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September 28, 2005

Fighting a War

Since Monday afternoon, I have been fighting a war. The smoke has cleared, and the front is now quiet, and I have a chance to look over the battlefield.

Starting sometime in the wee hours of Monday morning, a virus author controlling a large army of zombie machines started a massive propagation campaign, sending hundreds of thousands of messages to myriad targets on the Internet. Besides their binary payload, the messages had one crucial thing in common:

Their headers were forged to appear as though they’d originated from the company of my employ - from a randomly generated username (usually invalid) at my company’s domain.

As these messages reached their targets, immense numbers were rejected or bounced. They “returned” to their apparent port of origin. Us. Even though our inbound mail server is a buffed dual-Xeon 2GB spam-processing machine, it quickly developed a backlog of over 90,000 messages. All “legitimate” - because they were bounces, not actual spam or viruses. From myriad IP addresses, because the originating spam campaign had myriad targets.

In the end, we built a script snippet that would delete any bounce messages - related to the given storm surge or not. First pass took 20 minutes and deleted over 43,000 messages from the backlog. A tweak, another run, and 15,000 more were gone. Two hours, several passes, and no more surges later, we’d caught up.

More than anything, this simply reminds me that there’s a shadow war on the Internet - one that most users rarely see the depths of. spambots, virus campaigns, zombie armies, cancelbots, incessant probes, firewalls, VPNs, virus filters, spam filters… there will come a time when this overhead becomes too burdensome to do business online. Not sure what will happen, then. The Internet shares part of the UNIX philosophy, in that it “doesn’t prevent you from stupid things, so as not to prevent you from doing clever things”. But the stupid is growing, and doing its best to eat the clever.

Posted by jim at 02:38 PM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2005

Here it comes...

Remember what I just said yesterday (yesterday!) about the buzz ball being in Microsoft’s side and that, among other things, we’d see people publicly switching back to Windows based on the aforementioned buzz?

Here’s another backswitcher. Among the reasons? As he told Scoble in email, The corporate blogs that he reads convinced him there’s a future in the platform.

Posted by jim at 08:59 AM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2005

Buzz ball in Microsoft's court

In the “Apple vs Microsoft” camp of computing, it’s pretty hard to deny that the power of buzz has been on Apple’s side for at least a year and a half. As Microsoft stumbled - shutting down their engineering to focus on security (and still having some serious issues right after), “rebooting” their Longhorn (now Vista) development plans - Apple was getting all the good media buzz. Halo effect from the rampant success of iPod/iTunes, the Mac mini, Mac OS X 10.4, and several highly-visible “Web 2.0” personalities making the Mac their personal computing choice.

Well, the pendulum is swinging again.

Yes, the iPod nano is sweet. But the iTunes Phone was a non-starter. The record companies are, in their greed, ready to hamstring ITMS. There’s no new Mac OS X version coming down the pipeline for a bit, and it’ll be hard for Apple to excite people with new hardware until they truly get their Intel transition underway (the rumored dual-core Power Macs will still be G5s). The news isn’t bad - there just isn’t much at the moment.

In Redmond, however, Microsoft looks to be ready to blow out its constipated pipeline. Xbox 360, IE7, Vista, Office, Sharepoint v3, SQL Server, Longhorn Server - all this and more should be shipping over the next 24 months. Microsoft, for better or worse, looks to be embracing (and expanding) some of the technologies and practices they’ve been lambasted for ignoring (RSS, anyone? Blogs? Hi, Scoble!)

What does this mean? Lots of press about a resurgent Microsoft in the near future, with concomitant articles about an Apple being “under attack” (by MS on one side, and the labels on the other). People who switched from Windows to Mac OS X during the Tiger buzz will start to blog about having second thoughts or even switching back as they see news about the bright-and-shiny from MS (this is already starting). Microsoft diehards will let loose their I Told You So posts. Apple diehards will fall back into almost predictable zealot stance (shaolin monkey school).

That is, unless Microsoft fails to follow through on the proto-buzz they managed to generate in the past month (hitting a current high after PDC and the company meeting), or if Apple pulls something Big out of the bag at MacWorld in January (or at WWDC in July). Those are possibilities, sure.

But for now… I’m putting my money on a “resurgent Microsoft” theme starting in the tech media, and staying with us for a while.

Postscript: All I’m talking about it buzz here, kids. IE7? Summer 2006. Vista? Late 2006. First Apple Intel machines? June 2006. Office 12? Early 2007. We can judge the products when they ship.

Posted by jim at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2005

Google's Gmail Notifier

Google has finally come out with a Gmail Notifier for MacOS X, written by software engineer Greg Miller in his 20%. (All Googlefolk are expected to spend 20% of their work time on a project of personal interest).

Not that this niche hasn’t been addressed by the Mac community - most notably GmailStatus - but Gmail Notifier includes some spiff features, such as showing header excerpts of unread messages, allowing you to directly view only your unread messages, and the ability to make Gmail your default mail program. I’ll miss GmailStatus’ support for Growl, but Gmail Notifier has already taken over.

Also, a little side note. The new Google Desktop for Windows has a nice feature - not only does it index your desktop (and Outlook while it’s open), but it also indexes your Gmail account and makes that available. No Gmail importer for Spotlight on MacOS X 10.4 - so I went ahead and added a Gmail account to Mail.app, with a ruleset that marks any new Gmail messages as read it into a Gmail Archive folder. Voila - my Gmail messages are being archived by Spotlight.

Posted by jim at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)