From the Dark Side--Will M$ Monoculture Kill Global Computer Security?

1999–2004February 16, 2004Macs Only!Dark Side
Remember Dan Geer? He's the guy who was fired from his job as chief technology officer at @Stake, a computer security firm in Massachusetts, after a paper was published that he jointly wrote with other computer security experts warning about vulnerabilities due to Microsoft's OS monopoly and M$ integrating more and more of its software into its OS. One of @Stake's clients is M$ which claims there's no relationship to Geer's firing. His theory, called monoculture, is patterned after an ecosystem weakened through low biological diversity. Here is an AP article on how Geer and his theory are doing. [Dana Baggett]

-- Weekend, February 14-15 --

[Update 8a ET 2/15--Revised] Halo 1.0.4.1 Updater is Now Out and available for download via Versiontracker or MacGameFiles. 1.0.4.1 updates both version 1.0.3 and the defective 1.0.4. It's a 1.5 MB download while the defective 1.0.4 updater is a 800+ KB download. For some reason, as of this the time that this note was first posted, the defective 1.0.4 Updater was still posted on MacSoft's Halo Support web page. We applied the 1.0.4.1 updater to our defective 1.0.4 version and it fixed the Forward ("w") key problem of 1.0.4. The Mac Halo group is to be commended for getting out a working Mac version within 2 days of the PC version.

[Update 8a ET 2/15] AppleWorks File Utility is Out and available for download. We overlooked this one last week. According to Apple:

This utility is designed to fix AppleWorks documents that have become damaged when the documents are saved from AppleWorks 6 running on a Mac OS X 10.2.x client to an AppleShare or compatible file server.

Saw something? Send a tip

The archive ran on reader tips. What did you see, where, and do you want the credit?

Read by the editor. Never published without your say.

More in Dark Side · This month in the archive