Trend Micro Clueless on Linux and Android

Summary: The latest statements regarding iOS versus Android, rely on misinformation and ignorance.

The struggling insecurity firm known as Trend Micro has resorted to patent harassment in addition to other dubious activities and according to several reports [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] like this one, “Trend Micro attacks Open Source”:

Insecurity expert Steve Chang, who is the chairman of Trend Micro, has just declared himself the sworn enemy of the Open Sauce movement by saying that Android is less secure than the iPhone because it is Open Sauce.

Chang claims that because Android was open sauce a hacker could understand the underlying architecture and source code and work out new ways to do it over.

Steve Chang said that you had to give credit to Apple, because they are very careful about it. It’s impossible for certain types of viruses to operate on the iPhone.

A rebuttal has been posted, which states that “the open-source-is-less-secure myth was dispelled more than a decade ago. Take a look at Linux, Apache, Firefox, or Chrome — four huge open-source projects, and all many times more secure than their closed-source brethren (Windows, IIS, Internet Explorer). Open source projects are more secure than closed-source projects due to peer and code review, and vested interest! Trend Micro fails to appreciate that while maybe a handful of people have seen the iOS source, thousands have eyeballed Android’s innards to look for bugs. Don’t forget that Android is also based on Linux, which must be one of the most rigorously tested pieces of software ever made.

“Later in the interview, Chang even goes on to mention the iOS sandbox “that isolates the platform”… which Android also has! This comes a week after Trend Micro released a mobile security app for Android.

Anyway, Chang’s ultimate point is that as smartphones become more intrinsic to our everyday life, their security becomes an ever-growing concern. Smartphones need to be treated as real computers, and locked down in the same way; either by the platform, or with third-party software. There will come a point, in the next few years, when smartphone OSes receive even more attention from malware authors. So, in other words, he is promoting security by obscurity.

So, in other words, he is promoting security by obscurity. That must be the reason why Windows is so secure and while Linux is crawling with virii, right?

Ultimately, I’d dare predicting that users will ultimately end up choosing the platform that has more apps, due to development being much freer and easier and also one that provide you the safest means to navigate the Web.

Here is a comparison of ESET antivirus and a host of other competitors, notice where TrendMicro resides.

“In-the-Wild” viruses are real viruses that have been reported to the Wildlist Organization by at least two independent reporters. When it comes to In-the-Wild virus detection, no one even comes close to ESET as the following chart illustrates. ESET NOD32 has never missed an In-the-Wild virus.

Virus Bulletin tests, May 1998 through December 2010 – www.virusbtn.com

How The World’s Technology Juggernaut Lost Its Buzz And Became The ‘Underdog’

It’s worth pointing out that Web sites recently highlighted the loss of “Genuine Advantage” in Microsoft Office. It’s dead, reveals a source close to Microsoft:

Late last week, with absolutely no public announcement, Microsoft quietly retired one cog in its antipiracy machine. Microsoft has no “antipiracy machine”. It’s called counterfeiting, not piracy. And Microsoft loves counterfeiting in many cases. In a way, “Genuine Advantage” cannot possibly qualify as a product. It’s just a two-word euphemism which strives to spin an antifeature as a feature (using two positive words, “Genuine” and “Advantage”).

When you have a great product as OpenOffice, why does one need to fork $100+ dollars??

Changing the discussion, Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently took the stage at a joint press conference alongside another large technology company. He described his partner using a once-unthinkable designation.

“The thing that makes Microsoft a great partner for us is that they really are the underdog,” Zuckerberg said. “Because of that, they’re in a structural position where they’re incentivized to just go all out and innovate.”

Microsoft as underdog. At the beginning of this decade, this description would have been ridiculous, like referring to the Yankees as an unsung, longshot baseball club. From the spread of personal computing through the dawn of the World Wide Web, its software governed the desktops of more than nine in ten desktop computers. Microsoft was so dominant that it became a symbol of monopoly power run amok, supposedly snuffing out innovation. Its rivals affixed pejorative labels like “Death Star” and “Evil Empire,” accusing Microsoft of exploiting its control of the desktop to smother any and all potential competitors. Antitrust authorities in Washington and Brussels pursued a veritable crusade to break Microsoft into bite-sized pieces.

“Back in the 80s and 90s, Microsoft was seen as invulnerable,” says Howard Anderson, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

But now, after a lost decade that has seen its fortunes sag in multiple businesses, this same company is–not without justification–referred to affectionately as the underdog by the head of a Web business that did not even exist when Microsoft first developed an Internet browser. A Newsweek columnist recently dismissed Microsoft as no longer a source of fear in the technology world, but rather “a bit of a joke.” Nearly ten years ago, a newspaper had declared Microsoft a step away from “world domination.”

