As I have posted several times I believe Windows 7 will be out long before 2010, the Officially announced time frame. Recent post by Mary Jo Foley would seem to echo that same belief as she did a little digging and found a few references which would tie Windows 7 to May of next year.

As I’ve posted in the past we know Windows 7 is pretty far along and Microsoft has finally owned up to some of this recently. Lately several more hints have been put out which point to even an earlier release.

1. “WinHEC is the only chance for you to engage with the team at this level – there is not another WinHEC planned before Windows 7 is released.” http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winhec/default.mspx
2. Microsoft WinHEC New Orleans May 3-7, 2009
3. http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:xrpONpX0djAJ:www.neworleanscvb.com/crm/index.cfm/action/ViewForm/FormID/298+winhec+new+orleans&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
4. Asus CEO Jerry Shen, “I think in the future in the second half of next year we will put Windows 7 on Eee PCs. For now it will be Linux and XP and then Windows 7 and not do Vista. http://blog.laptopmag.com/asus-ceo-reveals-eee-pc-sales-numbers-plans-for-touch-eee-pcs-and-more-eee-family-products

Add that with the fact Vista’s bad reputation at this point, Microsoft advertising which is a total bust and that Microsoft will never miss another Christmas shipping season again it’s pretty obvious we will see Windows 7 in 2009 in time for fall.

Today Microsoft released a security update that fixes a remote code execution vulnerability in the Windows Server Service. This is a serious vulnerability and Microsoft has seen targeted attacks using this vulnerability to compromise fully-patched Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 computers so Microsoft released the fix "out of band" (not on the regular Patch Tuesday).

This security update resolves a vulnerability in the Server service that affects all currently supported versions of Windows. Windows XP and older versions are rated as “Critical” while Windows Vista and newer versions are rated as “Important”. Because the vulnerability is potentially wormable on those older versions of Windows, we’re encouraging customers to test and deploy the update as soon as possible. MSRC Blog

Most perimeter firewalls will block exploit attempts from outside your organization

If you are behind a perimeter firewall that filters inbound connections to TCP ports 139 and 445, you will not be reachable from the Internet. This is a common home user scenario. In this scenario, only the machines in your local LAN will have the ability to exploit this vulnerability. That said however the exploit is wormable and as a Trojan has been seen in the wild. The Trojan Gimmiv will certainly be modified so antivirus vendors will likely be behind in detection.

All users are urged to immediately download and install this update either by visiting Windows Update or selecting your operating system from the following website:

MS08-067

Source: Windows Weekly Podcast, Oct. 10^th, http://twit.tv/ww

Paul Thurrott of WinSuperSite talks about several Microsoft products in a very less than flattering way. From Hyper-V to Windows Mobile he tosses some pretty big stones at MS.

About 18 minutes in Paul is asked about his move to a beast machine to run Hyper V and his very blunt comment is:

“I first installed Microsoft Hyper-V server which is the standalone version but then I later went back to Windows 2008 Server because Hyper-V is horribly broken.”

Further comments about how poor the documentation is for Hyper-V is, how Microsoft is asking the end user to do the testing and report back and how the tech list are full of other people reporting the same exact errors.

http://tinyurl.com/horriblybroken

http://preview.tinyurl.com/horriblybroken

If you are out there browsing around and come across a pop up like this:

Please do me and the rest of us a huge favor and don’t click “ok” or for that matter “Cancel”, just use the X or Task Manager to close out IE. To say the least this is not a legit. In either case your likely to get redirected to another site which will claim your system is all infected:

Again please don’t click anything and just get out of Explorer as quick as possible. Make sure your running a solid Antivirus and Spyware solution such as AVG and just say No to Malware.

Seems NBC is willing to go to the ends of the earth tracking down every site that post the video which went right to the heart of the Democrats pocketbook, George Soros. All references to the skit on Hulu and NBC have been pulled. Uploads to YouTube are pulled within minutes. Well NBC let’s see how much pull you have and if you can force this blogger to pull the screen shots and transcript down.

It amazes me when time after time I find Microsoft sites done in Flash vs. Silverlight.  Once again Microsoft has done this with their Small Business Summit website.