I wish I knew more about this stuff. I really ought to cobble together a server and try some of these things out.

Which search product is right for you?

Compare Microsoft's enterprise search products using the table below. Click on the product features to learn more about them.

Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express
Microsoft Search Server 2008
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007*

Product Features:

Search Center
No Pre-set Document Limits
Extensible Search Experience
Relevance Tuning
Continuous Propagation Indexing
Federated Search Connectors
Indexing Connectors
Security-trimmed Results
Unified Administration Dashboard
Query and Results Reporting
Streamlined Installation
High Availability and Load Balancing
People and Expertise Searching
Business Data Catalog
SharePoint Productivity Infrastructure

Looking at Microsoft Expression Studio and Silverlight, it seems to ME at least that Microsoft is taking careful aim at the entire line of Adobe products as they relate to web development specifically.

...up until now, Adobe has had a free hand at the wheel with their visions of the future regarding Rich Internet Application development.

Those days are over, methinks.

Expression Studio includes:

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Expression Web

Microsoft® Expression® Web is a professional design tool to create modern, standards-based sites that deliver superior quality on the Web.

(This is the product that Front Page evolved into)

Standards-based Web Sites
Create CSS-based, XHTML 1.0 Transitional-conforming Web sites by default. Work better across browsers, simplifying deployment and maintenance. Configure flexible schema settings to support all combinations of HTML, XHTML, Strict, Transitional, Frameset and CSS 1.0, 2.0, and 2.1 plus browser-specific schemas. Validate your site with compatibility and accessibility reporting and against Section 508 and W3C Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

CSS Based Layout
Generate elegant, modern CSS layouts with state-of-the-art surface design tools. Directly manipulate positioning, sizing, margins and padding. A sophisticated CSS rendering engine inside gives you the confidence to make design decisions on the fly. Try out CSS styles on the page with drag-and-drop style management, and migrate them to a central repository. Typing aids and IntelliSense® in the Code View make your process efficient and fast.

Rich Data Presentation
Build and format views of industry-standard XML data using drag-and-drop tools for quick visualization. An XPath Expression Builder allows you to create complex queries, and XSL Transform (XSLT) support gives you the flexibility to present data any way you want. XML data can be retrieved and presented via live RSS feeds that match your site's formatting.

Powerful Server Technology
Harness the power of ASP.NET 2.0 to transform your sites into dynamic, interactive Web applications. No code data binding required with integrated support for server and user controls. Inserting and configuring ASP.NET controls is a snap with the controls toolbox, properties grid, and on-control "action menus." ASP.NET Master Pages make site-wide changes quick and easy.

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Expression Blend

Microsoft® Expression Blend™ is the professional design tool to create engaging web-connected experiences for Windows.

Efficient Collaboration
Work together in a friction-free environment, sharing projects, code, and designs for better productivity and quality. Quickly build stunning prototypes, and then turn them over to developers with confidence. Your designs can be used intact in the final product so you keep creative control. Developers no longer have to try to recreate them; play the hero and rid the world of "developer art." Open existing Visual Studio projects to re-design and re-skin the applications.

Tools for Creativity
Expression Blend opens the door to creating elegant and compelling user interface designs using a full spectrum of media types, including vector and pixel art, video, audio, text, 3D content, and animation. Work inside a rich, real-time design environment optimized for creative professionals to shorten the distance between idea and execution.

Codeless Interactivity
Add interactivity to your designs without writing code-just add fully customizable controls, from simply-styled buttons to sophisticated custom listviews. Easily connect interface elements to each other or to live data. Layout interfaces using containers that adapt your content and interface to various screen resolutions and form factors. Just drag and drop to add developer-written custom code or controls to your application.

Deliver Better Experiences
Deliver applications that are more usable and achieve greater end-user satisfaction and productivity. Leverage the full power of the desktop and Internet to provide your audience with big-impact, high-performance user experiences that drive brand recognition and repeat use. Easily create localizable and accessible applications for global audiences.

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Expression Design

Microsoft® Expression® Design is a professional illustration and graphic design tool that lets you build compelling elements for both Web and desktop application user interfaces.