How did such a seemingly indomitable enterprise lose its formidable grip on the marketplace? Are Microsoft’s best days now behind it? Can it recover its former glory (if not its notoriety) in the twenty-teens?

Microsoft’s conspicuous slide attests to the tenuous nature of power and supremacy in the Internet age, and the degree to which the product itself–technology–can radically reshape business models, creating new markets for upstarts and opening pathways around previously insurmountable gatekeepers. In an era in which innovation is perhaps more important than ever, Microsoft’s experience illustrates how nothing is really certain for anyone.

To be sure, Microsoft remains huge and powerful. It stands as the second-largest technology company on earth after Apple in terms of market capitalization. It boasted record sales of $62.5 billion in the 2010 fiscal year. Still, it has clearly lost much of its luster, suffering through a decade pockmarked by a series of spectacular disappointments made all the more frustrating by the glittering ascents of rivals such as Apple and Google.

For Microsoft, failures and missed opportunities have recently come to outshine its many successes. There was the delay–and disaster–of Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system, widely considered one of the worst tech debacles of the decade. The software that came to market months behind schedule was panned by frustrated customers who found the too-expensive upgrade bloated, slower than its predecessor, and incompatible with hardware. There was its failed attempt to purchase Yahoo, which rebuffed many months of advances in what became a humiliating spectacle, depriving Microsoft of a crucial expansion into Web searching. There was Microsoft’s new line of Kin smartphones–a D.O.A. product the company killed just 48 days after launch. There was Microsoft’s disappointing effort to launch a digital music player, Zune–which has proven no match for Apple’s iPod–and its failure, thus far, to produce a credible rival to the iPad, even though Microsoft led the way with a “trailblazing” tablet PC in 2001.

Seven years ago, Microsoft still controlled 35 percent of the market for software running mobile phones, but that share has since slipped to 15 percent. Internet Explorer, the Web browser whose dominance put Microsoft cross-wise with federal antitrust authorities, recently dipped below 50 percent of the market.

All of this has diminished the biggest number of all: After reaching a peak market capitalization of $642 billion in September 2000, Microsoft’s worth has been sliced in half.

These reversals have occurred even as Microsoft has spent astronomic sums on research and development–$8.7 billion in the last year alone. Microsoft has also lost ground in key areas in which the Redmond giant had viable contenders well before the competition. Microsoft saw the potential of television in the mid-1990s with WebTV, years before companies like Apple and Google took up the battle for the living room.

In short, changing appetites of the marketplace, technological evolution and questionable decision-making inside Microsoft itself have combined to accomplish what antitrust regulators never did: rolling back the company’s dominance and opening the terrain for newer, nimbler entrants.

Captive To Its Own Monopoly

In the telling of many technology experts, many of Microsoft missteps and stumbles are, ironically, the direct result of its very successes and core strengths. Its stranglehold on the desktop, while hugely profitable, helped turn Microsoft into an out-of-shape competitor focused on defending turf rather than scoring new hits. In seeking to maintain its dominance on the desktop, it failed to anticipate and plan for the spread of computing to mobile phones, handheld computers, the cloud, and Web-based services delivered by companies such as Google. Now, people can write documents, run spreadsheets and browse the Web without indulging any Microsoft software, steering right around the software giant.

“The fundamental challenge for Microsoft is that it is trying to protect an enormously profitable core franchise at a time in which alternative means of achieving same results put the core franchise at risk,” says David Yoffie, a professor of international business administration at Harvard Business School.

Microsoft declined requests for comment.

For a time, Microsoft’s size, market share, and clout meant it was large enough to smother challengers.

“If there was a market someone wanted that Microsoft had, Microsoft would roll over them,” says Anderson, the Sloan School of Management professor.

Most famously, when Netscape offered a Web browser for free, Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, effectively inserting it smack on to the screen of the vast majority of the world’s desktop computers. Suddenly, Microsoft controlled the primary gateway to the Web, with all the attendant opportunities.

But this mode of building new markets by tying new products to Windows sowed a monopolistic culture inside Microsoft, one that has proven damaging in a swiftly changing marketplace. As the company focused its energies on defending its grip on the desktop (not to mention defending itself against high-profile lawsuits aimed at curbing its power), it was slow to develop new products to serve changing ways of computing, such as relying on the Web-based software that has been central to the rise of its competitors.

“It has an executive team that had not truly lived in a world of competition for perhaps a decade, and its performance in the years between 2000 and 2010 have showed this,” says George Colony, CEO and chairman of Forrester Research, a technology and market research firm. “Essentially, the company had no competition for a decade and so it became out of shape and not ready to truly compete.”

The trouble for Microsoft is that its core business is so huge that it indeed warrants defending. Its Windows operating system and Office suite of applications together generated around 60 percent of Microsoft’s sales in the 2010 fiscal year. But time and again, Microsoft’s focus on defending these areas appears to have come at the expense of timely strategic thinking about how to expand into promising new areas.

