The Weekly Round-Up: 31.10.03

Some people take data back-up very seriously. And for good reason too.

When the silicon.com offices were burgled some years ago and some of our servers pilfered, we had that heart-thumping moment when we wondered if we had a business anymore. Were the back-up tapes missing too?

Happily, when the tech team rolled casually into the office at 10:30 they produced the said tapes but not before company employees had spent a few hours gnawing their fingernails down to the bone.

Meanwhile, security intelligence company Bocada recently asked IT professionals to put the pain of losing corporate data into everyday terms.

Subjects were asked to rank their feelings toward the loss of various personal and professional items.

Seventy-eight per cent of respondents said they would be most upset by the loss of one of their customer information databases, compared to the loss of their wedding rings (36 per cent) or front row seats to a World Series game (32 per cent). (Yes, it was an American survey.)

Ninety per cent of those questioned said tracking and reporting on the performance of their corporate backup efforts is essential, yet the majority admitted sheepishly to resorting to manual or other crude methods to do this.

Moreover, faced with the prospect of tracking down 'sources of backup error and inefficiency', 16 per cent said they would prefer to chew tinfoil, 12 per cent would prefer to eat 'day-old sushi'.

Strangely, a further 20 per cent would rather shave their head with a cheese grater, which is surely much worse than chewing tin foil and eating a few dodgy morsels?

We live in civilised times. Relatively speaking.

Sit a Mac user and a Windows user in the same room and they will calmly and rationally debate most of the problems facing modern society.

Ask the same two people which company was responsible for pioneering the graphic user interface and kick-starting the personal computing revolution and they'll be at each other's throats quicker than you can say "Xerox PARC".

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates this week gave techies at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles a sneaky peak at Longhorn - the next version of the Windows operating system.

Seven thousand Windows developers took their first look at the new software went "Ooh" and "Ah" at many of the same features that made thousands of Mac developers go "Ooh" and "Ah" when Steve Jobs took the wraps off OS X some three years ago.

You see, Longhorn bears a passing resemblance to the look and feel of Apple's rival system - from round, shiny buttons to document windows that float and swish about the screen in a semi-transparent state.

Meanwhile, another new feature in Longhorn is a task bar that sits on the side of the desktop and holds a user's essential information - any similarity to OS X's dock bar is purely coincidental. Still, Microsoft made its billions repackaging existing technologies with its own populist panache so this really shouldn't come as that much of a surprise to operating system enthusiasts.

Of course, this is all old hat as the OS wars have been rumbling on for years.

Except this time round there seems to be an element of reciprocity from Apple. It seems the Mac maker has been taking a few leaves from the Microsoft R&D book because the company's OS is apparently riddled with security holes.

A report from security experts @stake has warned of a number of vulnerabilities in OS X 10.2 'Jaguar'.

Three advisories warned of "systemic" flaws in the way OS X handles file and directory permissions, kernel level vulnerabilities and buffer overflows (see here for more.) All things rather more familiar to Windows users than their Mac counterparts.

Meanwhile, security firm Secunia this week highlighted the existence of 13 security risks of a 'moderately critical' level in OS X.

Happily for Mac users - though not necessarily for their wallets - the vulnerabilities do not affect the latest version of the just-released new version of OS X 'Panther'.

Inevitably the system is a veritable Wonka-esque chocolate factory of eye candy.

This is the fourth major reiteration of OS X since its launch and is consistent with the company's plan to offer users a significant system upgrade each year.

So with Longhorn's launch date of 2006 being very lightly scribbled in soft 4B pencil in tech columnists' calendars, the real question is whether Apple can think of enough big cats to give code-names to each new iteration by the time Microsoft's offering hits the shelves.

Mac OS X code-name Ocelot anyone?

Still on the Microsoft-Apple theme, a worker at the Microsoft in-house print shop in Redmond was counting the cost of his pro-Mac blogging activity this week.

Michael Hanscom placed a photo of a lorry-load of brand new G5 Power Macs being delivered to the print shop on his blog. A few days later, someone at Microsoft got wind of the posting. The result was a P45 (or its US equivalent) for Hanscom.

The decision to dismiss Hanscom had nothing to do with the fact that the delivery comprised of Macs. After all, Microsoft has a Mac Business Unit dedicated to creating software for the rival platform - as it happens the Mac version of Office is particularly snazzy.

Rather, the decision to terminate his contract was made on the grounds that the location of the shipping-and-receiving depot could potentially be interpreted from the picture leading to a potential security risk - although it's nice to see the Redmond behemoth tackling security problems head-on.

Hanscom's taken the dismissal with remarkable good grace and admits he made a "slight misjudgement" in posting the picture.

Still, at least he'll have plenty of time to play with his new copy of Panther... And finally, a life-size, mechanical dog which breaks wind set off a major security alert at a US airport this week.

(Reasons as to why anyone would want a mechanical, life-size, farting dog on a virtual postcard to editorial@silicon.com please, because frankly it's got the Round-up stumped.)

Dave Rogerson of Leeds, England was stopped by some jumpy airport security staff at Norfolk Airport in Virginia when the 'dog' set off a security detector.

The thing's innovative parping mechanism registered as a 'high explosive' on the monitoring equipment.

Rogerson was grilled by the Feds as the dog's digital derrière was submitted to a series of humiliating swabs. Hey, no-one ever said being a security guard was going to be glamorous.

Although the dog was returned to its owner, he had to take an alternative route to his destination.

Rogerson told the BBC: "There's no humour at American check-ins..." - hmm, there's a pretty good reason for that Dave - "...and for about 20 minutes I was quite scared."

There's a lesson in there somewhere but the Round-Up is still too preoccupied trying to work out the rationale behind the creation of a wind-emitting mechanical dog to figure out what it is.

Can you top that? Probably not but let us know if you've ever been stopped by airport security for carrying a ludicrous piece of gadgetry in your hand luggage. The sillier the better.

Until next week, the Round-up will be chewing on some tin foil and pondering a homemade short-back-and-sides with a Parmesan grater.

In the meantime, check out the following stories from a week in IT and, please, make sure you back-up your data...

Web guru now China's richest man UK security 'most shameful in Europe'

First British Gas email bills hit inboxes

Ecommerce minister has 'too much energy' to focus on IT

California Dreamin' of an end to spam

Hackers preying on patching headache