won’t “assert its Necessary Claims” against alternative (including open source) implementations of the ECMA C# and CLR specifications. The promise doesn’t cover implementations of .NET, WinForms etc- so the Mono team have announced they will be splitting their project in to two packages—a safe, ECMA based package and a package containing everything else. 7th July 2009, 11:15 am
And that is why, in 2009, when developing in Microsoft .NET 3.5 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0 on a Windows 7 system, you cannot include /com\d(\..*)?, /lpt\d(\..*)?, /con(\..*)?, /aux(\..*)?, /prn(\..*)?, or /nul(\..*)? in any of your routes.
— Benjamin Pollack 
12th June 2009, 11:48 pm
Let’s try to imagine what a Google Silverlight would have been. It would have been a fully open source product from Google, with a very liberal open source license (BSD or Apache). It would have all the technical specifications published openly. They would pledge to have the Silverlight VM interoperate with Javascript and HTML5. And a company like Zoho would have a ton of developers working on Google Silverlight based applications by now—as opposed to having exactly ZERO developers working on Microsoft Silverlight.
— Sridhar Vembu 
7th June 2009, 11:32 am
Imminent Death of the Net Predicted. Well, maybe not, but the way Windows Vista deals with round-robin DNS A records (using a new IPv6 algorithm from RFC3484 backported to IPv4) means that domains that serve up multiple A records to load balance between data centres will find that the IP nearest to the 192.168.* range will get the vast majority of Vista traffic. 
5th March 2009, 9:50 am
Microsoft: Big Security Hole in All IE Versions. Looks like a 0-day that’s being actively exploited. 16th December 2008, 8:26 pm
Windows Live Adds Support For OpenID. I hope they include the option to log in to the provider using CardSpace, to address phishing. 27th October 2008, 9:34 pm
The greatest coup Microsoft pulled with Internet Explorer was putting the word “Internet” in its name. It sits there, on the desktop of every new Windows computer, and it says “Internet”. So you click it. [...] What better way to beat a browser with the word “Internet” in its name—a browser that seemingly can’t be beat no matter how hard we try—than the Internet Company itself making a browser?
— Tom Armitage 3rd September 2008, 10:19 am
Unfortunately, we’re not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows.
— Install Photosynth page 21st August 2008, 10:07 am
Why I can’t put Tibet in my Hotmail address. Apparently it’s because “TIB” is name of a bank in Florida, and Microsoft are trying to prevent phishers from creating e-mail addresses that include the names of financial institutions. 10th August 2008, 10:41 pm
IE8 Security Part IV: The XSS Filter (via) IE8 will include an XSS filter to identify and neutralise “reflected” XSS attacks (where malicious code in a query string is rendered to the page), turned on by default. Sounds like a good idea to me, and site authors can disable it using Yet Another Custom HTTP header (X-XSS-Protection: 0). 3rd July 2008, 9:37 am
Bill Gates has pulled off one of the greatest hacks in technology and business history, by turning Microsoft’s success into a force for social responsibility. Imagine imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria.
— Anil Dash 26th June 2008, 5:17 pm
The point of “Open” in OpenID
TechCrunch report that Microsoft are accepting OpenID for their new HealthVault site, but with a catch: you can only use OpenIDs from two providers: Trustbearer (who offer two-factor authentication using a hardware token) and Verisign. "Whatever happened to the Open in OpenID?", asks TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid. [... 451 words]
Velocity: A Distributed In-Memory Cache from Microsoft. I’d been wondering what Microsoft ecosystem developers were using in the absence of memcached. Is Velocity the first Windows platform implementation of this idea? 
