May 2006 - Posts

Understanding E-mail Communications

Slashdot has a story / discussion regarding an article from the Christian Science Monitor on the topic of e-mail communications and why it is so easily misunderstood by the recipient. 

The bottom line is that email authors tend to assume that the reader will have the same biases and perspective.  This erroneous assumption raises the potential for every ambiguous phrase to lead the reader someplace the author wasn't going.

Their suggestion for avoiding this pitfall?  Pick up the phone and call instead.

Posted by jdevries with no comments

Rough Week in the Security Department

Microsoft has taken heat for many years about the number of security fixes released on a yearly basis.  In that same timeframe, Mac users felt immune to viruses & worms.  The increased popularity of Macs has raised their attack visibility, as more hackers get "under the hood" of OS X. 

My inbox today contained a link to Apple's latest security bulletin.  To summarize:  Apple today has released 25 security fixes for OS X, both the server and workstation flavors.They also released security fixes for QuickTime on Windows, which struck me as ironic.  Update: My QuickTime control panel applet offers Updates, but it says 7.0.4 is current.  I had to go to Apple's site and download a whole new install package to get the .

Microsoft, for its part, released three security fixes, two of which are classified as "critical."

One of those three was for the Macromedia Shockwave player, which was released in conjunction with Adobe, who owns the Shockwave suite..  That pretty much rounds out the trifecta.  I wonder how Adobe managed to get their patch to be deployed by MS's own delivery systems?  Perhaps Shockwave is in such broad distribution that MS found in their best interest to get the patch out there.  Update:  It's bundled with XP - makes sense for MS to distribute if they're the ones that gave it to us in the first place.

Hopefully next month will go a little smoother.

Posted by jdevries with no comments