Potato I have

The Register reports the buy, and now we wait for positioning with sharepoint. MS’s Jeff Raikes and Groove’s Ray Ozzie (to be MS’s 3rd CTO) discuss a bit, in Q/A format press release. Groove is about decentralization:

PressPass: How will Groove complement Microsoft’s current collaboration offerings?
[…]
Ray Ozzie: Microsoft’s current collaboration products and Groove build on each other’s strengths. Distributed teams can use Groove to create ad-hoc workspaces that reside on team members’ PCs and later have the documents, plans and other workspace content published to a managed SharePoint Web Portal. Or an individual can bring content from a SharePoint site into a Groove workspace on his or her laptop — in order to work on that content with others, to automatically and securely synchronize it between home and work computers, or just to stay productive when temporarily disconnected from the network

Which is consistent with my personal usage of sharepoint as primarily a backing store.

Groove’s folder synchronization briefly caught my attention: I don’t yet have a good solution for multiple desktops and to this point I’m most interested in Fowler’s subversion approach. Groove brings “chat, presence, and notifications” to folder synch, and claims to do security and firewall in a transparent way, but the first bit is far from my synch needs and of course it is all MS only. The marketing materials are slick, of course.

As for my own collaboration, I’m currently running a wiki experiment (our org is very enamored with sharepoint), and couldn’t be happier so far. Otherwise, it’s just classic jabber, outlook mail and calendar, phone and netmeeting.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging! (leaving this test post as a marker of my migration to WordPress)

Regarding the IDN exploit, Firefox has a security patch release that shows punycode in the status and location bars. It has a new config parameter network.IDN_show_punycode that is enabled by default.

To see the new behavior, I had to remove the unicode filter that I had in adblock (a persistent fix to the IDN problem); with the filter in place, any click on an IDN link would be ignored. I then had to re-enable the network.enableIDN parm, my original (and non-persistent, due to a firefox bug); with that set to false, I get this message from the handy test page for spoofed links:

http://sitefinder.verisign.com/lpc?url=www.theshmo%25D0%25BEgroup.com
&host=www.theshmo%25D0%25BEgroup.com

Network Error (dns_unresolved_hostname)
Your requested host “sitefinder.verisign.com” could not be resolved by DNS.
For assistance, contact your network support team.

Here again is a handy test page, where you can see punycode in both the mouse-over URL in the status bar, and in the location bar after going there.

(again via this article on the reg).