6th June 2008, 9:52 pm
The Machine That Changed the World: The Paperback Computer. This third episode (the second has also been published) is awesome—Sketchpad (the first GUI), NLS, Xerox PARC, the Homebrew Computer Club, Apple and the Macintosh, Lotus 123, Microsoft, and Virtual Reality presented as the “future” of computing. Worth investing an hour to watch it. 6th June 2008, 8:18 pm
CSS Compatibility and Internet Explorer (via) Official Microsoft guide to which CSS properties are supported by which versions of IE. This is the kind of documentation browser vendors should be providing as a matter of course. 2nd April 2008, 8:05 pm
IronPython, MS SQL, and PEP 249. How Dino Viehland got Django’s ORM to talk to the .NET database layer. 19th March 2008, 9:46 am
Django on IronPython. Dino Viehland demonstrated Django running on IronPython and SQL Server at PyCon. 17th March 2008, 4:05 pm
Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication. Would make life a lot simpler if they just supported OAuth, but at least they include sample code in Python, Ruby and PHP. 8th March 2008, 3:19 pm
Windows Live Contacts API (via) I didn’t realise Microsoft already have a contacts API for Live (which presumably covers hotmail as well). 7th March 2008, 5:57 pm
Introducing the Google Contacts Data API. Brilliant! (and about time)—now there’s no excuse for asking your users for their Gmail username and password so you can import contacts from their address book. Yahoo! and Microsoft need to catch up on this one fast. 6th March 2008, 11:29 pm
Principles and Legality. Eric Meyer notes that language about legality in Microsoft’s recent IE announcement suggests that Opera’s much criticised EU threat may have helped positively influence the result. 4th March 2008, 7:45 pm
In a recent [ASP.NET] MVC design meeting someone said something like “we’ll need a Repeater control” and a powerful and very technical boss-type said: “We’ve got a repeater control, it’s called a foreach loop.”
— Scott Hanselman 25th January 2008, 6:59 am
.aspx considered harmful. Jon Udell: “I guess I’m extra-sensitive to the .aspx thing now that I work for Microsoft, because I know that to folks outside the Microsoft ecosystem it screams: We don’t get the web.”—he goes on to mention that smart URL rewriting is thankfully built in to the upcoming ASP.NET MVC framework. 17th January 2008, 6:01 pm
Schools and colleges should make pupils, teachers and parents aware of the range of free-to-use products (such as office productivity suites) that are available, and how to use them.
— Becta 12th January 2008, 10:35 am
From my perspective, it is crucial for Linux to have good support for Silverlight because I do not want Linux on the desktop to become a second class citizen ever again. [...] The core of the debate is whether Microsoft will succeed in establishing Silverlight as a RIA platform or not. You believe that without Moonlight they would not have a chance of success, and I believe that they would have regardless of us.
— Miguel de Icaza 4th January 2008, 12:42 pm
The Dark Side Of The Moon (via) Robert O’Callahan believes that Moonlight is a strategic mistake, because it gives credibility to Microsoft’s entry to a new market which they will use to “keep the competition on a treadmill”; Moonlight can also never be entirely free due to the need for a proprietary codec (VC-1) available only as a binary blob. 4th January 2008, 12:41 pm
The strain due to the fact that most business desktops are locked into the Microsoft platform, at a time when both the Apple and GNU/Linux alternatives are qualitatively safer, better, and cheaper to operate, will start to become impossible to ignore.
— Tim Bray 3rd January 2008, 1:08 pm
Everyone applauds when Google goes after Microsoft’s Office monopoly [...] but when they start to go after web non-profits like Wikipedia, you see where the ineluctible logic leads. As Google’s growth slows, as inevitably it will, it will need to consume more and more of the web ecosystem, trading against its former suppliers, rather than distributing attention to them.
— Tim O'Reilly 1st January 2008, 11:29 am
EU: Microsoft’s Last Stand Against Google’s Acquisition of DoubleClick. Notable for some truly incomprehensible chartjunk from Microsoft. 27th December 2007, 12:26 pm
The companies that couldn’t beat Microsoft have all died, and evolution has resulted in three very different types of companies that are each immune to Microsoft’s strategies in their own way. Yet all are still vulnerable to the same thing: a better product. For the end users, this is a good position for the industry to be in.
