Windows president tries to calm fears of Win 7 critical bug

Microsoft's Windows Division president Steven Sinofsky tried Wednesday to tamp down a growing roar that Windows 7 RTM has a critical flaw that can shut down the OS by running a simple command.

"Sorry to get dragged into this," wrote Sinofsky, taking the unusual step of responding via the comments section of an industry blog called Chris123NT's blog.  Monday, the blog posted a recipe to execute the crash and included a picture of the results. 

Other testers also reported errors.

 "Of course [we] always want to investigate each and every report of any unexpected behavior," he wrote [Microsoft confirmed it was indeed him]. But Sinofsky, who is leading Windows 7 development, said Microsoft has not reproduced the crash, which is triggered by the Windows "CHKDSK /r" command.

"We are certainly going to continue to look for, monitor, and address issues as they arise if required. So far this is not one of those issues," he wrote. "While we appreciate the drama of 'critical bug' and then the pickup of 'showstopper' that I've seen, we might take a step back and realize that this might not have that defcon level," Sinofsky wrote.

"Bugs that are so severe as to require immediate patches and attention would have to have no workarounds and would generally be such that a large set of people would run across them in the normal course of using their PC."

Reports of a potential critical bug come a day before Microsoft is set to make Windows 7 available to MSDN subscribers. General availability is slated for Oct. 22.

Testers report that the bug only works on PCs that have a second hard disk or multiple hard disks. The bug, which gobbles up memory and leads to a "blue screen" crash, does not affect the main drive where the OS is installed.

"We're not seeing any crashes with CHKDSK on the stack reported in any measurable number that we could find," Sinofsky wrote. "We had one beta report on the memory usage, but that was resolved by design since we actually did design it to use more memory."

The memory usage is intended to speed up checking the disk for damage and errors, but, Sinofsky said, memory usage was not intended to be "unbounded."

He said the command is intended to leave at least "50M of physical memory. Our assumption was that using /r means your disk is such that you would prefer to get the repair done and over with rather than keep working."

Users on blogs and discussion sites are reporting consistently that they see a jump in memory usage, but reports of outright crashes of the OS have been spotty.

One post on the Windows SevenForum from a user named "Everlong18" said, It's not *that* much of a concern for me. It's not like I'm going to be running chkdsk on my D drive every day, but it would be nice if it got sorted."

On the Chris123NT's blog, a user name FireRX, who appears to be a Microsoft MVP, said, "the chkdsk /r tool is not at fault here. It was simply a chipset controller issue. Please update [your] chipset drivers to the current driver from your motherboard manufacturer. I did mine, and this fixed the issue. Yes, it still uses a lot of physical memory, because [you're] checking for physical damage, and errors on the Harddrive [you're] testing… Again, there is no Bug." FireRX also said he was sure a hotfix would be issued today.

The Microsoft official acknowledged FireRX's post in his comments, and said "some have reported that this specific issue [reproduces] and then goes away with updated drivers. We haven't yet confirmed that either but continue to try."

Sinofsky did not say anything about a hotfix.

Sinofsky, who posted his response at 7 pm Tuesday night, said Microsoft had started overnight stress testing of 40 machines of variants "as reported by FireRx."Microsoft has not made public results of those tests.

The Microsoft official ended his post saying. "Let's see if we can work on this one and future issues together. Deep breath –Steven."

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Wall Street Beat: IT investors eye bellwether financials

Earnings season has begun in earnest, with investors scrutinizing reports from IT stalwarts like IBM, Dell, Google, Nokia and Sun for reasons to expect a strong second half of the year.

So far, the second quarter for some of the leading vendors was better than expected, and several IT companies indicate that overall tech spending has reached the bottom for the year.

Internet search giant Google Thursday reported net income, excluding one-time charges, of US$1.71 billion, or $5.36 per share, up from $1.47 billion, or $4.63 per share, in the same quarter last year. Net revenue hit $4.07 billion, up from $3.9 billion. In a tough quarter, the Internet star once again shone, as it beat analysts' expectations for revenue of $4.05 billion and earnings of only $5.05 per share, according to Thomson Reuters.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt seemed careful not to sound too ebullient in a statement in which he called the quarter "very good."

"These results highlight the enduring strength of our business model and our responsible efforts to manage expenses in a way that puts us in a good position for the economic upturn, when it occurs," Schmidt said.

Google shares were up by $4.43 to $442 in after-hours trading shortly after the results were announced.

IBM shares also jumped after market hours Thursday to $110.64, up by $3.44 right after it announced income that blew past Wall Street expectations. Second only to HP among IT vendors in yearly turnover, IBM reported earnings of $3.1 billion, up 12 percent from last year. Earnings per share were $2.32, up from $1.97 a share in the same period last year and easily beating the estimate of $2.02 a share forecast by analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.

IBM sales were $23.3 billion, down 13 percent from last year and a little under analyst expectations.

But the good news for the rest of the year is that IBM says it will generate earnings of "at least $9.70" per share, up from its previous outlook of $9.20.

Dell, the leading PC vendor behind Hewlett-Packard, said earlier this week that demand is "stabilizing" and that after three quarters of revenue decline it expects to finish its current financial quarter, ending July 31, with a sequential increase in sales. The company did not paint a completely rosy picture, however, saying that the recession and price competition are putting the squeeze on profit margins.

