Seven days after a zero-day vulnerability surfaced that involves both Internet Explorer and Firefox, the Firefox developers at Mozilla have released a patch for the vulnerability. Microsoft, for its part, says the security hole in IE is a feature, not a bug.

For a week after the problem surfaced, security pundits were taking sides to pin the blame on either Firefox or IE. The rest of us, especially people in corporate IT, didn’t want to hear that — we just wanted it fixed. Finger-pointing (as in "the problem isn’t in our product, it’s in the other guy’s product") is as old as IT, and it’s always a sign of a vendor that cares more about playing games than about what’s good for customers.

It’s Tuesday’s IT Blogwatch: in which the state of Massachusetts thinks it likes Office 2007 after all. Not to mention why not to mess with two yuppies in a BMW…

Eric Lai has the scoop:

Massachusetts today released draft specifications that would allow state workers to continue using Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) format. The latest proposal comes about two years after state IT officials kicked off a raging political battle by unveiling  specifications that would have required state workers to use applications that support only "open" technologies like the OpenDocument format (ODF).
…
According to pages 18-22 of the proposed Massachusetts Enterprise Technical Reference Model 4.0, OOXML, along with ODF, plain text and HTML formats, meets the IT division’s criteria for an open document format. Other formats that are not considered open but could be used by Massachusetts state employees include Adobe Corp.’s Portable Document Format and Rich Text Format.
…
Microsoft has played hardball by lobbying hard in Massachusetts and other states, and to the federal government. On the other side, ODF supporter IBM has also lobbied governments.

Comments Off