Web searching, for example, seemed in the 1990s like a niche service that could be found anywhere. Many companies failed to realize that search could be turned into the immensely profitable business that Google has proven it to be, using it as a way to attract Web surfers who could then be pointed toward other experiences including services that Microsoft previously dominated, from e-mail to instant messaging to digital calendars.

Many observers argue that Microsoft has never recovered from the departure of its co-founder, the visionary and fierce Bill Gates. He was so adept at steering the behemoth he’s proved all but impossible to replace. His successor, Steve Ballmer, who became chief executive in 2000, has by many accounts fallen short, failing to match Gates’ technical expertise and foresight.

While Gates was a coder, Ballmer is known as a numbers cruncher, a math and economics major at Harvard, where he first met Gates. Without Gates’ tech knowledge, some say, Ballmer has been unable to see the competitive opportunities and threats ahead.

Ballmer is “a brilliant Wall Street tactician,” says the futurist Mark Anderson. “However, he couldn’t program an Xbox game. He doesn’t have that tech background.”

Ballmer famously scoffed at the iPhone when it first launched. “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share,” he told a television interviewer when Apple’s now-ubiquitous smartphone was first released. Today, Apple owns nearly one-fourth of the market for software powering smartphones, while Microsoft has only one-tenth, according to ComScore, a marketing research firm.

An ongoing survey of over 1,000 Microsoft employees by review website Glassdoor.com concluded that 50% did not approve of Ballmer’s performance as CEO, even though the company reported record revenue in the 2010 fiscal year.

Like perhaps any major company, Microsoft has also struggled to manage an increasingly enormous and fragmented operation, one with over 88,000 current employees worldwide and five major business units. In the telling of many insiders, internal politics and power struggles have often stifled innovation and thwarted coordinated action.

“A lot of time the phone division doesn’t even know what the Windows division is doing,” says Mary Jo Foley, a technology journalist and author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era.

In an op-ed in the New York Times published earlier this year, a former Microsoft vice-president, Dick Brass described the company as “a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence.”

The Found Decade?

Whatever happens next, at the dawn of a new decade, Microsoft appears set for a significant makeover. In recent years, as its many of its core businesses have suffered, the company has come to be seen as a predominantly business-focused enterprise, the supplier of software and services to major American companies. Many consumers have disdained Microsoft as an unsexy brand encountered primarily at work, while giving their leisure time over to the sleek realm of Apple, Google, and Facebook.

Now, Microsoft aims to change that, regaining the engagement of the American consumer even as it attempts to build on its strong legacy in the enterprise.

Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie says he believes the firm’s way forward is to speak directly to the consumer, a strategy no doubt informed by Apple’s success in getting parents, students, designers, and others to crave its white and silver devices.

“Apple has shown that if you don’t focus on the consumer in this market, there’s enormous risk,” Yoffie says.

But many experts are dubious that Microsoft can pull off such a transition.

“Apple builds fanatics,” says MIT’s Anderson. “Microsoft builds people who are sullen, but not mutinous. Their DNA is large organizations, operating systems, and applications. Their DNA doesn’t understand design and the consumer mind.”

Microsoft’s failure to see the opportunities that Apple handily seized upon hardly means it is doomed in the consumer space. HP, Sony, Nokia, and Research in Motion are just a few of the titans that missed what the Cupertino company anticipated and developed, from the rise of apps to the demand for a digital storefront for music. Some would even have bet on Apple’s demise, a sign of just how much a technology company is capable of changing course–Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell said of Apple in 1997 that his advice to the then-ailing firm would be to “shut [...] down and give the money back to shareholders.”

In its strange new incarnation as the underdog, Microsoft is adopting a different set of habits than those embraced by Microsoft, the overlord of yore–a cultural shift that may lead to greater innovation.

“The lost decade of Microsoft is propelling them forward now to be more daring,” says Colony.

Zuckerberg, the famously youthful chief of Facebook, said he enjoyed partnering with the Microsoft because–in contrast to its days as an entrenched monopolist–the company is “just trying to rapidly gain share by doing awesome stuff that no one has talked about doing before.”

In mobile, for instance, Microsoft has demonstrated a willingness to start from scratch. Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system, with its trademark homescreen made up of colorful square tiles looks little like the competition and has drawn critical praise as fresh and unique. Its latest versions of Internet Explorer and Windows, and its search engine, Bing, all stand as major improvements over their predecessors.

By some accounts, Microsoft’s efforts at refashioning itself have already reaped dividends. Its new mobile phone software is the product of a previously unmanageable cross-company collaboration in which the Zune, Xbox and browser teams all worked together to create an operating system that felt unified and consistent for the user. Microsoft has also scored points with Kinect, its new controller-free gaming peripheral that allows users to play games just by moving their body, which has been praised as the “future of gaming” and sold faster than the iPad during its first month on the market.

