HP and Palm – room for another phone OS?

You’ve probably heard that HP has offered to buy Palm for $ 1,200,000,000. Pending regulatory approval and some other hurdles, the deal should be consummated this summer.

John Fortt at Fortune has the best analysis I’ve seen:

Today, HP’s small portfolio of iPAQ business smartphones and handhelds runs Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS. Its soon-to-launch HP tablet computer runs Windows 7. Its DreamScreen digital picture frames run a homegrown flavor of Linux, and its netbooks come in both Windows 7 and Linux varieties. And its high-end calculators run another OS. Compare that to Apple, whose iPhones, iPads and iPod touches all run the same OS, and use the same app store.

So now we have iPhone and Android, both strong contenders. Then there’s Windows Mobile, which always struck me as a me-too, but then I’m biased. Now we have webOS getting the money, if not the recognition, it deserves. Is there room in the mobile market for four OSs?

Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances…

Write about an Apple product, get your house ransacked

Jason Chen, the head guy at Gizmodo, has made some very powerful enemies by writing about the iPhone 4G. Apparently, Gizmodo received a working prototype of the new iPhone under extenuating circumstances. Jason’s written about it, in spite of Apple’s heated objections.

Officers from the California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, using a court order issued by the Superior Court of San Mateo CA, broke into Jason’s house and took out four computers and two servers.

Makes you wonder about a lot of things, eh?

Jason’s account is on the Gizmodo site.

Microsoft re-issues one Black Tuesday patch; time to get updated

It looks like Microsoft has ironed the big-time problems out of its April Black Tuesday patches. Looks like it’s time to get all patched up.

Here are a few things to watch out for:

The documentation for the out-of-band Internet Explorer roll-up, MS10-018, KB 980182, is up to version 4.0. As far as I can tell, nobody’s getting clobbered by installing it. Of course, you use Firefox or Chrome, or anything other than Internet Explorer, so you weren’t on the bleeding edge anyway, but it looks like now’s a good time to apply the patch.

MS10-019 can produce a weird error if you try to sign a CAB file. If you don’t know why you would want to sign a CAB file, don’t worry about it. But if there’s a chance you might want to sign a CAB file, read the problem description and solution in KB 979309.

MS10-024 has a weird bug in the installer that may lead you to believe that you don’t need the patch, when in fact you do – and Windows Update will install it, just the way it should, in spite of what the installer says. There’s a very brief description in KB 976323. Susan Bradley has a much more thorough explanation in her Windows Secrets Newsletter Patch Watch column this week. If you suddenly can’t use your faxing software after installing this patch, take a look at GFI FAXmaker’s blog.

MS10-025 has been pulled, then re-issued, just today. There was a bug in the patch that kept it from working on some Windows 2000 Servers. Details on the MS Security Response Center blog.

Looks like we’re good to go. I’m moving us down to MS-DEFCON 4: There are isolated problems with current patches, but they are well-known and documented here. Check this site to see if you’re affected and if things look OK, go ahead and patch.

Yes, that means I feel that now’s a good time to apply ALL outstanding Microsoft patches, on ALL Windows PCs.

1,500,000 Facebook users can’t be wrong, can they?

The New Zealand Herald reports that the clown claiming to have 1,500,000 hacked Facebook accounts available for sale is working in Kiwiland.

Detectives from the National Cyber Crime Centre are investigating whether the hacker Kirllos is using New Zealand as a base to commit internet fraud.

Kirllos is offering the user names and passwords of 1.5 million Facebook users for between $35 and $62.70 per 1000 accounts sold on an underground hacker forum.

There are plenty of good reasons to be skeptical about Kirllos’s claims: Dancho Danchev has a good overview on the ZDNet blog. Still, it gives one pause.

How well does your AV software work?

Graham Cluley at Sophos has posted a chart taken from the Virus Bulletin 100 test.

The chart shows the results of a so-called RAP test: a “Reactive and Proactive” test that freezes an antivirus product on a specific date, then tests to see how well the software picked up old viruses – ones that existed before the cutoff date – and new viruses – ones that appeared after the cutoff date.

Virus Bulletin ran the RAP test on 60 antivirus packages, using Windows XP machines. The result: 40 out of the 60 packages were good enough to win the “VB 100 Award” – close enough to perfect that you can rely on them.

Take a look at the chart and tell me how the (FREE!) Microsoft Security Essentials fared, compared to your AV product. Oh, and did I mention that MSE is FREE?

Microsoft makes $4,000,000,000 in quarterly net profit

The Washington Post puts it succinctly:

At least the Xbox division (which includes the Zune and other entertainment products and devices) is no longer losing money, reporting $165 million in operating income on revenues of $1.7 billion. The online division cannot claim the same. Revenues were up 12 percent to $566 million, but It lost $713 million in operating income. That is about $300 million more than it was losing last year. That is okay, though, the $3 billion in operating income for the Windows division is up by $788 million from last year

Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 now available to MSDN subscribers

Just confirming that both Office 2010 Professional Plus (in 32 and 64 bit versions) and SharePoint Server 2010 (64 bit) are up on the MSDN site. If you know someone with an MSDN subscription, you can have them get the bits there.

You’ll have to buy a license, sooner or later, of course. But the “real” RTM version is now widely available. To MSDN subscribers, anyway.

Hotmail social networking shreds your privacy: get over it

You might’ve noticed that I haven’t been posting much in the past few days. Now you can find out why.

Windows Secrets Newsletter just hit the stands, and the lead article (from an author you may recognize) tells a sobering tale about how Microsoft pulls information about you from previously obscure sources, mashing it, and dishing it out to people you may not know.

My wife stumbled on the problem when she logged on to Hotmail a couple of days ago. That, in itself, is an interesting story, but it’ll wait until another day.

For now, if you have a Windows Live ID (hotmail address, Life Spaces account, whatever), run over to the Windows Secrets Newsletter Top Story page and see what you need to do in order to protect your privacy. Yes, you have to take this bull by the horns. No, Microsoft doesn’t give a hoot about your personal – potentially embarrassing – information.