Intel and Microsoft --- how best friends became frenemies

Once upon a time, the duopoly of Intel and Microsoft ruled the computing world, with the monopoly Windows riding on top of countless millions of PCs powered by Intel chips. Today, that Wintel relationship is crumbling, with the once-tight business partners competing against one another as well as cooperating. And things will only deteriorate from here.

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The latest sign of the now-prickly relationship is that next week Microsoft and Intel will hold dueling developers' conferences. Intel holds the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), Sept. 13 to 15 in San Francisco, and Microsoft holds its BUILD conference for developers, from Sept. 13-16 in Anaheim, California.

In bygone times, the partners wouldn't schedule conferences at competing times. But that was in the days before mobile computing upended the technology world. And mobile is what is driving Intel and Microsoft apart.

Take a look at what is expected to occur at each conference, and you can see why the one-time best friends are becoming rivals as well as partners. Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, told Computerworld that Intel plans to show that Intel-made Atom chips can rival ARM chips running Android tablets. He said Intel may even show Android tablets based on Atom at the show. There there will be technical sessions for Android developers at the Intel forum, he adds.

Then, of course, there's the Intel-developed MeeGo designed for phones, netbooks, and more, which will compete with Windows and Windows Phone 7. Intel recognizes that mobile is the future, and so it's betting on Android and MeeGo, competitors to Windows and Windows Phone 7.

Meanwhile, rumors are that a higlight of Microsoft's BUILD conference will be Windows 8 tablets given out to attendees, possibly built by Samsung, and not running Intel chips.

Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 devices don't run on Intel chips, and many Windows 8 tablets won't be running them as well.

Mobile killed the Wintel monopoly, and it's continuing to eat into the close relationship between Microsoft and Intel. And that's a good thing. A varied and robust technology market leads to greater innovation and lower prices. And who would argue with that?

Hackers stole Google SSL certificate, Dutch firm admits

Chrome and Firefox face updates, Microsoft blacklists firm’s certs in Windows 7 and Vista, but not XP

Computerworld – The Dutch company that issued a rogue digital certificate for all Google Internet domains said today that its network had been hacked last month Microsoft 70-640 Training .”

DigiNotar, a Dutch certificate authority (CA) that was acquired earlier this year by Chicago-based Vasco, said it was unaware of the breach for more than a week and had overlooked the in-the-wild Google certificate for over a month.

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Multiple SSL (secure socket layer) certificates were stolen in the July hack, said DigiNotar.

“On July 19, 2011, DigiNotar detected an intrusion into its Certificate Authority (CA) infrastructure, which resulted in the fraudulent issuance of public key certificate requests for a number of domains, including Google.com,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday.

“At that time, an external security audit concluded that all fraudulently issued certificates were revoked. Recently, it was discovered that at least one fraudulent certificate had not been revoked at the time,” said DigiNotar, referring to the certificate valid for all Google properties.

The company did not provide any additional information about the intrusion, such as the origin of the attack or the number of certificates that had been issued to the intruders. DigiNotar has not replied to Computerworld’s questions.

Today, however, a DigiNotar spokesman told Jeremy Kirk of the IDG News Service — like Computerworld, part of IDG — that “several dozen” certificates had been generated by the hackers.

DigiNotar’s timeline shows that the company was unaware of the hack for over a week: The Google certificate was issued July 10, according to information posted to Pastebin.com last Saturday. DigiNotar did not revoke the Google certificate until Monday, Aug. 29.

Fraudulently-acquired certificates are dangerous because they can be used by criminals to conduct “man-in-the-middle” attacks targeting users of legitimate online services and websites. The fake Google certificate, for example, was used by attackers to target Iranian users of the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant’s services, Google said late Monday.

The DigiNotar hack was the second breach of a certificate-issuing firm since March, when Comodo admitted that hackers had used an account assigned to a company partner in southern Europe.to acquire nine certificates for some of the Web’s biggest sites, including Google and Gmail, Microsoft, Skype and Yahoo Microsoft Free MCTS Training and MCTS Online Training.

Initially, Comodo argued that Iran’s government may have been involved in the theft. Days later, however, a solo Iranian hacker claimed responsibility for stealing the SSL certificates.

On Monday, Google pointed a finger at Iran in the DigiNotar hack, saying that attacks using the ill-gotten certificate had targeted Iranian users.

Over the past 24 hours, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla have taken steps to block the rogue certificate.

Google will update Chrome “very soon,” said a company spokesman today, to block all DigiNotar-issued certificates “while investigations continue.”

Beaches and BBQs vs. Blackberrys: Holiday weekends of the IT set

“Weekend? What’s a weekend?” While the rest of the country is escaping their offices for a leisurely weekend, many in IT could end up back at theirs at the beep of a Blackberry.

For all of the talk these days about this about the pie-in-the-sky hope that all of the wage-earners in this land can achieve some semblance of work-life balance, you hear a lot less about those jobs for which the notion of guaranteed days, evenings or holiday weekends off are, quite honestly, a joke.

“Umm… weekend? What’s a weekend?” a New York IT and services consultant told me today.

He wasn’t alone in admitting that as the rest of the country are escaping their offices for a leisurely weekend, he could end up back there at the beep of a Blackberry.

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“I won’t be ‘on-the-clock’ but who knows what’ll happen this weekend since I’m on call. I’ve got a history of jinxed on-call weekends, so my hopes are not high,” said a Houston-based systems analyst.

Though most IT professionals understand that it is the nature of the enterprise technology beast that they are present to toil over switchboards and software upgrades when the rest of an organization’s employees are absent, their work undisrupted, it doesn’t make them any less likely to cross their fingers and hope their number doesn’t come up in the queue.

“I myself will be on call, but I am third in the list so hopefully–knock on wood–nothing goes wrong,” a Microsoft engineer in Tampa told me.

In fact, the difference between manning the grill between rounds of Marco-Polo in the pool with the kids can come down to something as little as what system takes a nosedive.

“… Of course, if it is an Exchange problem, I get bumped right to the top of the list,” the Tampa engineer explained.

Self-employed consultants often say that there is no such thing as a day off when you’re a one man show.

“I am not only a tech, but a business owners, and in some ways this means that no, the ’shop’ per se is never actually fully closed,” said the New York IT and services consultant.

Furthermore, if managing project teams overseas where July 4th is most certainly not a holiday, it’s unlikely to be a quiet day off.

This is not to say that all holiday weekends are filled with dread if you work in IT.

“If you like computers, it doesn’t matter much if you’re stuck working on them over the weekend,” a Sacramento-based software CEO weighed in.

In fact, many even choose to work on personal or business technology projects on the weekend, in part to stay ahead of the game but also because they’re so passionate about it.

“It’s not required for my job, but I’ll be prepping over the weekend for the MCTS: SQL Server 2005 exam,” Jerry Hammond, an operations manager at a computer learning center in Las Vegas told me. “I have some time to do this during my regular work week, but this is once again quickly becoming a competitive market.”