— Ian Hickson 6th December 2007, 3:43 pm
Conversation with Bill Gates about IE8 and Microsoft Transparency. Molly asks the tough questions about IE8—it looks like there should be a lot of IE8 material at MIX08 next year. 6th December 2007, 11:47 am
A Little Laptop With Big Ambitions. I hadn’t realised how much competition OLPC faced from Microsoft and Intel’s Classmate. It would be amazing to see a generation grow up understanding that computers are open tools that they can control themselves rather than closed black boxes. 24th November 2007, 10:47 pm
ASP.NET MVC Framework. This looks pretty good. It includes clean URL support that’s very similar to how Django does things (with a nice alternative syntax for developers who don’t like regular expressions). 22nd October 2007, 1:45 pm
Questioning Steve Ballmer
This morning I attended a half day briefing at Microsoft UK entitled “The Online Opportunity—What Makes a Successful Web 2.0 Start-Up?”. Despite the buzzword laden title the event was well worth the trip up from Brighton, mainly due to the Q&A with Steve Ballmer (a pretty rare opportunity). [... 423 words]
Halo 3 Site Demonstrates Flaws in SilverLight. The Halo 3 “interactive manual” is like a throwback to Flash in the late 90s—“skip intro”, pointless transitions, text you can’t select or enlarge, links that aren’t links—all wrapped up in an ugly blob (only this time it’s XML instead of binary data). 27th September 2007, 2:38 pm
My own favorites were Cuba voting “yes” to the fast-tracking of OOXML, even though Microsoft is prohibited by the US Government from selling any software on the island that might even be able to read and write the new format, and Azerbaijan’s “yes” vote, even though OOXML as defined isn’t able to express a Web URL address in Azeri, their official language.
— Jeremy Allison 15th September 2007, 10:40 am
Silly MS-DOS 5 Promo Video. I can’t decide if this is better or worse than the Windows 386 rap. 13th September 2007, 10:10 am
Corrupt countries were more likely to support the OOXML document format. “We used the 2006 CPI index (Corruption Perceptions Index) as a measure of corruption.”—a statistical study by Electronic Frontier Finland. 7th September 2007, 11:30 pm
How much is that standard in the window, the one with the lovely tale? “The real loser in this could be ISO’s reputation itself.” Simon Wardley summarises the embarrassing shenanigans surrounding ISO’s rubber stamping of Microsoft’s OOXML. 3rd September 2007, 4:49 pm
It Is Estimated That NBC Could Not Have Screwed This iTunes Thing Up Any Worse. NBC’s request that Apple “stiffen anti-piracy provisions” is down-right scary. 3rd September 2007, 1:42 am
H.264 support coming to the Flash player. It looks like this is a response to the higher video quality offered by Silverlight. I wonder if YouTube knew about this when they started transcoding their videos to H.264 for the Apple TV and iPhone. 21st August 2007, 8:28 am
I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system—it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes.
— Joel Spolsky 20th August 2007, 3:58 pm
Fixing GC issues on IE 6: New IE download. Microsoft have released Windows Script Host / Script Runtime version 5.7, which apparently cleans up a bunch of IE 6 memory leaks. 17th August 2007, 11:50 pm
Windows Live ID Web Authentication Released! Passport lives again! Who’s going to be first to build an idproxy.net for it? 17th August 2007, 10:20 am
Open source is neither an industry fad, nor a magic bullet.
— Microsoft FAQ 13th August 2007, 1:54 pm
Does the idea of redefining the role of the Internet browser appeal to you? Do the terms HTTP, RSS, Microformats, and OpenID, excite you? If so, then this just might be the opportunity for you.
— IE Team Job Ad 18th July 2007, 7:43 am
Could someone please send, to whomever the hell teaches communication skills/techniques at Microsoft, a copy of the Chicago Manual, and perhaps a sixth—grade grammar text? I swear, there’s almost no one from that company who can write a proper English sentence.