But the positive reviews mean nothing unless the customer buys in. The mobile phone now stands as the single most important venue for Microsoft in the consumer space, the place that will determine whether the company goes down as an atrophied giant or can rise anew.

The Pew Research Center’s 2010 Mobile Access survey found that 40% of adults in the U.S. now use their mobile phone to go online, compose email, or instant message–a number that will almost certainly swell.

“Phones are do or die for Microsoft,” says Foley.

Microsoft’s deep pockets make it impossible to dismiss Windows Phone 7′s prospects. The company is trying to woo developers with free phones and cash–they offered game-maker PopCap $100,000 to create marquee apps–and are investing a reported half-a-billion dollars in a blowout marketing campaign.

As the iPad solidifies its place in the technology landscape, and as other tablet computers proliferate, Microsoft will need to catch up in that sphere as well–a painful reality for a company that launched its first tablet computer almost a decade ago.

According to research from Strategy Analytics, Apple controlled 95% of the tablet market in the third quarter of 2010. There’s also Google to contend with, as a host of new tablets and laptops running its Android and Chrome operating systems will be coming to the market over the next several months. While the last decade witnessed the browser wars, the coming decade will see Microsoft battle to be the operating system of choice across the slew of new devices that have come into play: phones, tablets, and TVs.

Some argue that Microsoft’s aim for the consumer’s affection is bound to fail, while distracting the company from its only viable mission: building on its already dominant position in the American workplace.

“If I were Steve Ballmer, I’d be doubling down on enterprise,” says Foley. “That’s where they’re strongest and that’s where they make their money.”

Microsoft is hardly turning its back on the corporations that have been so good to it for so many years. It has been refining a range of offerings intended to tempt corporate IT departments, such as Azure, a cloud computing service that launched earlier this year and has attracted clients like eBay and the Department of Agriculture, and SharePoint, a line of business software products that has been Microsoft’s fastest-growing ever.

But the giant is clearly gearing up for a major run to recapture the masses–this time, not by dint of its monopolistic grip on the desktop, but by the force and appeal of its innovations, another phrase not frequently uttered in connection with the company back in its halcyon days.

The only certainty is this: Microsoft will be around in a major way if for no other reason than the dollars at play.

“They have more money than God,” says MIT’s Anderson.

Nine reasons you might NOT want to buy an iPad.

In fact, if you’re thinking about getting or giving an iPad this Christmas, I’ll give you 9 reasons you might want to think again.

The iPad is fine technology, but quite limited. As far as the “Technology of the Year,” I’d certainly say the iPad might rate as the gadget of the year simply due to fan enthusiasm.

But in a year that has seen cloud computing grow to the point that it can provide a $525, 2048-core cluster in 45 minutes, there are clearly ground-breaking technologies that go far beyond a glorified iPhone with a bigger screen.

For that is, essentially, what an iPad is. It’s an iPhone with a bigger screen — minus the phone and the camera. Certainly, the iPad is portable and convenient, but it’s also wildly limited.

Here then, are 9 reasons you might NOT want to buy an iPad.

Reason 1: The iPad 2 is coming

Apple regularly updates its hardware and the iPad is no exception. Many of the features of the iPad already significantly lag behind the iPhone 4, so we’re likely to see a significantly upgraded device released within the next four or five months.

Reason 2: There’s no USB port

This is one of those no-excuse lacks that makes the iPad infinitely frustrating. Getting data onto the iPad is tedious, at best. If you want to load the iPad up with movies or PDF files, you have to go through any number of convoluted approaches, including using the horrid iTunes interface or uploading files to Dropbox and then downloading them again.

Reason 3: You have to use iTunes

‘Nuff said.

Reason 4: There’s no way to wirelessly synchronize your bookmarks

I know this is a nit compared to many of the iPad’s other shortcomings, but it goes to proving how limited the machine is for production use.

It is actually quite pleasant to sit on the couch and browse the Web on an iPad. But if you’re a writer like me, and you find a Web site you want to save for later, you can’t easily bookmark it and have that bookmark show up on your other machines.

I use Xmarks to keep my bookmarks in sync across all my devices and it works wonderfully. But although there’s an Xmarks app for the iPad, it doesn’t work in Safari (because Apple won’t let it). Safari is an island on its own.

Even if you own a Mac and you want to sync iPad Safari to Mac Safari, you can’t do it wirelessly. You have to hook up the iPad and let the — let’s all say it again — horrid iTunes sync process run to get those bookmarks in sync.

One new bookmark could take ten minutes of hooking up, unhooking, syncing, restarting, and otherwise futzing with technology that seems far more 2001 than 2011.

