Asia Tech Blog

When Vista ships, the days of getting a working copy for $1 will go with it.

For years the pirates of Panthip, a technology superstore in central Bangkok have been making their living burning copies of Windows for sale to both locals, and bargin hunting tourists. Those days will be coming to a close with Vista’s new anti-piracy features that will severely limit the functionality of any installation that doesn’t authenticate. The self-satisfied who brag about their one dollar Windows purchase will now be restricted to older versions of XP as Windows 98, ME, and soon 2000 reach their end of life and no longer recieve vital security updates.

While anti-copy protection advocates complain about false positives, one has to wonder why Microsoft hasn’t done this before. How long were the law abiding going to have to pay a hundred times more but get the same product?

True, Microsoft’s pricing in much of Asia is out of step with with the realities of local economic conditions, where a copy of XP Pro can go for as much as a month’s salary for an office worker, but this should be a boon to the open source community, not the pirates. Ubuntu Linux goes as far as providing free CDs, and free tech support along with a lightweight OS that can be used on less expensive computers, so why bother with Windows at all?

Easy. It sells, and pirates are interested in sales, not promoting alternatives.

The often unreported problem with rampant software piracy is the amount of computers running it who can function fully enough to become spam sending zombies, but not fully enough to get the security updates from the manufacturer needed to secure the machine against malware that hijacks it.

In case there are those of you out there who think that your BETA copy of Vista will be good enough to keep you going, those will expire and stop functioning late next spring, so have a few hundred dollars saved up, because there will be no joy in Singapore, Shanghai, or Bangkok. That i unless you find joy in paying for software that won’t work.

Questionable aquisitions, inability to integrate new features, and incompatibility with Firefox may be spelling the end of an internet mainstay.

Have you tried browsing Yahoo with Firefox lately? Chances are if you try it regularly Firefox will crash. Tried doing a simple search on Yahoo owned Altavista only to have it redirect you to Yahoo’s cluttered page after the first page of results? These are just a few of the troubles leading some to believe that the venerable giant Yahoo is in it’s death throws.

When Google was powering past Yahoo in the search game, Yahoo bought Altavista, the leading edge search engine since 1996, and killed it.

Venerable Altavista Dies - Search Engine Lowdown, March 2004

With this baffling action Yahoo lost all the advantages of the Altavista brand, and the best chance to take on Google who is now leaving Yahoo behind, buried under the weight of it’s cluttered user interface. Purchases of Flikr, and Alltheweb have proved equally lackluster, failing to rejuvinate what some experts are beginning to call “a dinosaur that just hasn’t died yet”.

Yahoo tried to spark new interest with Yahoo Answers which is the misleading name of the section where the most non expert people in the world gather to guess at the solution to a user’s query which is so time limited as to be useless.

So while Google marches on toward search engine glory, and Myspace and YouTube become social and entertainment meccas, Yahoo tries to do all of the above and drowns in it’s own mediocritry.

How the mighty have fallen.

Tired of overly invasive, memory hungry antiviruses? We think we’ve found the answer!

Those of you still running the bloated Norton or McAfee suites who’s licences are coming due should hold off before renewing those cumbersome programs.

I was skeptical at first, being quite happy with my pro version of Alwil’s AVAST antivirus program, but on the older systems it was being a bit of a drag on resources so I was willing to give nod32 a 30 day trial.

What a difference! It’s like it’s not even there! Lightweight, using a mere 14mb of memory out of an available 768, a non-intrusive email scanner, and no overzealous popup messages telling you what a good job it’s doing.

The user interface was at first a bit geek-ish, which would be somewhat daunting for the novice user, this is the only part of the package that caused us any concern. The deep scans were thorough and took much less time than AVAST or McAfee (McAfee was used as a comparison on a seperate system). One false positive was noted, but in 25 days that was the only one.

As our systems are kept meticulously clean, we cannot judge the heuristics other than tests from third parties. A recent review from CNet stated:

In terms of protecting your PC, we refer readers to two leading independent antivirus testing organizations. In the latest test results from AV-Comparatives.org, NOD32 earned an Advanced + (highest) rating, catching 98 percent of all malware tested. And NOD32 was one of only four products to earn CheckVir.com’s Advanced rating.

Our favourite thing about nod32? It doesn’t try to be everything. It’s designed to do one job, and do it well. That alone is worth the price.

Cost: $39 US
Ease of use: 7/10
Resource use: 9/10
Value for money: 8:10
Effectiveness: 9/10 (Based on third party tests)

Overall score: 8.5/10 (Excellent)

Where to get it: http://www.eset.com/download/index.php

Hint: It’s $10 less from the nod32 homepage than at CNet.

Did Mozilla Cave to Pressure From Advertising Giants?

Mozilla realeased their Firefox version 2.0 last week with a little less privacy protection than the previous versions carried. Version 1.5 allowed Firefox users to reject third party cookies, most often set by banner ads from large web advertisers to track users as they move from site to site, aggragating it with search queries to build customer profiles that help in targeting ads. Information collected is so specific that it is possible to determine much personal information, even identities as AOL found out when it realeased search data from customers this past spring.

Group Seeks FTC Investigation Into AOL - Yahoo Business

Was this a mere oversight after massive BETA testing? Open source fanboys loudly proclaim that open source software is the best way to catch bugs, so should we assume this is intentional, or that Mozilla developers, and millions of BETA testers missed this important feature?

Fortunately there is still a way to reject third party cookies if you know how to alter your config file;

In your address bar, type about:config
scroll down till you see network.cookie.cookieBehavior
right-click, choose “modify”
change value in popup box to “1″

Close the tab and your worries are over.

I love Firefox, and it’s sad to see it’s evil side coming out.

Needless too say, the uproar is beginning, and hopefully the Mozilla gang will cave in to it’s users, the people who took a chance on an upstart browser that had been steadily gaining market share through loyal and enthusiastic users spreading the word. Time will tell how much this loyalty has been tested here.