Microsoft

When it comes to free software, the open-source community certainly has a monopoly on high-minded posturing and puffy rhetoric. Just take a look at the Philosophy page of the GNU operating system's website:

"Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer. Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program's users have the four essential freedoms."

Microsoft is taking its Zune services down for maintenance Monday night, January 25, at 10 p.m. PT for approximately 24 hours. During that period, no content will be rentable or purchasable.

That doesn’t mean it’s time to don the tin-foil hats, however.

Windows 7 has turned out to be the darling of the operating system market share these days, nabbing a larger slice of the pie in a shorter amount of time than Vista - and overtaking all versions of Mac OS X.

According to a report published on Ars Technica, a month after being released Windows 7 was already at the 4.00 percent mark, compared to the Microsoft OS that frustrated everyone (Vista), which was at 0.93 percent after a month. After two months, Windows 7 was 5.71 percent, while Vista was at only 2.04 percent in its early days.

Microsoft was aware months ago of a critical security vulnerability well before hackers exploited it to breach Google, Adobe and other large U.S. companies but did not patch the hole completely until Thursday.

The software giant had intended to release a patch for the flaw in February — more than four months after learning about it, but had to speed up that plan and role it out this week in the wake of news that Google and others had been hacked through the flaw, the world’s largest software maker acknowledged Thursday.

Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser on Thursday, Microsoft Corp. said on its security Web site that the patch will fix eight holes in IE, including the “remote code execution” flaw that apparently was the weak link in the recent China hacking episodes.

Noting that the security hole had possibly been exploited by the hackers to initiate “limited and targeted” cyberattacks on Google and 20 other companies in China, Microsoft elaborated that the vulnerability enabled the hackers to remotely take over a PC after a user’s visit to a malicious code-laden site.

Congress should enact a law laying the groundwork for protecting consumers who use the Internet "cloud" to store data before states come in with an unwieldy patchwork of conflicting legislation, said Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith on Wednesday.

Smith, who said Microsoft had invested "billions" to build a cloud infrastructure, called for federal laws that would would improve privacy protections and strengthen law enforcement in going after hackers.

Microsoft is having a rough start to 2010. The company is facing criticism over a security issue in Internet Explorer, regulators have it under the microscope, and Windows Mobile 7 is still nowhere to be found. Microsoft needs to do something soon or see its credibility with customers continue to erode.

Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) said it planned to release the first emergency out-of-band patch of the New Year, repairing a critical exploited vulnerability in Internet Explorer, found as the source of malicious attacks against Google earlier this month.

Microsoft fell short of mentioning when the update would be released but promised to have more information about the impending patch on Wednesday. Security researchers say that the IE vulnerability was exploited by hackers in a series of cyberattacks against Google (NSDQ:GOOG) earlier this month.

Microsoft has said it will cut the length of time it stores IP addresses of Web searchers using its Bing search engine from 18 months to six. Google cut the time it retains searchers’ IP addresses to nine months in August 2008. However, Microsoft say that their initiative goes much further than Google’s, because Microsoft will delete all parts of the IP address after six months, while Google still retains part of the address after its self-imposed nine-month cut-off point.

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) has yet to patch a vulnerability in some versions of Internet Explorer that allow remote code execution, but not every corporation could easily change browsers, industry experts say.

Last weekend, the German Federal Office for Information (BSI) Security warned users against using versions 6, 7 and 8 of the browser until Microsoft patched the vulnerability referred to Microsoft in advisory 979352, the remote execution security hole believed to be connected to recent attacks on search engine Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG)