Google takes a break

This will be a short one but for about roughly an hour this morning for some people (I was only affected around 20 minutes) Google search results were listed as malware and would only display Google’s warning page upon clicking.  The results were still accessible if you adjusted the URL, however hardly convenient if you are doing any serious searching.  In the meantime I know I got use out of Live Search, which picked up the slack as I’m sure it did for many others around the world or another alternative.

Windows 7 and shortsighted people

Increasingly I’ve been reading more and more about Windows 7 and how it has grabbed the attention of even the staunchest Apple advocates such as Walt Mossberg, David Pogue, and Leo Laporte each conveying that they not only feel it is better than Vista but that they haven’t found any show-stopping flaws.  Leo Laporte even goes as far on his podcasts to promote a campaign to release Windows 7 now since in his experience he has evaluated it as shipping ready quality.

While it is widely held that Windows 7 is an improvement over Windows Vista I am prompted to point out that just because you feel it’s ready doesn’t mean the company writing the code should listen and obey.  Microsoft understands what went wrong with the way Vista was handled and has made drastic improvements in how they organize and deploy their efforts for 7.  This alteration in work ethic has lead to this very good beta product, but remember it is only beta.

I am very excited to see 7 launch but not at the expense of Microsoft bending to those vocal proponents and sacrificing more time for testers and the coders at Microsoft to smooth and polish the product. 

With that said, no amount of testing will ever make a perfect product and keeping a product in a perpetual testing phase in hopes that it will make it better is foolish.  Windows 7 needs to be released this year, but not just yet.

Trojan on Mac OS X - Massive Infections

I read this one over at macworld.com. Evidently some less than noble individuals placed a pirated copy of the new iWork 09 online, which was downloaded over 20,000 times. This turned out to be a Trojan horse that asked for the users' password and proceeded to install itself. This has been confirmed as an in the wild threat but fortunately the infection does not spread.

Security through obscurity is a phrase that has been used for years to describe the Mac platform in general and I tend to agree. The real question is how Apple will respond to threats such as these considering as their platform grows in popularity they will start to face the same problems that are affecting Windows users. The difference is Microsoft has had decades of addressing these problems and hardening Windows from a multitude of attack vectors, while Apple has seemingly skated by (getting back to that obscurity thing). I won't bash Mac users on this one, but a sense of humility would be nice in regards to security at the very least and in this area they could learn a lot from Microsoft.

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This site will be the commentary and opinion on stories and topics in the technology and video game industries. My background in Computer Science as well as many aspects of video game development will hopefully provide more substance for all the readers here, especially over the majority of postings on the Internet.

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