Romhack.Net, the alternative IT magazine

About one year ago was released Cuil, the self-proclaimed Google-killer. Although Cuil's search quality has significantly improved since the grand (and failed) opening, the site could only grab a negligible share of the overall search market and does not currently propose a compelling enough service to grab more. People are still waiting for the real Google-killer to come... So this is no surprise to have a huge buzz around WolframAlpha, the new "search engine" sponsored by Stephen Wolfram, the world-class scientist behind Mathematica. But…

If you are a regular follower of this blog, you’ll probably remember my couple of rather recent entries regarding the current state of the anti-virus technology and whether this kind of products still are as useful as they were in the past in today’s world. I’ve been going into great lengths regarding their weak points and how they tend to lagging behind the Operating Systems more and more every year due to their missing of infections, delays in signatures updates, which makes their protection far from being bullet-proof. What’s worst than everything, though, is when a system isn’t infected but the anti-virus thinks it is… and has identified an important system file as an offender…

To be remarked and distinguished, one's products must be clearly different from the others: it is a fact of marketing. When applied to software, there are two main kind of differentiation possible: the invisible to the eyes, yet noticeable, differences, such as better internal engineering and better performance, and the visible ones, most particularly the user-interface. In operating systems supporting windowing systems, the user-interface is one of the most important aspects of the product because it is the interface between the user and the machine: this interface thus needs to be both pleasing to the eyes but still ergonomic and efficient for the user to be able to accomplish his duties as quickly as possible.

Having one’s application stand out from the others is maybe a good thing for marketing, but what happens when every application on the system wants to look different from the other in term of user-interface of the system taken as a whole? This is what we are going to see through this argumented rant, with the help of some applications examples, and try to see whether the short-term benefits of these moves are worth the longer-term inconveniences of inappropriate user-interface skinning.

Anti-viruses, as everyone knows, are software that prevent intrusion of malware into the system where it is installed and active. But what happens when anti-viruses become less efficient in this mission than the the very Operating System that they are supposed to protect? In this article, I will try to establish whether anti-virus as they currently stand are a trustable protection to the current threats, and, in the next installment of this two-parts series, what’s their future, in a IT world where the focus on security has never been so high, especially in the Operating Systems area.

For the last month, I noticed occasional problems with sending e-mails from my professional POP-based account (I also have a professional Exchange account but I don’t use this one very much for a lot of historic reasons, like me having a BlackBerry subscription which only worked with POP-based accounts, until I got my new phone). The hosting company that was hosting this POP account was having a lot of problems for months and I was using their SMTP server (requiring SMTPAuth) to send my e-mails from this account. I was busy at that time and just wanted my urgent e-mails to get out so thinking they had yet another breakdown, I switched to my Internet Service Provider (ISP)’s SMTP server (on port 25) and it worked fine. However, that obviously meant that as soon as I would plug my computer to a network using another ISP, this SMTP server would block my e-mails because they are sent from an Internet line leased by a competitor. Of course, changing the SMTP server every time was an unacceptable time loss and bother to do every time, so I set out and investigated.