In Wall Street Journal there is a preview on Bill's speech today at World Economic Forum (they are actually flying over my house going to Davos – I hear them all the time J). It is a pretty interesting reading on new ways how capitalism could work not only for the rich but also for the poor. What I like – the longer the more – is the idea not only of charity but of making money AND helping the poor. Impossible? I do not think so. When I was in South Africa recently I visited a customer of us being a bank and their business model is exactly that: They are handling the transaction (pretty small ones) for people not having a lot of money. Actually they have branch offices in the middle of the slums. They use high-tech solutions to keep their cost to a minimum but with that, these people all of a sudden can save money to buy things later on or can get micro-loans to invest in their businesses. And the cool thing: They are actually really profitable. It works at least for them.

Read the WSJ-article yourself – it is worth it: Bill Gates Issues Call For Kinder Capitalism

Roger

If Al Qaida really has these capabilities, I am starting to get scared when I have to fly (which happens to me pretty often): There are reports that the plan crash last week could be caused by hackers attacking the plane before take-off in Beijing…. Al-Qaida ties to British crash probed

Roger

Something that might be worth looking at: Carnegie Mellon's CERT just published two Secure Coding Standards: One for C++ and one for C. I had no chance to look into this and understand how this compares to our Writing Secure Code but it is definitely worth mentioning.

Roger

Jeff released another report: He is looking back into one year of Windows Vista. We had the discussion about the value of vulnerability comparison and I do not want to open another discussion thread about that. But as long as we hear that our products are less secure than others because we have sooo much vulnerabilities, these reports are important for us internally (we know where we stand) and externally to communicate our findings – and they are pretty interesting.

Have a look at the report at Download: Windows Vista One Year Vulnerability Report

Last but not least it was interesting to see that readers of my blog are looking into these things as well: Vista logged fewer vulnerabilities in its first year than XP, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Apple Mac OS X did in their first years

Roger

I think that there is a very good example of how a platform could be offered for victims of cyber crime. There are often questions around: What are my rights? What can I do if something bad happens? Who is here to help?...

www.e-victims-org offers answers to a lot of questions like those and offers help. Ed Gibson, my CSA mate in the UK, is actually on the Advisory Council.

Roger