The Engineering Windows 7 blog, or E7 for short, is hosted by the two senior engineering managers for the Windows 7 product, Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky. Jon and Steven, along with members of the engineering team will post, comment, and participate in this blog.

The main goal is to maintain a little bit more control over the communication around Windows 7 (some might say that this is a significant understatement) and also have an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how they balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows. The blog team promise and will deliver such a dialog with this blog.

So if you are interested in partisipating in the development of the “Vista upgrade” this blog is definitely a good place to start. Stop complaining and let them know what you would like to see instead. Great ideas and constructive critisism could benefit the whole Windows community (which is like 90% of us).

I’d like to suggest less focus on GUI and more focus on functionality and speed. Wouldn’t it be great if you could fire up Windows in 10-15 seconds and start working immediately?

This one is just hilarious… Makes you laugh, and maybe also think a bit

There’s been a lot of talk about Google Street View lately and Google has received complaints from several countries for various reasons (USA, Australia, France, Italy, Australia and Thailand).  Last weekend the following image from Sherwood, Arkansas (US) was “captured” by the Google Street View team:

Even though it has received massive criticism the photo is still available.

In Thailand you can clearly identify persons “associating” with ladies of easy virtue (probably other places as well). Furthermore, photos of persons caught during personal crisis or under unfortunate circumstances seems to fire up under the debate whether this new map service is indeed an invasion of privacy.

Google on the other side claims that there isn’t such a thing as absolute privacy any more IF you are photographed and published while in public areas.

As far as I can understand this service is supposed to be a map service. Therefore I can’t understand why people and “events” should be displayed as they/it have/has nothing to do with the service itself. Concequently Google needs to “filter” this service before publishing in my opinion and only display what is really relevant.

Seeing your house on fire, or anyone doing something they’re not supposed to be doing for that matter doesn’t serve anyone any good. I understand the photo team has limited time in order to keep everything up to date, but then again they could replace some images with others (previously taken) if something out of the ordinary is taking place at the time of “capturing”.

What’s your take on this? And have you come across anything special on Google Street View’s lately?

A (bored) Russian physicist has successfully hacked an emergency patch designed to fix a recently discovered DNS vulnerability.

Evgeniy Polyakov reportedly used two desktop computers and a high-speed network link to fool the patch into returning a spoofed address in just 10 hours.

According to Polyakov, a typical attack server generates approximately 40,000-50,000 fake replies before hitting on the right one. Polyakov also noted that if the port is matched “the probability of successful poisoning is more than 60 per cent”.

Alarmed insecurity experts warned the patch could be exploited to redirect Internet traffic and collect user passwords.

The hacker appears to state on a Russian Blog, “DJBDNS does not suffer from this attack. It does. Everyone does. With some tweaks it can take longer than BIND, but overall problem is there.”

Read the full story at New York Times.

In less than one hour the Olympics will be officially opened at the Olympic stadium in Bejing. The Chinese are going to fire 35000 (yes 35 thousand) rockets (firework, not missiles) into the air during the show. Below is an image of how it looked like during the “rehearsal”;

I do indeed hope everything goes well and best of luck to all you Norwegian athletes!