Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch gives you a simpler and faster way to create high-quality business applications for the desktop and the cloud. LightSwitch is a new addition to the Visual Studio family. Visit this page often to learn more about this exciting product. See “What’s New in Beta 2” for information on new capabilities, installation [...]

When Google launched its own DNS service a year ago, one of the main stated goals behind the project was speed. While there are alternative services such as OpenDNS and UltaDNS, the problem is that most Internet users have no idea what a DNS server is, let alone how to configure one, or test how [...]

The very first service pack for Windows 7 should be popping into your Windows Update right around now. There are few areas that might cause some issues. Here’s what to watch for. Whitelisting / Blacklisting: Whitelisting software may not have checksums yet to verify all the files that are modified by the service pack. Firewalls: [...]

Today is the fourth annual Data Privacy Day. Dozens of countries have been celebrating with events throughout the week to inform and educate us all about our personal data rights and protections Few topics worth watching/reading; Privacy & Innovation: A Data Privacy Day Reflection by Ryan Calo Data Privacy Day 2011 The Technology of Privacy: [...]

Google has officially made available the SDK, and further official details about the new version of Android, codenamed Honeycomb. it appears that the new version of Android does not target mobile phones, but only larger devices such as tablets, as the interface has received a complete overhaul to become more tablet friendly. New features include [...]

Attack Surface Analyzer is the same tool used by Microsoft’s internal product teams to catalogue changes made to the operating system by the installation of new software. Attack Surface Analyzer takes a snapshot of your system state before and after the installation of product(s) and displays the changes to a number of key elements of [...]

BinScope is a Microsoft verification tool that analyzes binaries on a project-wide level to ensure that they have been built in compliance with Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) requirements and recommendations. BinScope checks that SDL-required compiler/linker flags are being set, strong-named assemblies are in use, up-to-date build tools are in place, and the latest good [...]

Microsoft released some updates to its secure development tools. Microsoft did some very nice work with these tools. While these tools are not necessarily limited to .Net, I highly recommend that .Net developers take a look at them. http://www.microsoft.com/security/sdl/getstarted/tools.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sdl/archive/2011/01/17/announcing-attack-surface-analyzer.aspx

VMWare released a security update pertaining to ESX/ESXi which addresses a number of security vulnerabilities (43 or so) in ESX/ESXi 4.0. Complete update can be found here : http://lists.vmware.com/pipermail/security-announce/2010/000093.html resource for hardening vShere : http://blogs.vmware.com/security/2010/04/vsphere-40-hardening-guide-released.html

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published a paper on browsers being tracked by it’s unique fingerprint. It turns out our browsers are more unique than we would like to think they are so it is possible for websites to track users around using the unique fingerprint. While it may not be possible to know the [...]