Flexible Vector Drawing
Use Expression Design's powerful vector drawing and editing tools to explore new artistic possibilities and create compelling graphic designs and illustrations. Integrate your vector artwork and bitmap images in the same document to create hybrid compositions.

Dynamic Live Effects
Take advantage of Live Effects to apply high-quality effects and filters such as Bevel, Emboss, and Gaussian Blur to any vector or bitmapped object. Then change the effect, or change the object, with the confidence that Live Effects are always non-destructive and fully editable.

Expanded Workflow
Bring your existing vector-based artwork from other popular graphic tools into Expression Design along with JPEG, PNG, and GIF bitmap files. Then export in a wide variety of formats, including XAML code that you can easily use when building next-generation software with Expression Blend. Or seamlessly copy and paste your images into Microsoft Office while preserving transparency.

Innovative Design Environment
Deliver applications that are more usable and achieve greater end-user satisfaction and productivity. Leverage the full power of the desktop and Internet to provide your audience with big-impact, high-performance user experiences that drive brand recognition and repeat use. Easily create localizable and accessible applications for global audiences.

---

Expression Media

Microsoft® Expression® Media is a professional asset management tool to visually catalog and organize all your digital assets for effortless retrieval and presentation.

Effortless Organization
Make digital asset management easy—just drag and drop to import more than 100 different media formats, including digital RAW files. Start working with your files right away, while Expression Media quickly creates full-screen previews. Store your files anywhere: shared folders, CDs, hard drives, or DVDs; and use integrated search tools to find them in seconds. Wherever they are, Expression Media will keep track of them all. Even when your originals are offline, visual catalogs allow you to browse, search, and annotate your assets.

Seamless Workflow Integration
Stick with the workflow that works for you and Expression Media will fill in the gaps. Support for RAW formats from the most popular cameras and industry-standard metadata formats means that your metadata is already there. Keep keywords consistent with custom dictionaries—just drag and drop to quickly tag thousands of files. Rename an entire folder of files or change their format easily with batch conversion. Use flexible scripting tools to get tedious tasks out your way. Make sure all your precious digital assets are protected with built-in archiving and backup features.

Image and Video Editing
Save time by taking care of basic image editing tasks, like rotating, cropping, and resizing, from inside Expression Media. Color management profiles are preserved throughout. You can quickly adjust levels, sharpness, brightness, or color balance yourself. With Expression Encoder, re-encoding video is as easy as converting images. Apply filters or add watermark logos to your video files, or re-encode video for optimized playback on the Web or Windows Media™ handheld devices.

Professional Presentation
Impress your audience with slide shows, videos, and Web galleries. When it's time to deliver, Expression Media can export your assets in exactly the format and size your clients need, with dozens of professionally designed presentation templates. With Expression Encoder, you can convert and publish video to reach a broad, cross-platform audience.

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Expression Encoder

Microsoft® Expression® Encoder, a feature of Expression Media, offers encoding, enhancement, and publishing of rich media experiences to Microsoft Silverlight.

Flexible Encoding Workflows
Encode a wide array of file-based media content, including QuickTime, AVI, MPEG, WMV, and more using the designer friendly Expression-standard user interface. You can also control the Expression Encoder engine from the command line. Produce live webcasts with multiple live and file-based sources that can be mixed and switched in real-time for streaming and on-demand viewing.

Richer Media Enhancement
Customize your media assets to match your brand or target your audience. Add leaders and trailers, watermarks, crop, scale and trim. Add Metadata and enhance your content with chapter markers, event markers and captions.

Publish Perfect Experiences
Deliver high quality VC-1 encoded content wrapped in a Silverlight player template directly from Expression Encoder. Dial in your encoding settings, save every aspect of your Expression Encoder job as a preset and then take advantage of third party hardware acceleration to get the highest quality result in a hurry.

I didn't expect to read this today:

Secunia has found that the number of security bugs in the open source Red Hat Linux operating system and Firefox browsers far outstripped comparable products from Microsoft last year.

From VNUNET:

Microsoft is reminding IT managers that the scheduled 12 February rollout of Windows Server Update Service will include an automatic upgrade to Internet Explorer 7.

Companies wishing to remain with IE6 have been offered guidelines explaining how to prevent the automated update taking effect.

If the update service is configured automatically to approve Update Rollups, IE7 will be downloaded and installed to workers' PCs when the release becomes available.

IT administrators will need to disable the auto-approval rule before the deadline to prevent the download.

Microsoft claimed that the move was prompted by security concerns.

Many companies will choose to remain with IE6 as some web-based applications experience issues running with IE7.

From the Tech Blog over at the Houston Chronicle:

Remember how fast ME was swept under the rug? Think it might happen again with Vista?

Microsoft's executives insist the company listens to its customers. Many of those customers have indicated they'll skip Windows Vista and consider Windows 7 when it comes out.

Their wish is apparently Redmond's command.

Wolfgang Gruener at TG Daily says he's obtained a leaked road map for the next version of Windows, and it shows Microsoft has put the operating system on a faster track:

Several industry sources have confirmed to TG Daily that a very early version of Windows 7, previously code-named Blackcomb Vienna, already has been shipped to "key partners" as a "Milestone 1" (M1) code drop for validation purposes. A roadmap received by TG Daily indicates that the new operating system will be introduced in the second half of 2009.

From NEWSFACTOR.COM, by way of the InstaPundit

Publishing in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, the Stanford researchers have shown that by using silicon nanowires as the battery anode instead of today's graphite, the amount of lithium the anode can hold is extended tenfold.

Just as Macromedia is putting a nice polish on Flash Video Compression, Samsung puts the finishing touches on its new memory chips. Now the only the left to support a nifty Dick Tracey video watch or... video cell phone... is a little bit better bandwidth.

It's right around the corner boys and girls...

In the mean time, check out these new chips:

Samsung's new multi-chip (MCP) offers a combined capacity of 3.2 gigabits in a package only 1.4mm thick, the company says, promising a new generation of cell phones and mobile devices that can offer more services and faster Internet surfing.

Samsung Electronics Latest News about Samsung, the world's largest computer chip Latest News about Chip maker, said it has developed the world's first eight-die multi-chip (MCP) package technology for use in high capacity mobile devices.

Samsung said the new MCP solution offered a combined capacity of 3.2 gigabits in a package only 1.4mm thick, promising a new generation ofcell phones Latest News about cell phones and mobile devices offering more services and faster Internet surfing.

"The new eight-chip MCP is an extremely compact, high-capacity solution that is likely to trigger development of new next-generation mobile applications," Samsung said in a statement.

"It will provide much greater functionality in cell phones and other smart mobile devices, from movie videos to games as well as faster Internet access."

Samsung said the new MCP offered all the memory chips available for mobile products in a single 11mm x 14mm x 1.4mm package.

Earlier today, Samsung said it will invest 603.8 bln won in a 13th memory chip production line to encourage broader use of 90-nano chip technology and support the development of next-generation 80-nano technology.

I can't wait to see how they plan to implement this. I already use the internet as my primary research tool, but to imagine large portions of public libraries online thanks to a collusion between Google and Oxford University, Harvard, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library... It's like a dream come true.

Well... for geeks like me, anyway...

Google Turns a New Page in Library Project

Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, announced an agreement yesterday with Oxford University and some of the leading U.S. research libraries to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.

It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an ambitious Internet effort by various parties.

The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections.

Democracy and Information

Google, newly wealthy from its stock offering last summer, has agreed to underwrite the projects announced yesterday while also adding its own technical capabilities to the task of scanning and digitizing tens of thousands a pages a day at each library.

Although Google executives declined to comment on its technology or the cost of the undertaking, others involved estimate the figure at US$10 for each of the more than 15 million books and other documents covered in the agreements. Librarians involved predict that the project could take at least a decade.

Because the Google agreements are not exclusive, the agreements are almost certain to touch off a race with other major Internet search providers like Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) Latest News about Amazon.com, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Latest News about Microsoft and Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) Latest News about Yahoo. Like Google, they may seek the right to offer online access to library materials in return for selling advertising, while libraries would receive corporate help in digitizing their collections for their own institutional uses.

