Steve Litchfield

Time after time I hear myself on-air complaining about a late or missing update to a smartphone. In the grand scheme it doesn't matter that much, surely? Why should it matter to a phone user whether their device is on 'March 2023 Android security' or err... 'April'? Or indeed 'February'? Well, it normally doesn't. Certainly most phone users have no awareness of the security status of their devices.  The security-smart answer is that users need protecting from themselves. All operating systems have some bugs, some vulnerabilities, due to their complexity, and exploiting (and fixing) these is a perpetual game of 'whack a mole' played between hackers and software developers.  But if a serious vulnerability is found in Android OS then simply going to a booby-trapped web page or being tricked into downloading and installing something dodgy, let alone knowingly downloading 'cracked' commercial apps and games from the dark web, then the phone ca...

Wow. A reported $44 BILLION ?? How on earth do companies a) come up with these valuations and b) afford the price in the first place. I knew Microsoft were rich, but this sort of price is insane. And for what? Surely they already have everything that Yahoo has got in their tech-bank, and more? Well, maybe not Flickr, surely the best purchase Yahoo! ever made.... But even so.... This won't get them level with Google, it will simply cheese off existing Yahoo! users, who will then defect to Google and make the situation even worse for Microsoft. My advice: don't do it. Don't even think about it.

Interesting to see ex-Microsofter Johansson ditching a DRM-heavy Microsoft app in favour of a non-Windows DRM-free solution for playing back multimedia . Especially interesting since I'd been struggling to get anywhere with Microsoft Office 2007's stupid approach to first 'activation' of its own trial version and then unfriendly handling of legacy Office 2003 files. After my teacher wife and I had torn our hair out in frustration, I simply installed the free OpenOffice 2.3 and peace was restored, with files being opened and saved properly - and we also knew where to find most of the functions rather than playing the new Office 2007 guessing game.

Russ Beattie is a man I've always liked for telling it like it is. In other words, telling the absolute truth and not minding if it offends some mega-corporation. In this case, saying what an absolute crock the Microsoft Zune is . Yes, it's competent, but it doesn't sparkle, it doesn't attract, it doesn't glow, unlike the stellar and constantly evolving opposition from Apple (and now the likes of Nokia). Just scrap the Zune, Microsoft, and admit you were wrong again. While you're on his blog, here's a great tip about reading web pages with silly colour schemes (you know, pink on dark pink, etc)...

Heartening news to hear that the one OpenOffice-dismmissing IBM has signed up to help develop OpenOffice . I've always been a fan of OO and have hated the way Microsoft make it so expensive for ordinary folk to do basic word processing and spreadsheets and with horrendous activation schemes. And now OO looks set to go from strength to strength.