(Thu Oct 11 2018 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) It's a brave new world. Consider a military warplane flying into battle, or a warship engaged in a sea battle, or a tank battle. In the past that military equipment was standalone, with communications limited to voices speaking over the radio. Now such equipment is connected in a digital communications network using the same technology as the Internet. A recent US Government Accountability Office report found these systems are vulnerable to attacks due to weak cybersecurity. One wonders if the result might be an airplane plummeting out of the sky, or a tank stopping in its tracks, or the guns on a warship going silent, during combat, because the adversary hacked into critical systems.
(Thu Oct 11 2018 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) As a software developer coming of age in the 1980s, Microsoft was the enemy. During the 1990s I worked for three companies that died or nearly died because Microsoft yawned and stretched its arms a little bit. Microsoft was brutal about dominating the PC market with its operating systems, and software developers chafed under their restrictions. But, something shifted, and over the last few years Microsoft got the open source religion. The various actions Microsoft has taken should make us all rethink labeling Microsoft as the enemy. Today Microsoft has pivoted its strategy around patents. Where Microsoft was formerly threatening the open source world with its patent pool, Microsoft has now joined the Open Invention Network, a multi-company patent pool that is protecting Linux.
(Tue Oct 09 2018 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) On Monday Google announced it was shutting down Google Plus following a review of the Google product line-up. Most of the news coverage is focusing on a bug that probably revealed user data. While that bug surely weighed on the decision, from the official blog post it is clear, irregardless of any bug, Google was going to pivot Google Plus to an Enterprise offering through the G Suite product line.
