I’d recently discovered a mailbox that I had left unattended for several years.  It had no anti-spam tool monitoring it, so it was mostly filled with really obvious spam messages and phishing attempts – email scams where people try to fool you into putting in your financial information into a site that looks like a legitimate banking site.

I found this message particularly amusing and thought I would share:

The email wants me to believe that Bank of America is giving me $30,000 in a lottery I never signed up for, never identifies me by name, and wants me to become a Western Union “Active Member.” (The message was sent in 2007, otherwise the Bank of the America reference would clearly be even less believable.)  All I have to do is send $400 to a Western Union in Phoenix, Arizona.  Phoenix isn’t even the corporate headquarters for Western Union.  Couldn’t they have thought of something more clever than that?  It seems pretty lazy.  It made me wonder how many people might have actually fallen for it.

Meanwhile, Microsoft recently published a study showing that the public estimates of losses due to phishing may be over-exaggerated by as much as a factor of 50.  In fact, most phishers may ultimately become victims themselves.  In the study, the researchers concluded that:

One explanation of the thriving trade in phishing-related services … is that phishers with more experience prey upon those with less. That is, those who have tried phishing and found it unprofitable or marginally profitable find it better to sell services to those who haven’t reached that conclusion yet.

So the big fish eat the little fish, just like in the sea.  Nice.

UPDATE:

I just took a peek at the Western Union website.  Maybe this type of scam is more prevalent than I thought.  Front and center on their online transfers page is a very clear and stern warning:

Protect Yourself from Fraud Don’t Send Money

• To someone who you don’t know
• To claim lottery or prize winnings
• Based on a promise to receive a large amount of money
• Because you were "guaranteed" a credit card or loan
• In response to an Internet or phone offer that you aren’t sure is honest

It’s really surprising that people actually need to be warned that they shouldn’t send money to claim a lottery or prize winnings.

[Microsoft Phishing Study c/o InformationWeek]

But even though adoption has been slow, more and more applications are gradually getting Gears treatments.

Today Google announced that Gmail can now be taken offline with Google Gears, meaning that you can now read and reply to your Gmail messages while you’re disconnected from the interweb, and have all of the email synchronize when you’re back online again.  There are still some bits of functionality that aren’t available in an offline mode – like the calendar, for example – but it’s a great start and about time.

Google Reader has offered offline support through Gears for some time now, and so has Google Docs.  Wordpress, although not an application developed by Google, has featured gears support for some time now.

It’s exciting to see so many powerful and rich applications available for offline use with Gears.  This could be one of those little things that Microsoft hears about and gets them a little bit nervous about the long-term future.  It’s probably far too early to make predictions about how much further web applications will go in replacing traditional desktop applications – and certainly there will always be some applications that will probably never be practical as web applications, like Adobe Photoshop for example.  But traditional “knowledge worker” applications – office productivity applications – seem like prime targets to be replaced by rich web applications.  Reliable and usable offline versions will likely accelerate the pace of innovation in these types of applications, as having an offline version will likely speed up end user adoption.  In other words, I think we’re hitting an inflection point where Google may consider a heavier investment in engineering and development of these tools.  Plus, Microsoft is planning a full web interface of their Office suite with the Office 14 release.  This could be the start of a new software war: the offline office suite war.

But I could be wrong.  As I said, I overestimated how quickly Gears would be adopted in the first place.  So we’ll see, I suppose.  My money is on Google for now, though.

According to the company press release:

LotusLive is designed to help companies work smarter by making it easy for them to connect and work together — with an emphasis on simplicity and ease of use. LotusLive’s online services give businesses of all sizes access to Lotus’ rich collaboration tools without requiring an up-front investment in IT support resources or infrastructure.

What’s most interesting about this news is IBM’s plans to partner with several key SaaS vendors:

• LinkedIn will provide LotusLive with searchable contact information.
• Salesforce.com will integrate LotusLive services within its CRM application.
• Skype announced plans to integrate voice and video into LotusLive.