"Within two decades, most of the world's knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes, for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today," said Michael Keller, Stanford's head librarian.

The Google effort and others like it that are already under way, including projects by the Library of Congress to put selections of its best holdings online, are part of a trend that would potentially democratize access to information that has long been available to only a small and elite group of students and scholars.

On Monday night, the Library of Congress and a group of international libraries from the United States, Canada, Egypt, China and the Netherlands announced a new plan to create a publicly available digital archive of 1 million books on the Internet. The group said it planned to have 70,000 volumes online by next April.

Read the entire article for even more info...

From the recent conviction that handed down 9 year sentences recently to AOL spammers... to this new verdict that puts the hacker who broke into the Lowe's credit card database on ice for 9 years... it certainly looks as if the Government is finally getting serious about setting some precedents. It's about time. Crime is crime, and we need some clear defenitions as we enter the information age.

Lowe's Hardware Hacker Gets Nine Years

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - One of three Michigan men who hacked into the national computer system of Lowe's hardware stores and tried to steal customers' credit card information was sentenced Wednesday to nine years in federal prison.

The government said it is the longest prison term ever handed down in a computer crime case in the United States.

Brian Salcedo of Whitmore Lake, Mich., pleaded guilty in August to conspiracy and other hacking charges.

Salcedo's sentence, imposed by U.S. District Judge Lacy Thornburg, exceeds that given to the hacker Kevin Mitnick, who spent more than 5 1/2 years behind bars, according to a Justice Department (news - web sites) Web site that tracks cyber-crime prosecutions.

"I think the massive amount of potential loss that these defendants could have imposed was astounding, so that's what caused us to seek a substantial sentence against Mr. Salcedo," federal prosecutor Matthew Martens said.

Two other men are awaiting sentencing in the Lowe's case. One of them, Adam Timmins, became one of the first people convicted of "wardriving," in which hackers go around with an antenna, searching for vulnerable wireless Internet connections.

Prosecutors said the three men tapped into the wireless network of a Lowe's store in Southfield, Mich., used that connection to enter the chain's central computer system in North Wilkesboro, N.C., and installed a program to capture credit card information.

Lowe's officials said the men did not obtain any such information.

The case was prosecuted in Charlotte because it is home to an FBI cyber-crime task force.

Mitnick led the FBI on a three-year manhunt that ended in 1995 and is said to have cost companies millions of dollars by stealing their software and altering computer information. Victims included Motorola, Novell, Nokia and Sun Microsystems.

U.S. Justice Department computer intrusion cases: http://www.cybercrime.gov/cccases.html

I doubt that this will be a great blow to spammers around the world. I think it is a fruitless exercise, myself... but it is emotionally gratifying. I loved it when AOL raffled off the confiscated spammer's Porsche.

We will only be able to effectively battle this with better and more accountable architecture, protocols and accountability. I worry about the solution as much as the disease though, for with such control comes the opportunity to censor, to tax...

In the current day and age where the quality of information brokerage defines success and those who impede the flow of ideas become dead wood... I don't think that the world will suffer such a Pyrrhic victory.

A brother and sister who sent junk e-mail to millions of America Online customers were convicted Wednesday in the nation's first felony prosecution of Internet spam distributors.

Jurors recommended that Jeremy Jaynes be sentenced to nine years in prison and fined Jessica DeGroot $7,500 after convicting them of three counts each of sending e-mails with fraudulent and untraceable routing information.

Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore applauded the convictions and called Virginia's anti-spam law the toughest in America.

"Spam is a nuisance to millions of Americans, but it is also a major problem for businesses large and small because the thousands of unwanted e-mails create havoc as they attempt to conduct business," Kilgore said in a statement.

AOL recently opened their mail servers to other mail clients under their new "Open Mail Access" program. This will allow AOL users to use an IMAP capable mail client, such as Microsoft Outlook, to check their AOL mail. Also, they allow you to use AOL's SMTP servers to send mail from your favorite mail client, but it does require some reconfiguration.

AOL e-mail can be sent and received using other e-mail applications by setting up a connection to AOL's e-mail servers. Setting up access to the servers is relatively simple, and the settings are similar for most e-mail applications.

The incoming e-mail server is an IMAP server. You will need to ensure that your e-mail application supports the IMAP protocol and you will have to select IMAP at some point during the setup process.

The outgoing e-mail server is an SMTP server. The SMTP server requires authentication, and you will have to select this feature at some point during the setup process. Using an authenticated SMTP server means that in order to send e-mail you must log in the SMTP server with a user name and password. The user name and password are the same as your AOL screen name and password. In addition, you need to change the outgoing mail (SMTP) port number to 587.

Incoming e-mail server address: imap.aol.com.

Outgoing e-mail server address: smtp.aol.com.

No, I am not talking about the Sun Protection Factor that you are used to seeing when you pick out your Coppertone or Bullfrog at the beach. I am talking about Sender Policy Framework, one of the latest efforts to help protect you from Unsolicited Commercial Email.

What is Sender Policy Framework? Let's go to the source:

SPF fights email address forgery and makes it easier to identify spams, worms, and viruses. Domain owners identify sending mail servers in DNS. SMTP receivers verify the envelope sender address against this information, and can distinguish legitimate mail from spam before any message data is transmitted.

They give a longer explanation on their website:

Have you ever gotten spam from yourself? I have, and I've been thinking hard about how to stop it! I didn't send it. It came from a spammer. If we could stop spammers from forging mail, we could easily tell spam from ham and block the bad stuff.

SPF makes it easy for a domain, whether it's an ISP, a business, a school or a vanity domain, to say, "I only send mail from these machines. If any other machine claims that I'm sending mail from there, they're lying."

When an AOL user sends mail to you, an email server that belongs to AOL connects to an email server that belongs to you. AOL uses SPF to publish the addresses of its email servers. When the message comes in, your email servers can tell if the server on the other end of the connection belongs to AOL or not.

And that's it! SPF aims to prevent spammers from ruining other people's reputations. If they want to send spam, they should at least do it under their own name.

And as a user, SPF can help you sort the good from the bad. Reject mail that fails an SPF check. Use it to help your spam filters make a decision. Have confidence that mail that SAYS it's coming from your bank, your credit card company, or the government really is!

If you do get spam that passed an SPF check, then you know you should hold the sending domain responsible for the message.

Want the short version?

It is sort of like "Caller ID" for e-mail, and whether we think that the SPF program is good, bad or somewhere in between... It is going to be in broad usage beginning October 1st, 2004. Already companies like AOL and Microsoft's HOTMAIL are implementing SPF records and using SPF as a spam testing tool for their clients.

I have my doubts as to its overall effectiveness, personally. Let's discuss how the program works before I explain them to you.

The SPF program starts by adding a special DNS record to your domain. The record is a "Text Record", something DNS servers have supported since the mid-eighties. (Most of you had not even heard of the internet back then)

This text record tells people what servers are authorized to send mail on behalf of that domain.

What good is that, you ask?

Well, when a mail server receives a piece of mail for a user, it looks at the "originating server" as well as who the mail is from. It looks up that SPF-Text record for the sending domain and compares it to the actual originating server. If the mail is from foo@foo.com then it looks up the SPF record for foo.com to see who is authorized to send mail. If the mail was actually sent by server.bogus.com, and that server is not listed in the SPF record, then it fails the test.

At first this sounds like a good idea. It could be a useful tool to detect all that spoofed-spam that pretends to be from one domain, but actually is not.

But...

What about the user who does not use their domain's authorized SMTP server? What if they are required to use their ISP's SMTP server?

Unless you use the SPF record like a huge whitelist, then those messages will fail the SPF test.

This is why I, as a system administrator, will implement these new SPF records so my users are not subject to the prejudice of overzealous mail admins around the world... but I will not weigh them heavily in my own spam tests. I refuse to use the SPF record as a huge whitelist, this is not the purpose of the DNS server, and I refuse to add large ISPs to the SPF record because their dynamic clients are the ones who send all that spam in the first place.

