Bartz Chosen as Yahoo CEO

by Nathaniel Ed on January 13th, 2009 at 6:55 pm EDT - 1,467 views

“There is no denying that Yahoo has faced enormous challenges over the last year, but I believe there is now an extraordinary opportunity to create value for our shareholders and new possibilities for our customers, partners and employees. We will seize that opportunity.” says the new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz former chief executive of AutoDesk.

Carol Bartz was named CEO of Yahoo today after much anticipation since Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang announced that he would step down in November. Yang was critisized greatly due to failed negotiations of a merger with Microsoft.

Bartz appointment could lead back to talks with Microsoft, who has stated that it is no longer interested in acquiring all of Yahoo, but is still very interested in buying Yahoo’s search engine.

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New Yahoo CEO Could Be Appointed Soon

by Nathaniel Ed on January 12th, 2009 at 6:58 pm EDT - 291 views

The Facts

The shoes of Yahoo’s CEO could be filled within days! The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo’s search for a top dog is coming to an end. There has been great speculation as to who will fill this position. Speculators have risen guesses as to who will fill this position, such as Carol Bartz, who was formerly the executive officer of software company Autodesk (according to the Wall Street Journal) or Yahoo president Sue Decker. Naming Decker as CEO could fare well for a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo! since she’s more familiar with the company.

My thoughts

I’m not sure if I want Microsoft to take over Yahoo or not. Yahoo is one of the most visited, if not the most visited site on the internet (Google would be a close competitor), and this would give Microsoft huge amounts of power. I hate seeing companies get too cocky about their products. We’ve already seen what Microsoft is capable of when it’s cocky (*cough*Vista*cough*), and I would really hate to see Windows 7 turn into another epic failure by Microsoft.

Source: Cnet
Picture courtesy of Yahoo!

Follow-up on IE Security Breach

by Taylor Flatt on December 22nd, 2008 at 1:47 pm EDT - 197 views

Microsoft has finally started giving insight of this bug that has actually been present for 9 years.  Microsoft said that the error was one that was never tested for.  Although they know of such bugs, they haven’t been training their staff to handle such issues which has essentially caused this major panic.  

To find the bug and to test for ones like this, which are called TOCTOU bugs (Memory errors), they had to use “fuzzers”.  These fuzzers would test out the software by dumping information into various parts and try to trigger a bug.  Since they didn’t have a fuzzer for TOCTOU errors, there was no way to find it.  The bug was not only present in recent browsers, but was traced all the way back to IE 5 (1999).  Micheal Howard, principal security manager at Microsoft had this to say about the bug,

“In theory, fuzz testing could find this bug, but today there is no fuzz test case for this code,” he said. “Triggering the bug would require a fuzzing tool that builds data streams with multiple data binding constructs with the same identifier. Random (or dumb) fuzzing payloads of this data type would probably not trigger the bug, however.”

Basically what he is saying here is that they had no idea an error existed and that there was really no way to test for it until people began to exploit it.

Although Microsoft was able to provide countermeasures to the folks using Vista, they could not, however, provide such countermeasures to those using Windows XP (which is out used 3:1 compared to Vista).  This was a tragic flaw that in the future, we hope they will be able to spot such bugs and not allow those within the program.  The bug could have been worse, but me being a Chrome/Firefox user, am thankful that I stopped using IE a long time ago.

What did you do when you hear this news?

Source: ComputerWorld

Microsoft Grants XP Longer Life

by Taylor Flatt on December 22nd, 2008 at 12:26 pm EDT - 278 views

Microsoft has seen the light and has given distributers a longer time to ship XP.  However, they still have to buy the licenses before the January 31st date, they can now ship through May 30th.  Microsoft has changed their shipping dates for XP 4 times since the release of Vista, which has plagued them with bad press and bugs since the beginning.  With this extension, XP has now become the longest “living” operating system just before Windows 95.

With all the growing disconent with Vista, XP has become the golden boy of Microsoft that they seem to not want.  With Windows 7 coming out in the next year or two, they are hoping to finally shelve both products and release a decent product.  Even though this could happen, I am still skeptical when it comes to Microsoft.  Not only do they rush things, but they sometimes release prematuraly which causes problems for everyone (Remember Sony’s PS3?).

I am just like everyone when it comes to hoping they put out a good system come release.  But with all the people switching to Mac, I don’t believe MS will get near the numbers it is wanting and might deam this product a failure as well.

Source: TGDaily