Right now only LotusLive Meetings (Lotus Sametime) and LotusLive Events along with the hosted Notes application appear to be available for purchase, with the other solutions still showing up as being in beta.  I wasn’t able to find details on when IBM plans to make the additional functionality available.

The dashboard page for the collaboration component looks a lot like what you might expect from a "web2.0” site, and is actually pretty slick looking.

Even without the details about when it’ll be available, it’s exciting news from IBM, and it stacks up nicely against Microsoft and their plans for more SaaS offerings with the upcoming Office 14 release, as well as Google’s recent push to start selling Google Apps through their recently announced reseller program.

More details at LotusLive.com, full LotusLive press release at IBM.

This is good news for Microsoft, considering that recent research form Forrester shows that services like Google’s Gmail cost 1/3 that of traditional on-site email solutions.  According to Forrester, it costs around $25.18 per month per user for on-site, hosted email vs. $8.47 for Gmail to operate.

Email is one of those services that I still say is easier to convert to SaaS than others.  It’s one I’d really love to see more companies adopt.

According to the official Microsoft press release:

With Windows 7, Microsoft paid special attention to performance, reliability, security, compatibility and battery life. The company is on track to deliver a great experience that will allow customers to spend more time doing the things they want to do, without the operating system getting in the way.

Hmm.  Special attention to compatibility, eh?  Does that mean Windows 7 will support older hardware and software better than Windows Vista?  And what’s that point about “without the operating system getting in the way” – that sounds an awful lot like those annoying User Access Control messages that people complained about with Vista.

In any case, it sounds like Microsoft is on target to release Windows 7 in the middle of next year, which may mean as I had written earlier that some business customers may never upgrade to Windows Vista at all, and instead go directly from Windows XP to Windows 7.

More details about Windows 7 are at Microsoft’s site: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/default.aspx

Assuming the release date for Windows 7 holds, this would leave just a six month gap between the release of Windows 7 and the end of life for Windows XP for smaller build-to-order manufacturers.  It would be only three months for the larger OEMs.  Many business users may never experience Windows Vista Business, and instead move directly to Windows 7.

A lot of critics have cited the oversized hardware requirements for Vista and the lack of backwards-compatibility for hardware drivers and older software.  At the moment, it’s unclear to me how Windows 7 might solve that problem.  Is Microsoft suffering because Windows XP was too reliable?

Windows NT 3.51, 4.0 and Windows 2000 were all horribly unstable business operating systems compared to XP.  Blue screens after software or hardware installations were common.  Unexplainable missing registry keys were common.  Windows XP, on the other hand, was a robust and (relatively) stable OS for business.  It begs the question: should business software be built like other office hardware is?  Should we all develop software that will intentionally be obsolete within 5 years?  Or should we always build backwards-compatibility into infinity?

Typically Microsoft releases patches every Tuesday, but this patch was deemed critical enough to be released ahead of next week’s cycle, especially given the amount of bad press that Internet Explorer has gotten lately regarding the flaw.

As best I can determine, reports of the vulnerability started to surface sometime around the beginning of December.  ZDNet’s article first published the flaw affecting hacked Chinese language websites on December 9th, 2008.

You may have heard it described earlier this week as a zero day flaw in Internet Explorer.  For the uninitiated, a zero day flaw is simply any critical patch which is known to the general public, but as of yet un-patched.

Original vulnerability report and technical details at CVE: CVE-2008-4844.

Patch details from Microsoft: MS08-078.

This could be a good opportunity for Google to promote Chrome as an alternative.

uTest

Whether this means that Internet Explorer 8 is the most stable of the three is debatable.  One problem in relying solely on bug counts is that it doesn’t give you an idea of where those bugs are, or how likely it would be that a user would be tripped up or completely blocked by the bugs on a frequent basis.

More details at uTest’s company blog.