So. I'm sure that this will be an effective tool in the general sense, but I am also sure that unless some ISPs change their SMTP policies, we'll get false positives from this test, too.

By the time those ISPs are on board, I'm sure the spammers will have figured out how to spoof the originating server as well.

Moot point.

For those of you who do not know, I am a partner/owner of two companies. One of them is Advantage Services and focuses primarily on corporate network management, training, consultation and high-end web development. We are a small company, about 9 employees, and pride ourselves on what we call a "boutique" level of service. Our customers appreciate the human to human (here's my cell phone number, call me if you need anything) level relationship we have that you can't get from the larger companies.

Our hosting company, WDDX.NET, was founded on the same principles. We pay for rack space that sits on top of an OC-48 ring with three OC-12 redundant pipes backing it up. Of course, we share it with others, but you can almost reach out and touch the incoming fiber from where our servers sit. Even still, we only take care of a few hundred companies and e-mail accounts that are only approaching the tens of thousands.

Though we are small in the vast scheme of things it is still a lot of responsibility. That's why I was so bothered when I read that a Federal Appeals Court ruled that an e-mail provider did not break the law when they copied and read e-mail messages sent to customers through their servers...

Upholding a lower-court decision that the provider did not violate the Wiretap Act, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals set a precedent for e-mail service providers to legally read e-mail that passes through a network.

The court ruled (PDF) that because the provider copied and read the mail after it was in the company's computer system, the provider did not intercept the mail in transit and, therefore, did not violate the Wiretap Act.

This is heinous. When a customer calls and complains about not receiving e-mail, I can understand sending test messages to their account and then looking in their main.mbx to make sure that they arrived, but if this ruling is not overturned, that gives the ISP or Hosting Services company the right to really read anything they damn well please.

The court ruled that because the mail was already on Councilman's computer network when he accessed it, he didn't intercept it in transit and therefore was not guilty under the Wiretap Act. The court said the mail was in storage at that point and, therefore, was governed under the Stored Communications Act.

In a similar case in 1991, the U.S. Secret Service seized three computers belonging to a company called Steve Jackson Games. The company, in addition to producing fantasy books and games, hosted an online bulletin board for gamers to communicate with one another. An employee of the company was under suspicion for activities conducted outside work, but the Secret Service confiscated his employer's computers as well. The Secret Service accessed, read and deleted 162 e-mail messages that were stored on the computers used for the bulletin board.

So the deal is that as long as the mail is just sitting there, the ISP is only prosecutable under the terms of the Stored Communications Act. Fine and dandy, but service providers are exempt from the Stored Communications Act!

Granting e-mail providers the ability to read e-mail is equivalent to granting postal workers the right to open and read any mail while it's at a post office for sorting, but not while it's in transit between post offices or being hand-delivered to a recipient's home or business.

So what else is stored? Well, internet based backup solutions, for one. How about voice mail? Isn't that stored digitally somewhere?

In the end, in the absence of laws to preserve privacy, the best solution for e-mail users to protect their privacy is to use encryption. But until encryption for voicemail messages becomes common, you'll have to settle for talking in tongues.

And even that is a poor solution. I am a proponent of encryption technology, I think it is great. Even still, I don't think I have sent an encrypted e-mail this year, and can probably count how many times I sent one last year on one hand... and I am technologically savvy! In most cases, I can simply send a fax, pick up a phone and talk to someone or take care of things that require that level of security in person. In order for encryption to work, your recipient has to use the same kind of encryption technology that you do, and you have to exchange each other's public keys in order to make it work. Sorry, but the rest of the world is just not ready for the discipline required to make such a solution viable. Oh yeah, it will happen. Maybe Microsoft will buy PGP and build the technology into Outlook. But that day is not yet here.

As a personal note to my customers: beyond the boundaries of troubleshooting on your behalf and whatever business practices are morally acceptable (like seeing the mail that AOL sends us when they file a complaint about one of our customers) we will not read your mail. I find that reprehensible.

We wear white hats. We're the good guys.

Although a number of my peers are already testing and reviewing Windows XP Service Pack 2, I read yet another article about its upcoming release in August of this year.