Reason 5: Kindles are much less expensive

If you want to use the iPad as an ebook reader, you may want to consider a Kindle or a color Nook. Kindles can be had for as little as $139 and the color for $249. Compare this to the iPad, which starts at $499 and goes all the way up to $829.

Plus, the Kindle comes with a free data plan. If you choose the more expensive iPad 3G models, you’ll have to pay for a separate monthly data plan.

Reason 6: WiFi is still unreliable

For some reason, Apple can’t seem to get WiFi working reliably with the iPad, even in its latest updates.

This is unfortunate, since the iPad is pretty much useless without WiFi. Some users (myself included) find that the iPad’s WiFi implementation is notoriously unreliable, so much so as to render the device almost useless.

This is unacceptable and, as usual, Apple isn’t acknowledging the problem.

Reason 7: You can only run software approved by Apple

Jason and I have both written extensively about Apple’s restrictive policies. The fact remains that, unless you want to go out and jailbreak your iPad, you’re forced to run software that Apple has approved for sale in its own app store.

Apple is notoriously capricious about what applications it approves and doesn’t approve, often denying publishing rights to software that’s otherwise excellent — except for the mere fact of competing with Apple’s mediocre equivalent applications.

You should have the freedom to run whatever software you want, and developers should have the freedom to sell or give you the software they make. But in the case of the iPad you’re locked in, so much so that members of the GPL community are considering pulling applications because of Apple’s restrictive policies.

Reason 8: There’s no camera, front-facing or otherwise

Apple’s video conferencing software, FaceTime, is rapidly becoming a killer app for the iPhone 4 and Snow Leopard-equipped Macs.

You would think FaceTime would be a perfect application for the iPad, but there’s no camera. Will there be one in the future? Probably, but not on this iPad.

Reason 9: It can’t be used as a standalone computer

The iPad almost seems like the perfect parents or in-laws machine, a true Internet appliance that would allow less technologically facile family members to have access to the Internet, email, and social networking capabilities without needing to know much about computers, operating systems, software installation, viruses, or any of the other nightmares of daily computing life.

Almost.

Except that, apparently by design, the iPad really, really wants to connect to a computer running iTunes. Bizarrely, to get started using the iPad, you first have to physically tether it to an iTunes-running computer and then, for all updates, it’s again a physical connection.

This from the company that introduced WiFi to the masses. It’s just very strange, highly inconvenient, and rules out gifting the iPad as a turnkey “get online” solution.

So there you go. Nine compelling reasons to avoid the iPad this holiday season.

Xmarks Sync to be Discontinued

Sadly, Xmarks will be shutting down our free browser synchronization service on January 10, 2011. This page contains details on how to transition to recommended alternative services. For more detail on why we’re closing our doors, please see our blog post. Learn more at http://www.xmarks.com/about/shutdown . [Updated: since our announcement several companies have expressed interest in acquiring the Xmarks service. More details in James' blog post (http://blog.xmarks.com). If you would pay $10 per year to continue to use Xmarks, please pledge your support here:http://www.pledgebank.com/XmarksPremium .]

Best regards -Team Xmarks

What you need to know:

• Browser Sync Alternatives

  While you may have to give up cross-browser sync when Xmarks goes away, there are a lot of good browser-specific sync options available:

  Browser	Sync Alternative	Xmarks Data Types Supported	Price
  	Firefox Sync (Mozilla)	Bookmarks, passwords, history, tabs	Free
  	Chrome Sync (Google)	Bookmarks	Free
  	Windows Live Essentials (Microsoft)	Bookmarks	Free
  	MobileMe (Apple)	Bookmarks, passwords	$99/year

  You can also create an html backup of your bookmarks at any time by using the Export feature at my.xmarks.com.

• Service End Date and User Support

  Xmarks Sync for Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari, and iPhone will continue to operate until January 10, 2011. Email support is no longer available, but our user support forums on GetSatisfaction will continue to be a place for users to help each other.

• Uninstalling Xmarks Extensions (Sync, Thumbnails, and SearchTabs)

  Instructions for uninstalling Xmarks can be found on this wiki page.

• Privacy and Your Data

  We understand that you have entrusted us with the task of storing your personal browser data and we take that responsibility very seriously.

  • We will never sell or release your personal data, and we will make sure to delete all user data once the Xmarks service shuts down.
  • If you’d like to take immediate action, click here to immediately delete your account and user data. (Make sure you have all your data first!)
• Other Shutdown Questions

  Please see our Shutdown FAQ if you have questions you don’t see answered above.

• More Sync Options

  If you have need of syncing more than just bookmarks between computers, here are two great services we recommend you try out. Both offer a free plan with no payment obligation.

