Sophos intends to buy Utimaco. Until then, Sophos will resell SafeGuard Enterprise and they now have a mutual referral agreement for all products from both companies. Utimaco will become a new business unit focused on data security and the SafeGuard brand will be retained.
From the customer announcement email:
Our future direction integrates information control and security compliance with existing anti-malware infrastructure to make security more manageable, and merging with the market leader in mobile data security provides a strong foundation for growth and leadership.
This afternoon on my MacBook Pro, Mail and Safari were acting screwy. Safari would give me a beach ball when I tried to fill out a form on Amazon and Mail would give me a beach ball when it did an address look up when I typed someone’s name in the To: field. I tried to open Address Book, but it wouldn’t open, instead giving me a “not responding” status immediately in the Force Quit Applications window.
Not having the skills or time to really find out what was going on, I popped open Cocktail and repaired the disk permissions and left to run some errands. I came back 3 hours later, glanced at the Cocktail log and opened a new email. When I typed a name into the address field, it did the look up (I could see the spinner working) and then stopped, not having found the name. This time I was able to open Address Book to see that everything was gone. All my contacts. Thousands of them. Gone. I visited the MobileMe page, naturally, the contacts were gone there too. I then opened my iPhone to turn off syncing before it got wiped - too late. Since I didn’t find the problem before SuperDuper made my daily backup, it looks I have lost my most recent changes, but luckily nearly everything is saved in my Daylite database so this isn’t critical - just a huge pain in the ass.
I had been reading headlines about the MobileMe problems, but never suffered any until this afternoon. I was a .Mac customer before solely for the convenience of the iDisk to backup a small amount of critical data so Apple won’t lose any of my money, but I have turned off over-the-air sync and don’t plan to turn it on until 2010 or so. If my contacts got wiped from my phone while I was on the road I would be crippled. Nope, can’t take that chance.
When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.
Some distrust science because it seems to overturn itself and prove itself wrong. This is really a manifestation of its strength. Science is a free market of ideas and observations. Anything that doesn’t reflect reality is eliminated while the real stuff gets refined and improved (moving toward the center of this diagram) but never becomes dogma. There is always room for doubt.
Richard Feynman gave this talk on the value of science over 50 years ago. It’s full of wisdom from a brilliant man.
If we take everything into account — not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn’t know — then I think we must frankly admit that we do not know.
All scientific progress came as a result of doubting existing “knowledge”. To make progress, we have to “recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt”.
Apple just launched K-12 on iTunes U(opens iTunes) that allows schools to use iTunes as a platform to distribute educational content. Not quite sure why a school would find this easier than just posting the stuff on the web, but I do know Apple would love to get all those students spending even more time in iTunes.
Some interesting new research out of ETH Zürich showed that Firefox’s Auto-Update mechanism works the best at keeping users updated with the latest and safest version compared to all other major browsers. The report, Understanding the web browser threat, used Google’s browser data from the last 18 months to figure out a lower bound on the amount of users that surf the internet using an outdated browser. It turns out that at least 45.2%, or 637 million users, were not using the most secure Web browser version on any working day from January 2007 to June 2008.
To improve this number, the paper suggests the following:
browser vendors follow Mozilla’s lead and implement an auto-update mechanism that checks for updates each time the browser is used
consumers implement URL filtering to reduce odds of visiting an infected website
implement a “best by” dating system for software similar to what consumers are familiar with when they shop for groceries. This is supposed to increase awareness of the risk of outdated browsers and motivate users to update.
someone implement an authentic, open repository of plugin version information that can be queried by vendors to make sure browser plugins are updated regularly
I don’t like the “best by” idea. A little red notice that states “145 days expired, 3 patches missed” isn’t much different from the existing software update schemes. Trying to raise awareness for the sake of awareness is futile. Outdated software alone doesn’t cause loss and discomfort like spoiled produce does so consumers won’t be motivated to pay attention to the “best by” date.