I sent an e-mail to my technicians some time ago on the various new features that they could expect to contend with in the near future, some of them change the way you do business with the OS.

Allow me to share it with you...

• In retail boxes, Microsoft is enabling its revised Windows Firewall software firewall utility by default.
• Mainstream Web sites that employ unsigned ActiveX applets, downloads, pop-up windows, browser helper objects, and other code- or scripting-based functions may encounter difficulty with SP2 version IE 6.
• Internet Explorer's "Information Bar," which halts suspicious processes on a site-by-site basis, presenting options for defeating or selectively defeating IE's automatic protections
• One of the best new features of SP2's Internet Explorer is the Add-On Manager, available from the Internet Control Panel's Programs tab. It gives you a way to enable, disable, and configure ActiveX controls, browser help objects, and browser extensions.
• SP2 also provides a new Attachment Manager that works with Outlook Express, Windows Messenger, and Internet Explorer
• Internet Explorer has also been strengthened internally to thwart several specific exploits and plug a wide swatch of identified vulnerabilities.
• pop-up blocker
• Windows Security Center is a new Control Panel applet with system-tray notification whose sole purpose is to ensure that you're aware when your computer is not adequately protected by a firewall, antivirus software, and the latest Windows and IE updates.
• Microsoft makes the Automatic Updates critical security patch online updating tool more aggressive in Service Pack 2.
• Microsoft also is working on the 5.0 version of Windows Update, its Windows-updating Web site, which handles a lot more than just critical updates. It's primarily a user-interface update, but one of the underlying improvements is that you'll no longer be required to restart your computer so often after applying updates. Windows is now able to wait to install patches on the next restart. Windows Update also is now able to make incremental installs ("delta installation" in Microsoft parlance).
• Windows XP includes a new wireless LAN client that provides a much better interface designed to help you understand and work with both secured and unsecured wireless networks. There's also a new Wireless Network Setup Wizard that let's you add a wireless network to your system either with or without security.
• Microsoft has also added an enhanced Bluetooth networking stack in this service pack.

Culled from this article: Information Week

Over 500 people have been arrested what the Guardian Unlimited calls "begging letter" scams. If you have an e-mail address, chances are that you have received one the many incarnations of this scam at least once... Now, thanks to British Police and a 100+ man squad of Nigerian "untouchables", we might not see many of those letters in the future...

Excerpts from "Police swoop on Nigerian email fraud ringleaders"
by Conal Walsh of The Observer

...More than 500 suspected fraudsters have been arrested, and $500 million of assets seized, in an international crackdown on West African 'advance fee' fraud involving the City of London police...

...Most of the suspects have been arrested in Nigeria over the past month in an operation coordinated by the coun try's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, acting on intelligence from London and elsewhere...

...Under diplomatic pressure, Nigeria has also set up a 100-strong squad of 'untouchable' police officers devoted to rooting out the fraud...

...Those arrested in the past month are rumoured to include prominent Nigerian politicians, civil servants and lawyers, although this has not been confirmed by the prosecuting authorities....

Recently my Internet Explorer had been giving me lots of errors while surfing, errors that I have not been getting on my other workstations. I concluded that the spyware (which has been horrible lately, hasn't it been?) that seems to find its way in through pop-up ads and whatnot have damaged components of my browser...

I may use FireFox frequently, but as a developer and a manager of developers, I need a good, stable install of MSIE on my primary workstation.

A quick search on the Microsoft Knowledgebase revealed a solution that worked rather well for me. I change a single value in a registry key, and voila... XP doesn't know that MSIE is installed, and it lets me re-install the browser. Since I keep my IEAK up to date, I reinstalled from the up to date flat files I keep on a network share. Reboot, Windows Update, no more problems.

MS KB Article 318378

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\{89820200-ECBD-11cf-8B85-00AA005B4383}

Change "IsInstalled (REG_DWORD)" from 1 to 0.

Now you can reinstall the browser.

Removing Spyware

I use four tools to keep SpyWare off of my system:

• Ad-Aware
• Spybot Search and Destroy
• HiJack This
• CWS Shredder