From Natrak: Four New Security Alerts

And he even named me by name:

Scott is going to love this: "Gartner forecasts that, due to legacy code and resistance to cultural change, Microsoft will not deliver necessary security improvements before 2004."

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The worst part here is that it's not hard for me to see that it could take until 2004 (just 15 months away) to make secure the CURRENT code.  Not the new code which will still have holes in it but just the current code.  Microsoft's business model is tied to upgrade revenue which in turn is tied to new features.  And new features will bring new security flaws.  That's like a 99.9% certainty since it's only after the cultural changes are made that new code will be written in a secure fashion. 

 

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Negotiation 101: Analyzing a Contract

[different, random, but hopefully interesting]

I'm helping a friend (party A) out with some financial negotiations and it NEVER ceases to amaze me what people try to get away with.  The circumstance is that party A is being bought out of shares in a private company by party B, a manager but not owner in the business.  Party A is an owner but not an active participant in the business so Party B has significant advantages and a much deeper understanding of the business and direct access to the company's books.  While party A may technically have access as a shareholder (they are roughly a 20% shareholder), practically speaking they don't. 

My overall comment on the process is that it seems that a sense of equitable fair dealing seems to have flown the coop and / or people seem to think that the other party in the negotation must have "fallen off the turnip truck" (for those non-english native speakers, this means an unsophisticated individual). 

Here's the standard approach that I use for any contract I'm asked to look at ...

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