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GeoSocial Meetup: Thursday November 6th at the Charlotte Room, Toronto

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date November 3, 2008
1 Comment on GeoSocial Meetup: Thursday November 6th at the Charlotte Room, Toronto

Earth, as seen from space The folks from PlanetEye — the travel-planning site whose motto is “Discover destinations. Plan trips. Share experiences” — are hosting a GeoSocial this Thursday, November 6th at 6:30 p.m. at the Charlotte Room (19 Charlotte Street, Toronto, not far from the corner of King and Spadina).

GeoSocial?

Organized by PlanetEye’s Mark Evans and Juan Gonzalez, a GeoSocial is “a group for people interested in exploring the uses of geodata to enhance the relevancy of information on the web and create new means of social interaction.”

Juan explained more in a recent post on the PlanetEye blog:

We firmly believe the GeoWeb has succeeded in providing an easily understood framework for gathering, analysing and displaying information. The challenges that remain ahead are now about leveraging this framework to create better ways for people to explore and discover their world.

GeoSocial wants to provide an open forum for all people developing ideas, technology and products that leverage the GeoWeb to create advanced social applications that can deliver personalized, geographically relevant content. We also want to invite people from other areas (bloggers?) to participate and discover how these technologies can fundamentally impact their own products.

If you’re building (or just thinking of building) location-based mobile applications, mashups, maps, producing or consuming geodata, writing about your city or neighbourhood or just have an interest in what’s being called “Where 2.0”, come out to this event and meet some like-minded people!

(I’ll be attending this event, by the way.)

Windows Exploits Come from Third-Party Apps

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date November 3, 2008
2 Comments on Windows Exploits Come from Third-Party Apps

According to Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report (SIR), malware writers aren’t targeting Vista directly; they’re using holes in third-party apps to attack people’s systems instead. Microsoft’s data agrees with that of independent anti-malware company Kapersky Lab: while direct attacks on XP account for almost half of its vulnerabilities, nearly all attacks on Vista are done by way of exploiting third-party software.

ZDNet’s article on the report includes these graphs comparing the top 10 browser-based vulnerabilities on Windows XP and Windows Vista:

Graph: Top 10 browser-based vulnerabilities in Windows XP -- half are Microsoft's fault.

Graph: Top ten browser-based vulnerabilities in Windows Vista -- all are third-party apps' fault.

One question that comes to mind: is it because Vista is more secure, or because attacking XP is a better approach because it represents a larger base of targets? I certainly don’t know the answer.

Another question that naturally arises from this is: How do you solve the problem of vulnerabilities through third-party apps? I’m a firm believer in Bruce Schneier’s maxim, “security is a process, not a product,” and think that the best approach is a multi-pronged one. The prong for which I’m responsible is educating developers about application security, and as I find out more about the Windows platform and security, I’ll write about it here on Global Nerdy as well as in some of Microsoft’s developer-focused sites.

My PDC Interviews: Don Box, Miguel de Icaza, John Lam, Phil Haack and .NET Micro Framework

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date November 3, 2008

PDC2008 graphic

A number of people have asked me how many sessions I attended at last week’s Microsoft Professional Developers Conference; my answer was “I only attended the keynotes”. Since every session was recorded on video (with a split screen showing both presenter and presentation) and made available online, I decided to focus on what you can’t replicate outside the conference: getting to know people in the Windows developer community.

It’s standard procedure at Microsoft to assign “buddies” to new hires to help them get acclimated. I have the very good fortune of having John Bristowe as one of my buddies; not only is he a warm and friendly guy, but I also already know him (his sister Ashley and I went to Crazy Go Nuts University together). John’s big on podcasting and was very generous in sharing the interviewer’s chair; he let me do a lot of interviews as a way to both get podcasting practice and introduce myself to people in the Windows world. Thanks, John!

You’re going to need Silverlight to view these videos. If you’re rolling your eyes at the prospect of having to download yet another plugin, keep in mind that Silverlight is a pretty cool tool for writing rich internet apps, I’ll be covering it rather extensively soon, and it’s catching on. Besides, you can’t see the videos without it!