Worldwide PC shipments for 2009 are still expected to decline by 4 percent, to 287.3 million units, according to a research note by iSuppli this week. That's better than the approximately 9 percent decline many researchers were expecting a few months ago, but still a significant drop for the year.

Mobile handset sales are also experiencing a big drop, especially in the low-end phonetString := StoryDateLine + " (" + @Text(StoryFiledDate) + ") - ";
@If(datelineinbody = "No"; tString; "") market. Nokia Thursday reported second-quarter sales that were 25 percent lower, at €9.91 billion (US$13.9 billion), than a year earlier, with net income down by 66 percent to €380 million. However, even though it said it does not expect its own market share to grow this year, the company did say it expects that global mobile-phone shipments will remain stable or increase slightly in the third quarter.

The software market has also been shaken up during the first half. Sun Microsystems said Tuesday that it expects a drop in sales for the June quarter. The company, whose shareholders voted Thursday to accept a takeover bid by Oracle, forecasts revenue for the June quarter to be between $2.58 billion and $2.68 billion, down from $3.78 billion last year.

Sun sales may have been affected by news of its imminent acquisition by Oracle. Microsoft might give a better read on the software sector when it reports next Thursday. Other IT bellwethers reporting financials next week include VMware, Apple, Yahoo and Advanced Micro Devices.

Michael Jackson's death spawns malware, more scams

As security researchers expected, hackers have begun to use the death of pop star Michael Jackson to infect people's PCs.

Starting late last week and continuing today, messages posing as breaking news alerts from the likes of CNN and the Los Angeles Times have been reaching users' mailboxes, said several security companies, including Sophos, Symantec and Trend Micro.

Some of the messages, which have appeared only in Spanish and Portuguese so far, include links claiming to lead to video of Jackson in an ambulance, or even of his body postmortem. The links, of course, take users to nothing of the kind. Instead, they force a pop-up message that instructs the user to update their copy of Adobe's Flash.

The Flash update ploy may be a now-standard hacker tactic, but it's worked extremely well in the past. Last summer, for example, fake CNN.com news notifications led massive numbers of users to thousands of hacked Web sites that served up fake Flash software.

According to Trend Micro's analysis, the phony news e-mails try to trick users into downloading a bot Trojan that hijacks PCs, then awaits instructions from the botnet's controller.

"Quite notable is that even if a user chooses the Cancel button, which should allow him/her to quit from downloading the file, the site will continue to push the download of the codec, leaving users with no choice but to deal with the malicious file downloaded into their system," Trend's Argie Gallego, one of the company's anti-spam research engineers, said in a blog post today.

Also new today, said Sophos, is a malware-free scam that tries to get people to send money to the bogus "Michael Jackson Organization." In an e-mail that calls Jackson "a true humanitarian," scammers beg people to "send your donations to us via money gram/western union."

Last week, Sophos' senior technology consultant Graham Cluley predicted that malware attacks would soon begin to make use of Jackson's demise. He was spot on. "I wouldn't be surprised to see hackers claiming that they have top-secret footage from the hospital, perhaps [allegedly] taken by the ambulance people, that then asks you to install a video codec," said Cluley last week.

Symantec has added more scams to an expect-soon list, including spam that leads users to fake antivirus software, Twitter tweets that include links to malicious sites and Facebook messages that dupe users into downloading Koobface, a worm that has appeared, disappeared and reappeared on that social networking site and others.

Things will get worse before they get better, argued Sophos in a post to its security labs' blog on Friday. "We have not seen many samples of this malware spam, and distribution seems limited so far," said Sophos. "It is likely that more Michael Jackson-themed malware and spam is on its way."

Security on a stick guards British diplomatic business

When it comes to security, the British government's Consulate-General in New York, part of the United Kingdom's diplomatic mission for business and visa-related activities, is taking no chances on spies or other intruders sneaking onto its network.

This U.K. diplomatic office for visa-issuing operations and trade affairs allows dozens of its employees to gain remote access to the consulate's network from any computer they want, a boon for those checking in from home or on the road. But no one gets network access unless they're using a USB token for security called Trusted Client, made by BeCrypt, which basically acts like a self-contained operating system and secured desktop environment.

"It revolutionized our working practices," says Brian McIntyre, senior systems administrator at the British Consulate-General in New York, about the small USB token supporting thin-client Citrix desktop application, a Juniper VPN and more that's encrypted. The security on a stick was integral to granting employees more flexibility in their jobs because it mitigates risks associated with remote access.

The BeCrypt token, in use at the New York consulate for about two years, is also used at other parts of the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth office, including the U.K. Mission to the United Nations, McIntyre says.

The security procedure requires authentication after booting up with the USB token, which is a hardened Linux Ubuntu operating system that effectively provides an isolated working environment from malware and hacker threats, says McIntyre."Basically, I will load onto it whatever the user needs," McIntyre notes about the USB token, which he says shields the user from any "contamination" there might be on the unmanaged computer in use. "A software-based keylogger wouldn't execute with this."

While this isn't the only security at the consulate's office - some aren't for public discussion - the USB token fits neatly into the workplace there because it permits varying levels of controls be placed on what each user can do inside the network. It supports a "multitude of roles," McIntyre says, depending on each employee's responsibilities