Microsoft's dirty tricks archive vanishes
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What don't they want us to see? Last week Microsoft settled its only outstanding antitrust case, a class action lawsuit brought in Iowa.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Hard drives full of confidential data are still turning up on the second-hand market, researchers have reported. Investigations carried out on behalf of BT by the University of Glamorgan in the U.K., Edith Cowan University in Australia, and Longwood University in the U.S., found that 37 percent of drives surveyed had traces of personal data on them. Damningly, this figure is much the same as it was for the same surveys undertaken by the universities in each of the last two years, suggesting that either companies are ignoring the issue or simply lack the tools to adequately wipe data before resale. Sensitive information retrieved included salary details, financial data of specific companies, credit card numbers, medical data, visa applications, details of online purchases, and inevitably, online pornography. The sample totalled 350 hard drives acquired in online auctions. "Given the level of exposure that the subjects of security and identity theft has received in recent times, and the availability of suitable tools to ensure the safe disposal of information, it is difficult to understand why disks are still not being effectively cleaned before they are disposed off," said BT's security research head, Dr Andy Jones. "When organizations dispose off surplus and obsolete computers and hard disks, they must ensure that adequate procedures are in place to destroy any data and also to check that the procedures that are in place are effective -- whether they are handled by internal resources or through a third party contractor," he said. The full report -- which has yet to be made publically available -- reveals that buying second-hand disks is an unreliable way to get hold of storage. Of the 133 disks bought in the U.K., 44 percent of them didn't even work. But of those that did, 19 percent had enough information on them to identify the organization from which they had come, 65 percent had enough data to identify named people, and 17 percent contained "illicit" data. Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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A false positive in company's antivirus products leads to quarantine or deletion of some Windows users' copies of explorer.exe.
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Microsoft product managers Friday claimed that a data corruption bug in Windows Home Server crops up only when the system is under an &quot;extreme load,&quot; but also defended their decision to sound a general alarm before they had completed their investigation.The news that Windows Home Server (WHS) could corrupt files raised a storm of criticism from customers and observers alike.&quot;The problem isn&#39;t one hundred percent reproducible, and depends on quite a few different factors,&quot; explained Todd Headrick, the product planning manager on the Windows Home Server (WHS) team. &quot;Home Server has to be under an extreme load while doing a large file copy,&quot; he said, adding that the flaw comes into play only in instances when the file server&#39;s cache is full and the user is editing a file previously saved to a shared folder.&quot;But we thought it was important enough to generalize [the bug] so people would take it seriously, even though we took a PR [public relations] hit,&quot; Headrick added.Wednesday,&#160;Microsoft warned users&#160;in a tightly worded support document not to edit files stored on their servers with certain programs. &quot;Files may become corrupted when you save them to the home server,&quot; Microsoft said in KB946676, which it published last week to its support site.Saying that the bug was in the shared folders feature of WHS, the document urged users to stop using seven Microsoft applications, including Windows Vista Photo Gallery, Windows Live Photo Gallery, OneNote 2003, OneNote 2007, Outlook 2007, Microsoft Money 2007 and SyncToy 2.0 Beta under some conditions. &quot;We recommend that do not use the programs to save or to edit program-specific files that are stored on a Windows Home Server-based system,&quot; the document read.That wide-ranging recommendation caught the eye of WHS users and Microsoft critics alike. Some sounded white-hot.&quot;I&#39;ve had a fair share of files corrupted,&quot; a user identified as Shane K claimed on the WHS support forum. &quot;I have 800+ gigs of data on my home server and I&#39;ve had just about every file type you can imagine refuse to open or at sometime go to 0KB file size for no reason. This issue has been around for MONTHS so I don&#39;t know why suddenly the WHS team decides to &#39;work through the holidays&#39; to resolve it when there has been plenty of action on the boards since beta about this issue.