Where Do You Want To Go . . . Two Years Later?

I subscribe to a couple of Microsoft newsletters, one of them called the Microsoft Security Newsletter. Mostly, the appearance of these newsletters in my Inbox merely reminds me to check for the latest patches from Microsoft, and I delete them after a quick glance.

But once in a while, I read them a little more carefully.

And now I agree with what you're already saying . . . why?

Today's newsletter trumpeted something called "Strider HoneyMonkey" which is a Microsoft Research project to detect and analyze Web sites hosting malicious code.

Click on the link to read more, and you first get a puff piece from some suit in PR about an important new research technology . . . presented this week by Microsoft Research in a technical report and a subsequent presentation during the USENIX Security Symposium.

The bulk of the introductory article is filled with the usual boilerplate: Microsoft considers the security of customers' computers and networks a top priority . . . committed . . . innovation . . . industry partnership . . . investing in new solutions . . . innovative thinking . . .

Okay, no prob. They're in business to make money. Let's just kill this intro and go to the actual technical report.

Clickety-click . . . hmmm. A PDF file? Well, as hard as it is to believe, many companies still aren't clued in about how annoying it is to get PDF files when the equivalent HTML content would be just fine. Never mind, let's just download the bugger (it's too annoying to deal with the Acrobat plugin for browsers).

The tech report downloads just fine, we fire up AcroRead, load the PDF, and see this on the opening page:

First Version: June 4, 2005
Last Updated: July 27, 2005

Yes. 2005. And they're presenting it this week.

The paper itself wasn't completely horrible. Mostly, it was unimpressive, and it lost what little credibility that it might have had with its attempts to hint at the "superiority" of MSN Search over Google.

The real point is this: 2005.

Still breathlessly awaiting LonghornVista?

Noah, how long can you tread water?