The last post regarding Marc Orchant`s OneNote article was the first that I have posted here running the Windows Vista and IE 7 betas. After making the post, I viewed it in IE to double-check that everything rendered correctly, and was greeted with a warning that The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog may indeed be a phishing site.

Now I commend Microsoft for doing something about the phishing problem that plagues the web - it`s certainly not going away, and anything the tools we use can do to help us not get taken in by these scams is welcome by me. Of course, it`s quite disconcerting to discover that one`s own site is considered to be a potential threat.

But, consider that we are a site that has `Microsoft`right in our sub-domain, even though we`re not part of Microsoft`s microsoft.com domain. And we collect information, if you call asking for a name, email address and URL to comment on posts as collecting information, which in fact it is. So it`s reasonable that software might consider us as a potential threat.

Fortunately,  Microsoft foresaw that the tool might pick up many false positives, and offers a form right on the warning to allow site owners to alert the Phishing Filter team to the problem. There also appears to be a voting mechanism so that if enough regular site visitors tag the site as either legit or not, the site will be considered that way. Pretty cool, as long as that is not easily abused.

Kudos to Microsoft for attempting to further protect us. I can`t say that I`ll stick with IE7 for longer than it takes to get a feel for it - in my opinion Firefox is still leaps and bounds ahead of IE in terms of usability and extensibility. But so far IE7 is a welcome update to a sorely outdated browser.

The Associated Press has an article noting that Microsoft is warning people against installing 3rd party patches intended to fix the recent vulnerability in Microsoft's IE browser. This is the same position I took last week, however the fact that Microsoft's ridiculous release schedule for fixes leaves an immeasurable number of users open to attack for weeks before having the opportunity to access an official fix is just ludicrous. It is understandable that it may take Microsoft longer than a security firm to pump out a fix, due to the amount of regression testing they must do against various software combinations, they must certainly have a fix ready to go before Patch Tuesday comes around. If that is the case, just release the patch - as soon as it is ready.

And please re-think the Patch Tuesday strategy for security fixes.

While I would always caution users to avoid patching their system with unofficial patches, it's nice to know that it's possible to create a fix as quickly as these two companies have been able to. If you have an alternative browser like Firefox or Opera, I would recommend using that until Microsoft is able to officially patch the vulnerability. If you don't, you many need to weigh the risks of installing a 3rd party patch to protect your browser against the current vulnerability.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's acquired CTO from Groove Networks is on fire these days. Demonstrating a new concept for the web called Live Clipboard. The idea behind Live Clipboard is to maintain the structure of copied data from web to web and from web to PC. This is something you really have to visualise to understand, well I did anyway. Ray and friend’s released this idea under the Creative Commons which will hopefully spur on adoption by the industry; so far Dave Winter is onboard. What I also found interesting was that all the demonstrations I’ve seen so far were done using Firefox. Isn’t it great when we work together?