Author: M3 Sweatt

Last week in an EWeek article on phishing, it was noted that screen scraping attacks are becoming more common in scammer’s schemes to subvert sophisticated security systems. (Say that five times fast.) MSN has a page with more info on battling phishing.

In Canada, screen scraping is what we do to the front storm door after a major snowfall. But I digress.

And talk about safe: look at what’s coming in Hotmail (beyond the headers on my mails today noting that the various “official comminications” I receive from eBay and PayPal are actually from some phisher in far-off-I-don’t-know-where): Kahuna. Techweb reported last week that the beta test program for the new Hotmail had been expanded to the general public, which provides a new GUI and features for Hotmail users. (More on this “Mail Beta” is available on this MSN Site.) Imran’s blog with a reference to Kahuna was also mentioned in the Techweb article.

I spoke with Jeff Sandquist (http://www.jeffsandquist.com/) last week on Channel 9 and some of the new features. Yesterday I saw that Channel 9 launched Clipster, which introduces personal video recorder for video blogs on Channel 9, allowing users to define the most interesting points of the videos uploaded to the site and compile their own videos. With it, you can then create a link to “watch this particular segment of a video.”  You’ll now see a red record button in the embedded video player on Channel 9. Very cool – a great way for viewers to create a set of favorite clips, each with their own unique URL.

Although I use this space as a look at customer and partner satisfaction, a quick “good luck” to Sara and her husband on their way to Waveland. I heard from several people at the office that her bake sale was a success. Here’s more info about her quest to Waveland and how to support their effort.

As noted, this is just the tip of the iceberg in the ways we’ve heard of employees, our customers and partners helping those in need. It’s refreshing to see the incredible support going to help the people in the affected areas: I hope that there is a similar outporing when the next earthquake hits Seattle.

Donation info: You can also designate donations to help those affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita at Americares (which has an astonishing 98.9% program efficiency, and disclosed that each $100 in cash contributions enabled AmeriCare to deliver more than $3,000 in emergency relief). And don’t forget the Red Cross.

If you haven’t found it yet, you should click over to Steven Sinofsky’s Techtalk – he’s a senior vice president at Microsoft in the Office group. (more info available here). Today in his posting on “Bureaucracy. Threat or menace?” he talks about a class teaching a case on the development of Office 2000 and the topic of bureaucracy, and the need to balance agility with planning and design… while keeping your external partners and customers customers satisfied.

There’s been a great deal of discussion on how agile and innovative Microsoft is vis-a-vis the perception and reports in the reports in the press that the company has become overly bureaucratic. What we see internally are how the improvements we’re making, which take time. As Carol Grojean pointed out, Jon DeVaan (who leads the Engineering Excellence effort) frequently references the article “Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems That Never Happened” which addresses the reality every manager faces: dedicating additional effort to either work or improvement can increase the performance of any process. (As Carol wrote: “The issue at hand is do you go down the destructive work-harder loop, where you feel short-term gains despite long-term consequences, or do you follow the constructive work-smarter loop, where you feel short-term pain for long-term investment in capability?”) Jon has said many times that people should have the courage to change:

“Generally, most people know what the problem is and perhaps even how to fix it; the difficult part is just getting people to change. Everyone recognizes the problem and oftentimes it gets expressed over and over again in cynicism. The true insight is getting every level of management to understand that they are part of the problem when they continually reinforce the work-harder loop.”

Of interest may also be how we look at the evolution of how we develop software at the company, through the creation and use of the .NET Framework, and the effort to implement an agile yet highly disciplined approach to product development. . This paper discusses the nature and impact of these two dramatic shifts to the development practices at Microsoft.- this insight from our own Eric Brechner at the Int’l Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2005) earlier this year on the “Journey of Enlightenment & the Evolution of Development at Microsoft”. Eric is working on improving our software development practices across the product teams. The slides are an interesting read, ‘though alone it lacks the impactful delivery and depth Eric brings to his talks.

(Also a good read: Eric’s ACM paper “Things they would not teach me of in college: what Microsoft developers learn later”)