Best of the blogs: “When the source of the criticism is Microsoft, and when the accusations being leveled are both baseless and deliberately misleading, I do take offense,” Randall Kennedy admits. He’s referring to Team Redmond’s rebuttal of the series of controversial entries about Vista’s performance and “how it sucks compared to Windows XP” and SP3 specifically. When Microsoft Attacks! Microsoft Windows Vista team member Nick White criticized Kennedy’s OfficeBench linear test script. “What really steams my clams is the fact that Microsoft tried to dismiss OfficeBench without so much as a shred of technical data to support their claims. That’s FUD mongering at its worst.” The news beat: Britain’s intelligence agency, MI5, reports that Shell and Rolls Royce were hacked by Chinese spies plying the networks for information. Intel says that its forthcoming Diamondville chip will be based on Silverthorne, a 45 nanometer microarchitecture-based processor. Attackers target an upatched Apple QuickTime flaw that could enable them to run code on a victim’s PC. And open source content management vendor Alfresco aligns with Adobe and also bashes SharePoint, calling it “slow and not scalable” and “hard to program and extend.” Notes from the field: Robert X. Cringely asks the timely question Has Facebook jumped the shark? “I’m not the only old coot who’s had his fill of Facebook,” Cringe writes, referring of course to the Beacon service that, it turns out, is collecting shopping information even when users are logged out. “Either they’re evil, and can’t be trusted. Or they’re inept, and can’t be trusted.” Software Development