Robby Pedrica's Tech Blog

Tag: Microsoft

  • IE8 – not really all that

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    Robby Pedrica
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    IE8 was released to much fanfare recently ( Dean Hachamovitch at the Las Vegas MIX 09 conference ), but it hasn’t taken long for someone to find the first vulnerability. Nils, a hacker from Germany, banged the browser by using a previously unknown vulnerability in the browser, during the annual PWN2OWN contest held at the…

  • Mono, Suse and Microsoft – problems all around

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Microsoft’s recent patent suit against a prominent printer manufacturer ( that happens to use open source software in some of its products ) has raised more than a few eyebrows. This is the first execution of Microsoft’s threat against FOSS since its announcement over a year ago, when it indicated that FOSS was in violation…

  • Microsoft’s AstroTurfing

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Microsoft’s bullying tactics in the IT field are well known but one would have thought that they might have stopped with the AstroTurfing by now, seeing as many are wise to their tactics. But not according to one of their Technology Evangelists, James Plamondon.  For those unfamiliar with the term, AstroTurfing means that you, through…

  • More on the IE exploit

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Microsoft says Internet Explorer 5.01, 6 and 8 (beta) are also potentially susceptible to the zero-day exploit, published recently. Until now it had been assumed that only Internet Explorer 7 contained the vulnerability. Microsoft recommends that Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and memory protection be enabled in Internet Explorer 7 (Tools/Internet Options/Advanced/Enable memory protection…), but this…

  • ISO issues generate more discent

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    Robby Pedrica
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    13 members of the Norwegian standards body, Standards Norway, have left the organisation citing  issues relating to the OOXML standards process debacle. Reasons are as follows: * The administration of Standard Norway trust 37 identical letters from Microsoft partners more than their own technical committee. * The process within Standard Norway has been unpredictable and…

  • ODF and the Microsoft-sponsored SC34

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    Robby Pedrica
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    SC34, possible right-hand Microsoft lapdog and current ISO/IEC committee responsible for OOXML, appears to be trying for a takeover of ODF as a standard. Yes, I know, it’s madness. But apparently, the fact that the whole world knows that ISO is now useless, has escaped the SC34 guys completely. They’re indicating that they would like…

  • Crackers target Windows Media encoder bug

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    Robby Pedrica
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    It didn’t take long for exploit code to become available after last week’s Microsoft bug fix for the vulnerability in Windows Media Player. The code is distributed in 2 ways: a simple cleartext program where the shellcode has been altered and a widely deployed toolkit called e2. This causes a visitor to a web site…

  • Quebec government sued over purchase of Microsoft software

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Facil ( Quebec’s open source association ) is suing the local provincial government for purchasing Microsoft software without following government guidelines which requires government organisations to stimulate competition and look for alternatives. They indicate that Quebec has refused to look at alternative bids from open source vendors – apparently they’re spending more than $80million per…

  • Breaking News!!! – CONSEGI Declaration: 6 nations say no to ISO/IEC

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    Robby Pedrica
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    The fallout from the ISO confirmation of Microsoft’s Office Open XML Specification as a standard, continues and is starting to lead to some serious consequences. The recent conference in South/Latin America focusing on free software, drew some 2000 registrants to the IT event, many of whom were top government officials. The outcome ( and declaration…

  • Open Source software protected under copyright law

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    Robby Pedrica
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    A recent US federal appeals court ruling ( which overrules a previous lower court ruling ), has indicated that open source software now has the same protection under copyright law as other content. It’s quite interesting that the Business Software Alliance ( BSA ), which in the past has been the watchdog for such commercial…

  • Microsoft, Intel, Negroponte and the OLPC – we’re all one big happy family

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Bryan Appleyard from the Times Online recently wrote a brilliant piece on the trials of Nicolas Negroponte’s philanthropic venture, the OLPC. Briefly, Negroponte started out with the vision of having a cheap/low cost laptop-type device that could be used in countries where it was not possible to afford the IT industry’s normal costs. These costs…

  • Microsoft ODF/OOXML

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Well very interesting news that Microsoft is to support ODF in MS Office 2007 SP2 albeit the older 1.1 specification. But the most interesting is that this comes straight after Matusow’s visit to SA. I wonder if he got wind of the intended SABS appeal against the JTC1 OOXML process. MS will be shut out…

  • South Africans apparently don’t understand OSS

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Well that’s according to one of the largest commercial software vendors on the planet – Microsoft. I wonder where they get this drivel from? Maybe from the fact that they’re fighting a losing battle with OSS and need to try and grab any last share of support they can. Perhaps they thought that coming to…

  • OOXML and what it means to you

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    Robby Pedrica
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    What it means to you A document format is not just a simple way of saving information. Rather, look at it as a means of preserving information for the short or long term. Applications come and go, but it’s always necessary to open documents no matter what was used to create them. If another party…