Summary: Additional signs of an ever-crumbling software giant

WITH A LOT of stuff happening today, we haven't the time to cover this thoroughly, so here are just the pointers:

• Opinion: Windows 7's UAC is a broken mess; mend it or end it

The changes Microsoft has made to Windows 7's UAC render it little more than a pesky annoyance. If this is the path the company wishes to go down, it should stop doing things by halves and kill it off altogether.

• The Tigger Trojan: Icky, Sticky Stuff

A relatively unknown data-stealing Trojan horse program that has claimed more than a quarter-million victims in the span of a few months aptly illustrates the sophistication of modern malware and the importance of a multi-layered approach to security.

When analysts at Sterling, Va., based security intelligence firm iDefense first spotted the trojan they call "Tigger.A" in November 2008, none of the 37 anti-virus products they tested it against recognized it. A month later, only one - AntiVir - detected it.

As for general failures (not in security):

• Is Microsoft's Kumo Already A Failure?

Microsoft is testing its new search product, codenamed "Kumo." VentureBeat's MG Siegler hopes the long-awaited upgrade to Live Search "performs better than it looks." Reviewing the screen shots obtained by Kara Swisher, who broke the story, Siegler says Kumo looks "like a product that fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. Who picked this color scheme? Blue, light orange and gray? This looks like the ugly Cleveland Cavaliers' basketball uniforms from the 1990s."

• App-V 4.6: Too little, too late?

As we've all learned by now, Windows 7 is simply a tweaked Vista. The application runtime model and API support mechanisms remain essentially unchanged. In fact, there's nothing radically new under the hood, which I'm guessing wasn't the original plan. Rather, integrating application virtualization into the OS and providing at least the option of running a cleaner core software stack was no doubt in the cards for Windows 7. However, expediency ultimately trumped purity, and the resulting Vista successor is now just a shadow of what it might have been (shades of the infamous "Longhorn reset").

More to come this evening. ⬆

"LH [Longhorn] is a pig and I don't see any solution to this problem. If we are to rise to the challenge of Linux..."

--Jim Allchin, Microsoft Vice President