Microsoft for years has been warning the world not to use open-source software. Apparently, its Kumo search team didn't get the memo.

Kumo will weigh heavily on open source.
(Credit: Screenshot by Ina Fried/CNET)

As The Register reports, Microsoft's new Kumo search technology is filled with open source and, in fact, the Kumo search team, formerly Powerset, "tr(ies) to use open-source software, if it is available."

In other words, open-source software appears to be the default choice for the Kumo team, not proprietary software. It looks like Microsoft's anti-open-source bubble really has burst.

Indeed, reading through the Powerset-turned-Microsoft-Kumo team's description of its approach reads like it was written by an open source-friendly IBM:

Instead of creating a proprietary copy of these pieces of infrastructure, Powerset decided instead to turn to Hadoop, a Lucene subproject that is a framework for running data-intensive applications on large clusters of commodity hardware...Unfortunately, there was no Hadoop equivalent to Google's BigTable storage engine.

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Picture this: It’s late at night, you’re sitting at your computer playing a game or working on a project when, suddenly, Windows freezes completely. All your work is gone, and you find a blue screen full of gibberish staring back at you. Windows is dead, Jim, at least until you reboot it. You have no choice but to sigh loudly, shake your fist at Bill Gates and angrily push the reset button. You’ve just been visited by the ghost of windows crashed: the Blue Screen of Death.

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Conficker Worm: Not Finished Yet

Ian Paul

April 1 has come and gone, and the Internet has not disintegrated and no major cyber-attacks were reported. But Conficker still remains a threat. Now don't panic, this doesn't mean cyber-Armageddon could strike at any minute, it just means you need to make sure your computer is fully updated if it isn't already. Feel better? Good, then let's take a look at what's going on.

Why It Ain't Over Yet

The Conficker Working Group -- which is made up of 27 tech companies and agencies including AOL, F-Secure, Facebook, ICANN, Kaspersky, McAffee, Microsoft, Symantec -- says that Conficker, also known as Downup, Downadup, and Kido, is the largest worldwide computer infection since the SQL Slammer in 2003. The CWG estimates anywhere from 3 to 15 million computers are infected worldwide, and says 30 percent of Windows computers across the globe are not updated with the latest patches to protect against Conficker. The virus authors are also still at large and able to communicate with Conficker, although that capability has been significantly reduced.

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A list of more than 8,000 user names and passwords for customers of Comcast, one of the nation’s largest Internet service providers, sat unprotected on the Web for the last two months.

Kevin Andreyo, an educational technology specialist in Reading, Pa., and a professor at Wilkes University, came across the list Monday on Scribd, a document-sharing Web site.

Mr. Andreyo was reading a recent article in PC World entitled “People Search Engines: They Know Your Dark Secrets… And Tell Anyone,” when he was inspired to find out what information about him was online. He searched for his own e-mail address on the search engine Pipl.

The list on Scribd was one of four results, and it also included his password, which was a riff on his love for a local sports team. Statistics on Scribd indicated that the list, which was uploaded by someone with the user name vuthanhan2004, had been viewed over 345 times and had been downloaded 27 times.

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It would make 'one big badass botnet,' says Finnish security companyThe computer worm that exploits a months-old Windows bug has infected more than a million PCs in the past 24 hours, a security company said today.

Early Wednesday, Helsinki, Finland-based security firm F-Secure Corp. estimated that 3.5 million PCs have been compromised by the "Downadup" worm, an increase of more than 1.1 million since Tuesday.

"[And] we still consider this to be a conservative estimate," said Sean Sullivan, a researcher at F-Secure, in an entry to the company's Security Lab blog. Yesterday, F-Secure said the worm had infected an estimated 2.4 million machines.

The worm, which several security companies have described as surging dramatically during the past few days, exploits a bug in the Windows Server service used by all supported versions of Microsoft Corp.'s operating system, including Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008.

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By now, it's common knowledge that the ISP megalomaniac, Comcast, has finally disclosed exactly where its bandwidth cap is. While I had often thought that Comcast's cap was low enough to trap anybody that's ever used YouTube, it turns out that the cap has actually been placed at 250GB.

Let me begin by saying that, if my last two months of router logs are any indicator, I don't use 250GB of bandwidth in a full year's time.

Of course, Comcast's own explanation of their quota is still somewhat ambiguous - a certain number of photos or songs, without actually mentioning the size or bitrate of the media being downloaded. Are we talking the 64kbps-sort-of-music that can be streamed from band websites, or can I actually assume that I can download some ridiculously large number of songs at 256kbps from the Amazon music store? Is that millions of photos taken with camera phones, or millions of high-res pictures from NASA? I did a bit of math to try and figure it out while at the same time being slightly more descriptive. Not considering traffic overhead, 250GB will give you:

* 40 hours of ATSC 1080i-quality audio and video, assuming a 17.82Mbps ATSC channel
* 2840 hours of music from the Amazon MP3 store (assuming songs average five minutes, that's roughly 34000 songs)
* Just over four million photos from an average 0.3-megapixel cameraphone, with shots averaging 65k
* Just under 375,000 photos shot at the 1600x1200 "High-Quality" mode on a 3.3-megapixel Olympus C-3000Z, with shots averaging 700k
* 8500 standard-quality, ten-minute YouTube videos; even I don't know anyone with a YouTube addiction that's this bad
* And for those that frequently download Linux on DVDs: 67 copies of Ubuntu 8.10, 58 copies of openSuSE 11 or Mandriva 2008 Spring, or about thirteen copies of the entire Debian "main" repository

That's more than ample breathing room, I'd say, regardless of whether or not Comcast is being deceptive with their numbers. I normally transfer about 20GB a month, and as of late had tried to refrain from using streaming audio and video services just in case Comcast's barrier was something considerably lower; say, 50GB. Now that I know the real figure... Well, my bandwidth for today is already 2GB, since I've spent the day streaming the news feeds from both Fox and CNN while following Hurricane Gustav, downloading a 600mb ISO image, and then uploading that same image back to someone else (it's legal). In other words, I increased my bandwidth usage, which probably isn't exactly what Comcast had in mind...