  Evernote lets you save entire webpages, including text, links and images. It keeps everything synchronized across your computer, phone and the web. In addition to storing webpages, Evernote also allows you to take notes, store to-dos, snap photos and more.		SugarSync is easy, secure online file sync and backup. Keep your files, photos, and music stored in the cloud so you can access them anytime. Works with PC and Mac plus mobile devices like iPhone, iPad, Android, and more. Try it Free!

Desktop Linux: Ready for the mainstream

Organizations can adopt Linux for many users, and save the high upgrade and possible hardware costs of Vista or Windows 7

Desktop Linux is a worthwhile option for both public organizations and private companies. Those who standardize on Linux would save serious money on the new equipment needed for Vista or Windows 7, not to mention OS and Office upgrades as well. Your business could, too.

Moreover, Linux-based shops would require significantly less training than they would to teach staff Vista or Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2007.

Let’s face reality: Most people use just Microsoft Office, e-mail, and the Web at work. For that, you don’t need an expensive, resource-hogging suite like Office or a piggy operating system like Windows Vista, Windows 7 or the other known alternative OS, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Plus, adopting Linux will solve some of IT’s headaches when it comes to PC management.

Even Microsoft admits it. After years of denial, the software giant’s latest SEC filings acknowledge mounting competitive pressure from Linux, and not just in the datacenter. Addressing Microsoft investors in February, CEO Steve Ballmer went as far as to suggest that the open source OS could be a greater threat to Windows than Mac OS X. That same month, Microsoft began actively recruiting a director of open source desktop strategy, a position whose responsibilities will include “influencing multimillion dollar marketing campaigns.”

Let me explain.

An easier transition from XP than going to Vista or 7.

When choosing Linux, one can retain any proprietary operating system and or application  via the use of Virtualbox, virtual machine

It booted like a real OS, with the familiar GUI of Windows XP and its predecessors and of the Mac OS: icons for disks and folders, a standard menu structure, and built-in support for common hardware such as networks, printers, and DVD burners.

Yes, I know that a running virtual machine is not a real PC, with all the variables per PC model that can make Linux not work on some models. But that’s beside the point.

Dell and others offer Linux-equipped PCs if you want that assurance. If you have a standard desktop configuration in your business, you’ll find out quickly if it’s Linux-compatible.

I was struck by how XP-like Ubuntu is. And that’s a good thing. It took me very little time to find where standard functions are, given the similarities. In fact, it’s a much easier transition. The menu structure is clear and not hidden. There’s none of the “I’m so complex I must hide myself in gewgaws” nonsense that Microsoft has convinced itself, in Vista and Windows 7, makes a good UI but in fact further complicates an already hodgepodge user interface. (Gluing feathers on a platypus won’t make it fly.) Users can get to work without guessing what Microsoft thinks they ought to do.

Adding Hewlett-Packard and Brother network printers was trivial — easier than in Windows and about the same as on the Mac. But I did have to install drivers for the Brother’s fax and scanner capabilities, and these required command-line installation via the Terminal. Using an external USB media card drive was also no biggie; Ubuntu detected both the drive and the SD card I inserted, saw it contained photos, and asked to launch a photo management app. You can expect to come across compatibility issues with more exotic hardware, but most business PCs don’t typically include that class of consumer-oriented gear.

Well-suited for office workers, but not specialty users
After basic compatibility with PC hardware, the big criticism of desktop Linux is the state of its apps. There’s good news and bad news here. Ubuntu comes with the Mozilla Firefox Web browser and the Evolution Mail client pre-installed, as well as OpenOffice.org’s office productivity suite.

Firefox is my preferred browser, but if you depend on ActiveX controls for your company’s Web apps (which you should not in this multibrowser, multiplatform world), the lack of Internet Explorer could be a deal killer. The Evolution Mail client is fantastic; it easily connects to Exchange Server for mail, calendar, and contacts, using LDAP and Outlook Web Access. The UI is similar to Outlook’s but simpler. And in a move that should shame Microsoft, the Evolution Mail client is more compatible with Exchange than is Microsoft’s Mac client, Entourage. (One example: I could set an away notice, which I cannot do with Entourage.) You can also run Mozilla Thunderbird if you’re POP-oriented, though Evolution Mail also supports POP and IMAP.

OpenOffice is a sound alternative to Microsoft Office, but I spent most of my time with the free IBM Lotus Symphony, which is a slightly better productivity suite than OpenOffice, in the InfoWorld Test Center’s evaluation. It’s simply more refined and will be easier for Office users to adapt to, even though it lacks the database and drawing applications that OpenOffice has. I’m sure there are features in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that Symphony and OpenOffice can’t match, but you can bet that for 80 percent or more of your “knowledge workers,” sales staff, and so on that Symphony or OpenOffice will do the job.

Adobe has made its Reader, AIR, and Flash Player apps available as well, so you can work with PDF files, AIR apps, and Flash media just as Windows and Mac users can. In addition to Symphony, IBM offers a Linux version of Lotus Notes.