A lot of tech news sites have been theorizing that the “browser wars” may begin again, with Chrome, FireFox 3 and Internet Explorer 8 all competing for the highest chunk of the browser market.

While it might create some new innovation in the market, and drive much needed new features into Internet Explorer, I doubt this will re-ignite the same war that happened between Microsoft and Netscape.  The late 1990’s battle of the browser titans, Netscape and Internet Explorer, was primarily about one thing: personal revenge.  Bill Gates and his team at Microsoft were personally upset with Marc Andreessen’s comments about Windows (being a “poorly debugged set of device drivers” and so on), and the refusal by Andreessen to sell Netscape to Microsoft.  Microsoft licensed the Mosaic source code from Spyglass, Inc. and built Internet Explorer in response to the growing challenge from Netscape.  The comments from Andreessen helped fuel the team at Microsoft to work extra hard to come out on top, and the fact that Microsoft could bundle their browser with the OS just helped to seal the deal.

Today, the browser market is a little more crowded.  Internet Explorer, FireFox and Apple’s Safari are competing for the top three spots, with Opera and Chrome following close behind Safari.  And despite FireFox’s steadily growing usage, up to somewhere around 20-25% of the browser market today, it’s important to remember that 65-70% is still Internet Explorer usage.  It’s simply a fact that there are people that use the Internet that don’t really care what browser they are using to get there.  It’s all the same Internet to them.  Google may be able to use its brand and broad reach to push Chrome usage up, but it will probably come at the cost of FireFox usage first before it affects much of the Internet Explorer user base.

But beyond that, it doesn’t look like Microsoft is that worried about anyone eating away some of their browser share.  More and more of their web applications are being cross-certified on FireFox and Safari (and since Chrome uses Safari’s WebKit rendering engine, it’s likely that Chrome will work fine for the most part).  And the unfortunate reality is that there isn’t much money in the browser market.  Google’s Chrome gives Google the ability to do what Microsoft has done with Internet Explorer: tailor experiences on their web applications to have proprietary hooks so that you get that “it just works better” feeling when using Google Chrome with Google web applications.  But there isn’t any money being made: Chrome is free, there’s no additional advertising being displayed (at least not yet), and Google’s one and only business model is to sell advertising.

So what will happen next?  Internet Explorer 8 will come out, it’ll probably make webmasters unhappy (and maybe even a few Internet Explorer 6 users that have never experienced Internet Explorer 7’s UI), but it will be a step forward because it adheres to web standards better than any version of Internet Explorer before it.  People will use it, and the market share will probably stay around 60-70%.  FireFox usage will decline once Chrome gets add-ins, as discussed in an earlier post.  And FireFox 3.1 will come out and be faster and better than ever.  But not much will change, at least not over the next 3-5 years.

The real war isn’t really about browsers.  It’s about what powers the desktop.  If Google goes one step further and starts their own Linux desktop, and then pushes Chrome onto it along with a host of productivity tools, that would be the point where we’d see the same kind of massive war that we saw in the late 90’s, with amazing advancements in technology in such a short time.

The site for Oxite admits that this isn’t meant to be much more than a very large example of what can be done with ASP.NET.  And it’s actually a probably a good way to sell more licenses of Visual Studio, since you really can’t change a whole lot about Oxite without Visual Studio to compile changes.  It also might help folks understand the MVC model in .NET a little better, although I doubt it’ll win any Ruby on Rails converts.

Oxite comes with all the typical blog features you’ve come to expect from MoveableType, Typepad, or WordPress, such as trackbacks, pings, comments, permalinks, etc., etc.  It also integrates well with Windows Live Writer, which if you haven’t used already, you really, really should.  Not to digress, but Windows Live Writer is actually pretty cool tool for bloggers.  (Yeah, I may criticize Microsoft when they’re making bad technology decisions, but I’ll give them props when they’re doing good.)

Anyway, Oxite is probably worth a look if you’re into that whole .NET world, otherwise you’ll probably want to stay away from it like the plague.