"Gone in 60 seconds" takes on a whole new meaning

       Ihave been using Excel and Access 2007 recently and there are some good points and bad points about these products, especially for those who want to delve a bit deeper into things.
       The first thing I discovered that really annoyed me was that you can't use any of the usual SQL comments in Access SQL queries, as the Jet Database Engine doesn't support this. Some other SQL that would work just fine under, say,SQLServer also does not run. No prizes for guessing that is a deliberate ploy to get people to upgrade to SQLServer from Access.
       That being said, I really like the power of Microsoft Queries and how you can turn these into reports within Excel. You will have to learn a bit about conditional formatting and =IF() statements, but with a bit of work you can turn your data in Access into a fairly decent report under Excel.
       Pivot Tables are really powerful in Excel 2007 and a lot easier to use. Moving both Microsoft Queries and Pivot Tables between Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 can be a bit of a pain as well. Also do not point to an empty Access table with a Microsoft Query or you may have to reboot to get out of it. You would think that they would have considered that as a possibility, but not so.
       I am still frustrated by the rearrangement of where things are under the new Ribbon implementation but that is a matter of practice. Sometimes things are not in the places you would expect to find them.
       Industry news
       If you think that your wireless network is safe, think again. Some networking nerds say they can break the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption within 60 seconds. So "gone in 60 seconds" can take on a whole new meaning here. How they do it is a little technical but the old record was somewhere between 10-15 minutes.Shortening the time is a great boost to hackers but not so good for users.
       The good news is that the technique will not work for WPA 2, the AES-based successor to WPA. The bad news is that this system is not yet widely available.
       With more good news comes the announcement that someone has released the source code for a Windows Trojan that can record Skype calls as MP3 files. Not so good for your VoIP privacy. The individual concerned said that it was released so that malware protection could be created as quickly as possible.
       There are the usual conspiracy theories that a government or two wanted this capability to be able to eavesdrop on Skype calls. Germany has been quite vocal on the issue and law enforcement agencies in Europe and the US have also been looking for this capability. As with any malware, you have to be infected first. If you take the regular precautions,you will not be subject to such an attack.
       So I was scanning though Engadget looking at all the new toys and I saw that Sony is brining out a motion-based controller. The unit is being compared to Microsoft's Natal project.
       I admit to being impressed with the Sony demo. It uses a camera, called an "eye", to track the unit in the hand. The motion tracking is also one-to-one so that as the controller is moved it tracks on the screen with whatever is being represented, be it a racket, a weapon or just about anything you can think of.
       Compared to the Microsoft demo, I don't see them being competitive. Of course this is just an extension of the already popular Nintendo technology and I suspect that they will have something similar out, perhaps before Sony delivers their product. Microsoft's product will be for the more casual user.
       It can't help Microsoft that their Xbox has been rated as the least reliable console, with a nearly 24 percent failure rate after two years compared to 10 percent for Sony's PS3 and under 3 percent for Nintendo. You can find the full report here www.squaretrade.com.
       Researchers at Sentrigo have discovered a security vulnerability in SQL Server 2000,2005 and 2008.As an Administrator you can change passwords but not see them. The hole allows Administrators to see the passwords and possibly use them without the user being aware, like they would be if the password was changed. Microsoft says administrators have lots of control anyway so this is not an issue they are going to address. This gives me the usual warm, fuzzy feeling of security.
       On the subject of security a survey by PC tools has found that women are better than men at using passwords, in the UK at least. I guess it has something to do with creativity,attention to detail and being better at wanting to hide things. It reported however that men are better at knowing what the risks are when using the Internet and applications such as Facebook.
       Toshiba claims that it is winning in the 2.5" hard drive area with a 640GB drive but Seagate had already released one before them without the fanfare.Like all things in the computer market this will not stand for very long as Western Digital and Toshiba have already announced 1TB drives. Let's see who wins this one, and for how short a time they will wear the crown.
       In Apple news you can now edit Microsoft Office 2007 documents with your iPhone. The first question that comes to mind when you have no keyboard is why? Quickoffice was rolled out with support for .docx and .xlsx files,which is somewhat brave since the Word legal challenge has not been resolved as yet.
       This means that iPhone users can now edit the latest file formats for Office 2008 for the Mac and Office 2007. The Office Open XML files, a Microsoft standard that was rushed through the approval process, are supported to write
       along with read for .PDF and PowerPoint files. It costs $14.99(510 baht) and at the time of writing this was the best-selling app in the business - but you can't use it for business - section of the Apple iStore.
       In Linux news, administrators at the Apache Software Foundation faced a recent hacker attack that briefly closed down their site a week and a bit back,
       It had something to do with Secure Shell keys facilitating the attack. None of the coderepositories were touched.The issue has been addressed by generating 4096 bit keys, which at this point in the security evolution are not crackable without a very powerful set of computers working for a very, very long time. They also implemented some other changes.
       What makes this attack so interesting is that the foundation made public the whole process from front to back and also pointed out how quickly they not only recovered from the attack but immediately implemented changes to stop any further attempts.They also were very candid about their mistakes in the matter something other large organisations could learn from.Apple will never discuss security breaches with the public no matter how obvious they may have been and Microsoft will often take quite a while to address an issue.