Last summer, Microsoft announced that it had sold 175,000,000 Windows 7 licenses through the end of June 2010. Cranking together a few numbers produced some surprising results, which I talked about in my July 26, 2010, article "Do the math: 175 million copies of Windows 7 isn't that impressive."
We've known for almost a year that Microsoft is building facial recognition technology into Windows 8, potentially offering a more secure (and fun) way to log into your computer.
Now it appears Microsoft is getting closer to making this reality, according to websites that have published leaked early builds of the next-generation operating system.
When Joshua Blake tweeted to me on April 18 that Microsoft was planning to open source the coming Kinect software development kit (SDK), I sat up and took notice.
Blake is the OpenKinect Community founder, a Microsoft Surface Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and Technical Director of the InfoStrat Advanced Technology Group.
Microsoft released two security advisories that included solutions April 13 as part of its massive April security update. Along with the 17 security bulletins in the April patch, Microsoft released a tool to help protect older versions of Office, as well as an update to the winload.exe program.
The Office File Validation tool scans and validates Word files in Office 2003 and Office 2007, checking for malformed files employed by hackers to spread malware. This feature, which installs as an Office add-in, already comes standard in Microsoft Office 2010.