&quot;Others misunderstood Microsoft&#39;s warning, and assumed that client backups to WHS would end up corrupted, which wasn&#39;t true. &quot;This could potentially be the &#39;my dog ate my homework&#39; for the 21st century,&quot; said a user named BVis on a Slashdot.org thread that tracked Computerworld&#39;s original story. &quot;&#39;I did my homework, but the power went out before I could save it, and my backups were all corrupt!&#39;&quot;&quot;People read things into [the KB],&quot; said Headrick. &quot;I heard people say &#39;Don&#39;t use the computer backup,&#39; but there were no problems whatsoever with Windows Home Server backup.&quot;Headrick and Joel Sider, a WHS senior product manager, both defended the decision to issue the warning. &quot;This is a very serious issue,&quot; said Headrick. &quot;We take any [data] corruption issue very seriously.&quot;&quot;We went with the amount of information we had at the time,&quot; said Sider. &quot;We had seen a reproducible problem, but we hadn&#39;t created a reproducible environment yet.&quot;&quot;We didn&#39;t have any more information, other than we were working on the problem, which we&#39;d already said,&quot; echoed Headrick in explaining why the team left the original support document untouched until late Friday. Then,&#160;Microsoft updated KB946676&#160;to include some of the same information that Headrick and Sider discussed in their interview with Computerworld.&quot;You can still use the WHS home computer backup to back up and restore files from and to your home computers,&quot; the revised document read.Headrick promised that the WHS team would work around the clock to come up with a permanent patch for the corruption bug, and would release it first as a hotfix that users would have to download manually from the Microsoft site. He refused to set a schedule for its release, however, saying only that the developers would have something to test &quot;in fairly short order.&quot;At some later date, the fix will be pushed to all WHS customers via Windows Update, Microsoft&#39;s update service, with the process determined by the server software&#39;s Automatic Updates settings, Headrick promised. He also said that although the WHS team was aware of file corruption reports related to Torrent applications, Intuit Inc.&#39;s Quicken personal finance program and Intuit&#39;s QuickBooks small business accounting software, it has not been able to reproduce the bug on its test systems. In addition, Headrick put the responsibility for any problems with Quicken on users&#39; shoulders.&quot;Quicken [data] was never meant to be stored on a network share,&quot; said Headrick.Computerworld&#160;is an InfoWorld affiliate.&#160;
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Blog: Upgrades based on purchase history allows users to recover previously purchased and lost iTunes files
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Is open source becoming the dumping ground for no-longer-wanted software, sort of like a Salvation Army dropoff point for programs instead of old clothes?
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As part of an update to Office 2003, Microsoft is cutting off the feature, which it says can save time, but risks exposing confidential information.
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'Don't edit' list includes photos, and Quicken and QuickBooks files, Microsoft warned. There's no word yet on a fix.
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Blog: Researcher finds a basic cookie-handling error that could compromise Windows PCs.
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Use Workshare Trace software to remove incriminating hidden comments in your next Office document.
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Show 'em if you got 'em. And El Reg does The old Microsoft used to ban strippers from interrupting its product launch events.â¦
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Blog: Microsoft has dropped its "Get the Facts" website, but the replacement isn't much better.
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There are multiple known instances of lost or stolen tapes but, to the best of my knowledge, not one reported instance of anyone recovering and maliciously using data stored on missing tapes. It's just too hard for an average thief to retrieve it.
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Code that exploits a weakness in the way many Microsoft applications process JPEG images has been published on the internet. Microsoft only discovered the security flaw, which could allow software viewing
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So-called FairUse program breaks copy protection on Windows Media Player.
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A bug in Microsoft&#39;s Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000 and Proxy Server 2.0 can let hackers spoof Web content, such as a trusted site, with their own fake content, the Redmond
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fihzy writes &quot;eBay have announced they will retire Microsoft Passport Sign-In and .NET alerts. The Microsoft Passport Directory of Sites has been discontinued, too.