All these apps work very much like they do in XP, so your users will need just an hour or two to adjust to accessing them on desktop Linux. Seriously.

Ubuntu has a handy utility to add and remove a broad selection of free Linux apps, from FTP clients to graphics editors, so you don’t have to hunt for them. (But the Adobe and IBM apps aren’t in it, so it’s not complete.) These apps self-install, so you don’t have to switch to the Terminal and use sudo privileges and other arcane commands to install them. Sure, IT techs can manage this, but not your users.

I’m disappointed that Cisco’s VPN client, which my company uses, has the kind of install that gives desktop Linux a bad rep. You have to know basic Linux commands to navigate to the files in the Terminal, use sudo to get admin privileges, and follow the convoluted install script. As is common with these Terminal-installed apps, there’s little documentation, and the Web is full of contradictory and inaccurate instructions on how to install them. Cisco dissuades end-users from getting information at its site, so even after I procured a copy of its VPN client software, I couldn’t find reliable instructions for installing it, so I gave up after 40 minutes. I had similar problems installing Parallels Desktop’s UI tools into Linux. VMware Fusion uses a Terminal script, but the program runs it for you when you first install Linux, so that’s less of an issue. (Note that neither product supports cut and paste between Linux and the Mac, as they do with Windows.)

Let’s face it: The app selection for desktop Linux — especially those designed for regular folks — is very thin. You won’t find BI tools, database apps, media creation apps, and so on, as you would for Windows or the Mac. If you think the Mac has too few apps to be used in business, you’ll downright dismiss desktop Linux.

A successful migration to Linux on the business desktop therefore depends almost entirely upon the ability of the organization in question to weather the disruption that will inevitably result. For some, the pain may be minimal; for example, organizations that conduct most of their business using standards-based Web applications may have little trouble making the transition to Linux. Companies that rely heavily on proprietary products such as Microsoft SharePoint or Exchange, however, will find it difficult or even impossible to switch without major adjustments to business processes.

The cost issue: “Free” Linux isn’t the whole story
Having weighed all that, then, a potential desktop Linux customer’s second question — how much money will I save? — can often be simplified even further: Will it be worth it?

Answering this question, however, can be incredibly difficult. The factors involved in calculating TCO (total cost of ownership) for an entire desktop OS environment, applications and all, are so numerous and complex that you might as well read tea leaves.

Just knowing when to switch can be tricky. Jumping ship to desktop Linux often means abandoning proprietary software licenses that have already been paid for. Depending on where an organization is in its normal upgrade cycle, that license issue could represent a significant hidden short-term cost.

Once the switch to open source is complete, the days of paying license fees will be over, but most enterprise customers will still want to pay for a support contract. How effective such support is at responding to any issues that may arise will determine how much those issues impact productivity — and, by extension, the business’s bottom line.

Some customers may prefer to do a “soft launch” — switching some PCs to Linux while leaving Windows on others, for example, or using virtualization software to run key Windows applications. But this kind of hybrid environment requires IT to manage two OSes at the same time — including user support, software updates, security, backups, and interoperability between the systems. And that drives up costs.

At the end of the day, on a per-head basis, the amount an enterprise spends on proprietary software licenses is insignificant compared to the amount it spends on salaries, health care, phone bills, travel, retirement plans, and other benefits. For a cash-strapped company in a down economy, Windows may be the least of its worries. The harsh reality is that, from an operations perspective, it may be much simpler and safer to cut costs by reducing staff than to implement a radical and disruptive enterprise-wide IT initiative.

Does desktop Linux matter? Here’s how it might
Far from it being a simple case of FUD clouding the waters, the issues surrounding Linux’s failure to achieve mainstream success on the desktop are complex, far-reaching, and diverse. It’s such a thorny problem, in fact, that the chance of Linux taking Windows’ place on the enterprise desktop is virtually nil.

But maybe it doesn’t need to be.

Computing today is in a state of flux. The proliferation of broadband Internet access has made possible new modes of operation that were unthinkable even a decade ago. Increasingly, traditional desktop applications are migrating to the Web, and the rise of cloud computing means their data is going with them. Soon, typical computer users may be able to work almost entirely online, using nothing but a Web browser.

That’s great news for Linux — today’s desktop Linux distributions offer browsers already. But the issue is actually bigger than that. As Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation put it at the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, “It’s time to start asking yourselves: What is the desktop?”

