The news beat: A research firm lists the 10 biggest challenges facing Microsoft in 2006. Chief among those: Marketing Windows Vista. Folks behind the Opera browser dismiss Google takeover talks as nothing but rumor, and Sun Microsystems updates its portal server for Web 2.0. Security: In the holiday spirit, a worm dubbed Dasher is targeting Windows. Dasher, along with two other recently posted attacks, could crash or gum up Internet Explorer. Is anyone other than me ready for IE 7? (I still can’t go full force to Firefox because some of the apps I use most frequently are bootstrapped to IE.) Open source: The past year has seen significant changes in open source software, perhaps most notably vendors stepping up efforts to simplify usage and licensing while assuring customers that they can be confident in deployments. Columnists’ Corner: Roger Grimes advises his clients to use one or more honeypots — sticky traps for detecting malware. The reason? Plain and simple, all computer security will fail in one way or another. Honeypots, you see, serve as early warning systems. “As a non-production asset, nothing should ever touch the honeypot — that way, if something touches it, probes it, port scans, or tries to log on to it, you’ll know it’s malicious, and you can capture as much information as possible from the initial contact,” Grimes explains. Listen now to the audio companion for this blog. InfoWorld Daily Podcast: Enterprise technology in 5 minutes or less. https://akamai.infoworld.com/podcasts/IFW_Daily_12-16-05.mp3 Software Development