— John C. Welch 12th July 2007, 6:23 pm
Mobile Device Connectivity to Exchange using IMAP vs Exchange ActiveSync (via) I count 14 instances of “experience” in this 1,000 word blog entry. Do real people talk like this? 12th July 2007, 5:17 pm
The Sarcastic Gamer: MS Surface. “Your next computer will be a big-ass table.” 21st June 2007, 11:42 am
The One True Object (Part 2). Jim Hugunin describes how the DLR let’s Python / JavaScript / Ruby talk to each other using a message passing abstraction. 5th May 2007, 1:27 am
Microsoft’s XUL. My take on XAML from back in 2003 seems strangely relevant. 4th May 2007, 11:40 pm
Migrating Microsoft Hotmail from FreeBSD to Microsoft Windows 2000. I’d like to see them try that with Yahoo!’s 100+ properties. 4th May 2007, 5:54 pm
MSFT and Yahoo: two icebergs, roped together. Yahoo!’s engineering platform and culture is Open Source pretty much all the way down. Microsoft’s isn’t. I wonder how that would pan out. 4th May 2007, 5:50 pm
Dynamic Language Runtime. Miguel de Icaza describes how Microsoft’s new Dynamic Language Runtime lets you call JavaScript and Visual Basic functions from Ruby. Looks like they beat Parrot to the punch. 3rd May 2007, 10:29 pm
How to debug JavaScript with Visual Web Developer Express. Microsoft’s best kept secret: a decent free debugger for Internet Explorer that doesn’t require you to install Microsoft Office. 2nd May 2007, 2:06 pm
Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image (via) Microsoft have made free VPC images of IE 6 and IE 7 available for testing, but they expire in August. 20th April 2007, 4:47 pm
Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. But eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.
— Paul Graham 7th April 2007, 8:22 am
i’m Home. “Every time you start a conversation using i’m, Microsoft shares a portion of the program’s advertising revenue with some of the world’s most effective organisations dedicated to social causes.” Microsoft are now getting their marketing ideas from spam e-mail forwards. 2nd March 2007, 10:43 am
Introducing Windows CardSpace. I incorrectly stated in my talk yesterday that CardSpace was a feature of Vista; it’s actually available for XP as well as part of the .NET 3.0 framework. 22nd February 2007, 11:47 am
CardSpace & OpenID: Working together. A more detailed explanation of what the Microsoft OpenID collaboration actually means. 7th February 2007, 1:58 am
Microsoft & OpenID. HUGE news. Microsoft are officially supporting OpenID, through integration with CardSpace. 7th February 2007, 1:56 am
Microsoft confirms Vista Speech Recognition remote execution flaw. “I have verified that I can create a sound file that can wake Vista speech recognition, open Windows Explorer, delete the documents folder, and then empty the trash.” 1st February 2007, 5:19 pm
Microsoft Breaks HTML Email Rendering in Outlook 2007. They’ve dropped the IE renderer and replaced it with... Microsoft Word! No CSS background images, no floats, no CSS positioning, no forms. Wow. 10th January 2007, 8:18 am
IE JScript Performance Recommendations Part 3. Once again, Microsoft’s official advice is to avoid closures entirely rather than learn how to use them safely. Sigh. 9th January 2007, 11:48 am
A conversation with Jon Udell about his new job with Microsoft. Jon wants to bridge the gap between the alpha geeks and the mainstream. 8th December 2006, 2:16 pm
Microsoft versus FOSS Configuration Management. Why the Free Software world’s source control works and Vista’s apparently doesn’t. 7th December 2006, 9:28 am
Transcript of Bruce Sterling at Microsoft Corporation (via) Bruce Sterling on scaling up his annual SxSW party. I can’t believe I missed it htis year. 22nd May 2004, 8:35 pm
Microsoft Security FAQ (via) Point your less technical friends here 17th December 2003, 2:50 am
Nasty new IE vulnerability
Most people reading are probably aware of the common trick whereby spammers and other assorted ne’er-do-wells publish URLs with usernames that look like hostnames to fool people in to trusting a malicious site—for example, http://www.microsoft.com&session%123123123@simon.incutio.com. This trick is frequently used by spammers to steal people’s PayPal accounts, by tricking them in to “resetting” their password at a site owned by the spammer but disguised as PayPal.com. [... 164 words]
Palladium
Via Boing Boing: Seth Schoen’s notes on Palladium after a meeting with Microsoft. Cory Doctorow points out that Seth is probably the most knowledgeable tech person to have been briefed on Palladium by MSFT without signing an NDA
and his post certainly makes interesting reading. Palladium has had a lot of coverage since the Newsweek article announcing it first broke, with Robert Cringely providing some of the best analysis (in my opinion at least). The Register also has a story about Palladium which introduces some more information and guestimates on a shipping schedule. [... 115 words]
