A Sydney, Australia-based journalist, Michael Lee covers a gamut of news in the technology space including information security, state Government initiatives, and local startups.
The equivalent of an electronic tidal wave -- originating from the Microsoft campus in Redmond -- hammered the ZDNet Australia servers earlier this week.On Tuesday at the AusCERT conference, I interviewed Mark Estberg, Microsoft's director of internal security, who told me that he is considering taking away admin rights from most of the company's employees.
Senior executives are rarely heard promoting a rival's product, which is why it seemed odd that Microsoft would offer an iPod as a competition prize.On the first day of the AusCERT conference, Microsoft was holding a question and answer session at which delegates could grill four of its senior executives.
Within hours of arriving at the AusCERT conference in the Gold Coast on Monday, my PowerBook decided it would rather commit suicide than listen to Microsoft's top security executives answer questions about Vista.I had lost my mobile phone on Saturday night in a less-than-upmarket Oxford Street bar and my voice recorder had started playing up, so I decided to use a software-based voice recorder on my -- until now -- ultimately reliable Powerbook to tape the Microsoft Q&A session.
Last week, two security companies spoke to me about their new products and I suddenly realised that we are close to losing the war against spyware.There are various forms of spyware with some being more aggressive than others but they all share the same desire -- to steal personal information from their victim's computers.
Microsoft's new operating system is great ... as a public relations platform for the software giant.
Windows Vista will have a snazzy new firewall, but by default it will only block incoming traffic, unless...
So Apple has launched Boot Camp, which is a piece of software that allows its customers to choose between Windows XP and OS X when booting up. But if you have OS X, why would you downgrade?
Special Minister of State Gary Nairn this week released a paper entitled 'Responsive Government - A New Service Agenda', which details how e-government services will be "improved" over the next four years.If and when these services are delivered I hope that during a security emergency they will offer better advice than the Australian Tax Office did this week.
If you ran a software company and an independent security researcher contacted you with proof that your product contains security vulnerabilities, how would you react?Over the past 18 months I have come across three very prominent cases where security researchers have been ignored, gagged and even called terrorists, by vendors.