“The U.S. can't match Canada in friendliness, crime rates, personal freedom, or the environment. But no immigrant wants to walk around in a snow suit trying to understand French either.” (Scott Adams, in today’s Dilbert Blog)

I hope that none of my Canadian kith and kin read my blog, or Scott’s :-)

"If any of my colleagues or friends from Google, or who represent Google, are here, I invite you to jump up and scream and yell at me. For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem. I think we're going to continually to see a problem, potentially, with Google, who I think so far has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising lawfully." (Remarks in June by Christine Varney, President Obama's nominee to be the next U.S. antitrust chief, indicate Google's ties to the administration won't keep it out of the cross hairs – as quoted in GMSV, 2/18/2009)

One of the things in life that I really don’t understand is why people don’t listen. Why they insist on repeating the same mistakes that others made before them multiple times.

According do ZDNet, last week-end the US customer database of security software vendor Kapersky Labs was hacked (Kaspersky denies leaks after SQL hack), using SQL injection code. Such a situation is never funny, even if you’re somebody who preaches security. The real issue is that the database vendor claims to have no security vulnerabilities since several years. ZDNet’s article references a similar attack on Microsoft, using the same technique of SQL injection code. But that had happened already in 2007.

A spokesperson for the company said in a statement:

"The site was only vulnerable for a very brief period, and upon detection of the vulnerability we immediately took action to roll back the subsection of the site and the vulnerability was eliminated within 30 minutes of detection. The vulnerability wasn't critical and no data was compromised from the site."

Well, I wonder why they didn’t secure their customers’ data already two years ago. And I question myself: If I’d be a customer of theirs, would I believe such a statement to be true?

In a few weeks I’ll receive a new credit card. My bank had informed me that my current card had to be blocked, after an attack on a payment processing company exposed the customer data of several million customers – including mine. That was the second incident in less than twelve months.

"The only thing that happens in front of a countdown clock is a bunch of bad decisions." (Steven Sinofsky, on reasons for the absence of a release date for a product)

"Your future self is lazier than you are now." (Mike Torres, about Getting Things Done)

So?

Focus on your important tasks, not on due dates suggested by others.

"Engineers ask HOW, architects ask WHY." Miha Kralj

So?