German Government warns against using Internet Explorer...

The German government has warned against using Internet Explorer after a security flaw left it vulnerable to hackers.

Sometimes there's nothing that a Blogger can say. The facts speak for themselves.
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The Ethics of Blogging about Bugs.

As a certified IBM/Lotus Business Partner I believe that I have a duty to report bugs to IBM in order to help them fix the product. Generally I'm quite happy with the speed of the response I get from IBM/Lotus even though I don't always get the fix for which I was hoping. Whether or not the bug gets fixed, the event normally provides some Blog Fuel for slow-news days.

Late last year I had a response from an IBMer to a bug post on my blog which said, in the friendliest possible manner, that it was better to report bugs directly to IBM than to just blog about them. Normally I do both - but in this case I had just blogged about the issue and hadn't raised a bug report. Leaving that particular bug aside for the moment, I want to consider whether blogging about bugs is a positive contribution to the Yellowverse. On the Down side ...

• the risk of triggering a beat-up by Microsoft PR - "Lotus bloggers snub IBM software!!!"
• uh... [open to suggestions here]
  

On the Up side we see:

• the possibility of getting a workaround from some otherwise unknown Yellow Bleeder who has a better understanding of the problem than I do.
• the possibility of getting a permanent bug fix from some otherwise unknown Yellow Bleeder who has a better understanding of the problem than IBM does.
• a public warning to other Users that 'Here Be Dragons' and to tread carefully.
  
• gratuitous gratification at holding up IBM's dirty underwear? Maybe ;)
• a Great Reversal of the traditional vendor lock on information where the supplier can continue to deny the occurrence of the bug and there is absolutely *Nothing* that the end user can do to get more information.
• a new ability for the individual to publicly prod IBM with a pointed stick and keep Big Blue focused on fixing bugs quickly, or as Gavin said in his reply - "Somehow, blogging seems to make IBM just that little more responsive."

Allen was right in his reply to my blog last year - I should have reported the bug and I didn't (because I considered the bug to be trivial and there was an obvious workaround). Leaving aside my failure in that particular incident I'm interested in other people's opinions regarding non-emotive blogging of software bugs. Is it a good thing to do?
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Oh no, Lotus... surely you wouldn't ...

Installing Lotus Foundations on a client PC is normally a straightforward job - click here, click there, then twiddle my thumbs for five minutes while the code copies down from the server.

Not this time. The install script kept bombing out with 'unable to create file' errors. Two minutes of checking with a text editor found the problem:

set noidfile=no
set logfile=c:\Notes850_Setup.log
echo -------------------- >> %logfile%

A hardcoded 'c:\' in a setup script without a prompt to warn the person installing the software? Surely Lotus wouldn't ... but alas, Lotus did. Of course, this works wonderfully when you are setting up on a PC with a c:\ drive but not so well when the local drive is set to h:\ and a c:\ drive doesn't exist.
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Microsoft eliminates Blue Screen of Death!

Prevx reported today that the dreaded Blue Screen of Death has finally been eliminated from Windows. For Windows 7 (and future releases) the "Blue" screen has been upgraded to a "Black" screen of Death. A spokesman for Microsoft said:

"Customers have been complaining for years about the Blue Screen of Death so we finally acted to remove the problem while still retaining backward compatibility with the BSOD acronym. Note that this new feature will not decrease the frequency of the problem but it will bring comfort to millions of users who can see that we are in control of the situation."

Unconfirmed reports suggest that Microsoft has already made this feature available as a free upgrade for Vista and XP and slipstreamed it into an automatic update that ran in the last week of October.
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