Onions and Orchids: Round 1

By Jerry Pournelle

January 9, 2006

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This is my traditional year-end column (or beginning of the new year, depending on how you look at it) in which I comment on trends in technology and the industry, speculate on the future, give my Chaos Manor User's Choice Awards, and present the annual Chaos Manor Orchids and Onions Parade.

Awards are nominated by BYTE readers and editors as well as by myself. Winners are chosen by me. Note that I make no attempt to present my Users Choice winners as "best", since I have long since given up trying to test and use every brand and product in the industry. On the other hand, I can generally get anything I seriously want, I never use anything that isn't "good enough," and I don't recommend anything I am not using.

This year the column deadline falls during CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. In the absence of COMDEX, CES has more than filled the void. It has also filled the entire Las Vegas Convention Center AND the Sands Expo and Convention Center. Thus, I always go to CES, so this is filed from Las Vegas. Look for our CES reports.

The Sky is Falling

As I write this, the computer world is holding its breath in anticipation of the worst computer worm/virus attack in our history. At this writing, nothing much has happened yet, but the potential damage is enormous.

The WMF exploit potentially allows the bad guys to run any program they like--from spyware to maliciously corrupting or erasing your files--through an infection you acquire simply from looking at a web site, or receiving (but not opening) an attachment to your email. The potential for the exploit has been with us since the 1980s. The notion was to allow code to be incorporated in a graphic image, so that "the function could be called by Windows if a print job needed to be cancelled during spooling." For reasons not clear to me, no one noticed that this made all versions of Windows exceedingly vulnerable to drive-by penetration, until suddenly this burst upon us during the Christmas holidays.

As of this moment, Microsoft has announced a fix.

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