There is the beta Wine app that runs many Windows apps, giving desktop Linux wider reach, as well as the commercial CrossOver version from CodeWeavers. But the list of supported Windows apps is not huge. Moreover, supported versions are often one or more iterations behind what’s currently available. But Microsoft Office, Project, and Visio 2003 are all on the list, as are Internet Explorer 6 and Intuit QuickBooks. I tried to install three unsupported apps — Adobe Acrobat Pro 9, Adobe Photoshop CS4, and H&R Block TaxCut 2008 — but had poor results. Acrobat 9 managed to install, but the license confirmation dialog box would not close, so I could never use the software. CrossOver claimed to install Photoshop, but it did not. And it couldn’t install TaxCut. So don’t count on Wine or CrossOver for more than Microsoft Office and supported apps.

Also, though synchronization for Palm devices (as if they matter anymore) is included in Ubuntu, you can’t sync to an iPhone, Windows Mobile device, or other handheld — even though these are increasingly commonplace in business. But Ubuntu can access an iPod’s or iPhone’s photos as if it were a digital camera. (There are hacks out there to support some of these devices for data and music syncing, but IT doesn’t want to rely on hacks.)

Essentially, desktop Linux makes sense as the desktop OS only for those employees who do common work in Office and Web apps. But that’s a lot of people.

Solving some of IT’s control issues
Desktop Linux’s app limitations mean that you’ll still need Windows PC or Macs for users who require specialty apps. But they also provide an easy way to assert control over the desktops you manage.

Think about it: Most of your malware worries go away, as does the constant effort to stay up with the latest anti-malware patches. You don’t need to worry about users installing games, iTunes, or spyware — those are designed for Windows (and sometimes the Mac) — so the need to monitor rogue apps is greatly reduced.

Of course, you won’t have the same kind of central system management options that you do for Windows PCs. So you’ll need to rely on your Linux distro’s update manager, as well as your apps. This automated, client-level approach is also standard on Windows and Mac OS, even though many IT organizations don’t like it and instead want to validate and apply such patches centrally. The more control you want, the less you’ll like desktop Linux (just as you probably don’t like the Mac).

But desktop Linux does support basic Active Directory authentication for user access management.

I’m not suggesting every organization chuck its Windows or Mac OSes for desktop Linux. But many companies, government agencies, and educational institutions can chuck at least some of them. Those based on XP — or Windows 2000, which still has a huge installed base in government agencies — can look to big savings on licensing, hardware, and training costs.

Desktop Linux and its core productivity apps are solid and worth serious consideration for many of your users’ PCs. Try it yourself.

Pwn2Own – What browser and OS are the safest to use?

Pwn2Own is a computer hacking contest held at the annual CanSecWest security conference, beginning in 2007. Contestants are challenged to exploit specific software (especially web browsers and other web related software) / computing platform targets. Contestant winners receive the device/computer that was successfully exploited and a cash prize.

For each successful exploit, the contest’s sponsor, TippingPoint, provides a report to the applicable vendor, detailing the vulnerability and how it was exploited. The details are not released to the public until the vendor has corrected the vulnerability.

Summary: The results of pwn2own is definately a major factor in choosing a browser. The winner was Google Chrome due to its implementation of each tab being sand-boxed from the operating system.

The Competition started at March 24, 2010 and had a total cash prize pool of $100,000. On March 15—nine days before the contest was to begin—Apple released sixteen patches for WebKit and Safari.

Software to exploit

$40 000 of the $100 000 are reserved for web browsers, where each target is worth $10,000.

Day 1

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7
• Mozilla Firefox 3.6 on Windows 7
• Google Chrome 4 on Windows 7
• Apple Safari 4 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Day 2

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista
• Mozilla Firefox 3 on Windows Vista
• Google Chrome 4 on Windows Vista
• Apple Safari 4 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Day 3

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP
• Mozilla Firefox 3 on Windows XP
• Google Chrome 4 on Windows XP
• Apple Safari 4 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Target: Mobile Phones

$60,000 of the total $100,000 cash prize pool is allotted to the mobile phone portion of the contest, each target is worth $15,000.

• Apple iPhone 3GS
• RIM BlackBerry Bold 9700
• Nokia E72 device running Symbian
• HTC Nexus One running Android

Successful exploit

• Charlie Miller successfully hacked Safari 4 on the Mac OS X.
• Peter Vreugdenhil exploited Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 by using two vulnerabilities that involved bypassing ASLR and evading DEP.
• Nils hacked Firefox 3.6 on Windows 7 64-bit by using a memory corruption vulnerability and bypass ASLR and DEP. Mozilla patched the security flaw in Firefox 3.6.3.
• Ralf Philipp Weinman and Vincenzo Iozzo hacked the iPhone 3GS by bypassing the digital code signatures used on the iPhone to verify that the code in memory is from Apple.

It is interesting to see how different companies approached this event:

Mozilla acknowledged the bug, fixed it in 10 days, publicly announced it as critical, and fixed it in a previous version just in case .

Microsoft made a public statement saying that it will be fixed, and that’s all folks, at least for now.

Apple with Safari is all secrecy.

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 can read your iPhone’s secrets