By Jin Nan Goto

Microsoft announced today that it will discontinue the sale of it’s Windows Live OneCare suite on June 30, 2009.  Live OneCare is a commercial all-in-one anti-malware/security/backup/network management/kitchen sink application, and it will be replaced by a free downloadable anti-virus application code-named “Morro”.

Code-named “Morro,” this streamlined solution will be available in the second half of 2009 and will provide comprehensive protection from malware including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans. This new solution, to be offered at no charge to consumers, will be architected for a smaller footprint that will use fewer computing resources, making it ideal for low-bandwidth scenarios or less powerful PCs. As part of Microsoft’s move to focus on this simplified offering, the company also announced today that it will discontinue retail sales of its Windows Live OneCare subscription service effective June 30, 2009.

Morro essentially branches off the anti-virus and anti-spyware portions of OneCare into a separate but free product.  From the press release it’s not clear what the future relationship Morro will have with Microsoft’s other anti-malware program, Windows Defender.  Will they ship as two separate applications or will the be combined. Also OneCare had other features other than Anti-malware and it’s not clear how those features will be replaced. While Microsoft hasn’t said so publicly, there is another Microsoft product that is also expected in the second half of 2009.  That product is Windows 7.  Coincidence? 

This move seems to fit with Microsoft’s plans to move a lot of bundled applications off Windows 7 and into the Windows Live Suite.  Bloggers have for years pointed to Windows Movie Maker as evidence of how bloated Windows had become. In Windows 7 Movie Maker will no longer be bundled with Windows and will be offered as a free downloadable program. Offering Morro as a free download rather than bundling it with Windows also has the advantage that it makes it much less likely that Microsoft will face the same kind of legal issues from the US Justice Department and the EU than it faced with its bundling of Internet Explorer and Window Media Player.

Links:

Microsoft Press Release
http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/nov08/11-18NoCostSecurityPR.mspx

OneCare Blog Entry
http://windowsonecare.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!C29701F38A601141!10418.entry

By Jin Nan Goto

Making sure Windows is fully patched is the most important way to improve your security against malware and viruses.  Within hours of patching a security hole, Malware creators will have reverse engineered the patch and will actively start exploiting the problem.  This creates a short timeframe where the computers that did not receive the update are vulnerable. Antivirus software can help protect you but it is not guaranteed to prevent malware from installing on your computer, especially if the exploit is new.  Ensuring that you install updates (eliminating the problem) as soon as they are released provides the best protection.

However it’s not just Microsoft products that suffer critical security flaws and patches. While Microsoft provides its updates automatically through Windows updates, many third party applications such as Adobe Reader and Java Runtime may go a long time before they the patch is installed. During that time your computer will be vulnerable. Also, Microsoft to its credit has greatly improved the security on Windows (especially Windows Vista).  In fact Microsoft reported that in the first half of 2008 none of the top 10 browser exploits affecting Windows Vista were Microsoft Vulnerabilities.  All were from third party software vendors (Microsoft Security Intelligence Report Volume 5). 

This illustrates that just patching Windows is quickly becoming insufficient as malware is now frequently targeting popular non-Microsoft products. Secunia PSI is a free program that will scan your computer and will check all of your installed programs (both Microsoft programs and programs from other vendors). It will check and see if there are vulnerabilities with those programs that have been patched.  It will then provide a link to the update.

Secunia PSI is very easy to run and I found it very useful for alerting me to out of date software that I wouldn’t normally think of.  I recently reinstalled windows on this machine, and when I ran it I knew that Adobe Reader and Adobe flash player was out of date (just because my restore disks were old).  Sure enough Flash player and Adobe reader were flagged by Secunia.  However, it also alerted me that my version of Java Runtime environment was also out of data and had an update available. For convenience, links to the patches were provided and that made fixing all the issues found by Secunia very easy. Secuina PSI is an incredibly valuable tool for securing your PC and I highly recommend it to everyone.

