Office 2010 hits store shelves today

Office 2010 is out. Officially.

If you have an order in with Amazon, it should arrive today.

I’ll have an article in Windows Secrets Newsletter tomorrow that talks about the cheapest ways to buy Office 2010. You might want to wait…

AT&T leaks 114,000 “early adopter” iPad 3G users’ email addresses

Rather embarrassing, and there’s a lot of finger pointing.

As best I can tell, the story broke on Gawker:

The breach… exposed the most exclusive email list on the planet, a collection of early-adopter iPad 3G subscribers that includes thousands of A-listers in finance, politics and media, from New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson to Diane Sawyer of ABC News to film mogul Harvey Weinstein to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It even appears that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s information was compromised.

Gawker credits Goatse Security with the find.

Goatse Security obtained its data through a script on AT&T’s website, accessible to anyone on the internet. When provided with an ICC-ID as part of an HTTP request, the script would return the associated email address, in what was apparently intended to be an AJAX-style response within a Web application. The security researchers were able to guess a large swath of ICC IDs by looking at known iPad 3G ICC IDs, some of which are shown in pictures posted by gadget enthusiasts to Flickr and other internet sites…

Good one, AT&T.

A peek at Office 15

You’re worried about Office 2010, and Microsoft’s already hard at work on Office 2013, a.k.a. Office 15.

Details on my InfoWorld blog.

Get Office 2010 cheap – but you have to act NOW

This just posted on my InfoWorld blog:

Save money on Office 2010 by first upgrading to 2007

If you have Office 2003 Ultimate and you want to upgrade to Office 2010 Pro, there’s a trick that’ll save you two hundred bucks – but you need to do it now, while the boxes are still available. Well worth reading.

MS-DEFCON 2: The big batch of patches is out – WAIT!

As expected, Microsoft released 10 security bulletins, covering 34 individually identified security holes.

SANS Internet Storm Center reports that there are no known exploits for the patched holes – at least none that matter.

One of the patches, MS10-035, is yet another massive update to Internet Explorer. Another, MS10-041, patches Microsoft’s .NET Framework. Teh ActiveX killbit patch, MS10-034, also applies primarily to IE. Traditionally, both IE and .NET patches have provided all sorts of surprises.

If you still have Office XP, applying the patches won’t solve all the problems. Office XP users will, at some point, have to go to KB 983235 and manually apply yet another patch. Don’t do it yet, though. Wait for the all-clear.

Keep Automatic Updates turned off. Wait for the other guys to start reporting the problems.

 

Ballmer: Microsoft lost “thousands of man hours of innovation” on Vista

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft admits that Microsoft lost “thousands of man hours of innovation” on Windows Vista.

Read more about it on this ZDNet Blog:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/ballmer-microsoft-lost-thousands-of-man-hours-of-innovation-on-vista/8361

MS-DEFCON 2: Don’t apply any patches, at least on 64-bit Win7 systems

See my previous post about KB 980408.

Bottom line: MS screwed up again. I’m moving us up to MS-DEFCON 2: Patch reliability is unclear. Unless you have an immediate, pressing need to install a specific patch, don’t do it.

I would’ve moved up anyway because this Tuesday’s round of patches is going to be horrendous. Check and make sure you don’t have Automatic Updates turned on.

KB 980408 won’t let you rename folders on 64-bit Windows 7 systems

They did it again.

Microsoft released KB 980408, the “stability and reliability update” for Windows 7 as part of the “Second Tuesday” round of miscellaneous patches.

Many people are reporting that, after installing on 64-bit Win7 systems, they can’t re-name folders.

Apparently there’s a workaround that works, which involves editing the Registry.

Microsoft’s quality control on Second Tuesday patches really sucks. That’s a technical term. Because of this massive screw-up, I’m moving us up to MS-DEFCON 2. See my next post.