You can download Secunia PSI from this address
http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/

By Jin Nan Goto

Microsoft publicly unveiled its new upcoming Operating System, Windows 7, to a cheering crowd at the recent PDC.  It promises to be more polished, more efficient, and more reliable than Windows Vista.  Regardless of whether all the negative coverage of Vista was deserved or not, Windows 7 is Microsoft’s answer to all of those shortcomings. 

From what I saw about Windows 7, it didn’t disappoint.  The prebeta build, not surprisingly, is very much like Windows Vista.  However after working with Windows 7 for a while I can see that it is very stable and usable for a prebeta release.  Also its clear that the Windows 7 team has been paying close attention to small details which shows a level of refinement that was missing from not only Vista, but all versions of Windows(XP included).

Windows 7 brings many new features into windows, and here are five that I’m excited about.

The New Windows 7 Taskbar

Microsoft’s official line is that Windows 7 will be released in early 2010, but It’s speculated that it could come as early as August or September of next year.  Now, that’s almost a year from now but it’s inevitable that we will soon hear from Apple fans about how Microsoft has copied yet another Mac Feature by turning the Dock into their new Taskbar.  While the philosophy behind the taskbar and the dock are very different, I will admit that there is something very Mac-ish about the Windows 7 Taskbar.  For instance you can easily reorder the icons on the taskbar (much like you can with the OSX dock). What I like is, Windows 7 allows a lot of customization of the notification area of the taskbar (the icons in the bottom right corner representing programs running in the background).  By default all items are hidden from the notification area and you can specify what you want to show up. 

Changes made to User Account Control

Windows 7 is also scaling back Vista’s signature feature, User Account Control.  I really like UAC and I appreciate what Microsoft was trying to accomplish with it, but for the majority of the world UAC was the annoying popup that asked permission for every little task.  Deserved or not, That was how people saw it and Microsoft responded by allowing greater customization to UAC’s behavior through a slider. You can set it to always notify or to never give notifications. It’s likely but not entirely clear that setting UAC to never notify is more insecure, but it is great that Microsoft is giving its users a choice.

Plugging in a Projector is now Easy

Many will probably see this as minor feature of Windows 7, but It’s a little thing that will save people a lot of grief.  If you hold down the Windows Key + P you can select from various settings for external displays.  You can choose Extended Desktop for running with dual monitors, or you can choose a mirrored display if you want to connect your computer to a projector.  This is a wonderful feature for everyone who’s ever needed to show a Power Point presentation over a projector.  It always bugged me that every single computer manufacturer seemed to have their own weird key combination for connecting the computer to a projector.  Function + F5 or Function + F3, there was no standard way of doing this.  It was incredibly confusing for novice users. This is a really proactive solution by Microsoft to a real problem.

Homegroup Networking

I am really interested in how Windows 7 is going to handle Networking.  Windows Vista inherited more of a business centered networking model.  While things like Printer sharing was greatly improved, Plainly speaking it was a real pain to set up things like file sharing.  Windows 7 introduces a simpler and easier way to network called Homegroup. It allows all computers (presumably running windows 7) on the password protected Homegroup to easily share documents, photos, and music.  At the same time it allows a lot of control over what is shared.  For example when you bring your Work laptop home and connect it to your homegroup, your work documents are not viewable over the Homegroup. While homegroup is interesting and exciting I’m holding out full judgement of it until I see how it handles a network of non-Windows 7 computers.

Bitlocker on a flash drive

Bitlocker is not a new feature, but Windows 7 allows you to enable bitlocker drive encryption on a portable USB flash drive. Encrypting the drive is now quite easy.  Data loss is a serious problem and unfortunately the cheap and abundant flash drives are easily lost.  Enabling bitlocker on these drives will greatly mitigate the potential damage of losing a drive with important data. However like Homegroup I want to see that this is compatible for different operating systems or even different versions of Windows 7 (Vista home users could not use Bitlocker).  If you encrypt a flash drive with bitlocker you are going to want to be able to recover the data on a Mac or on an older Windows computer otherwise it severely limits it’s usefulness.