Microsoft

This holiday season Microsoft has a special surprise in store for “naughty” Xbox 360 hackers — a particular sweeping ban that relies on spotting modified drive firmware. Rolled out starting last week, the ban, according to sources, blocks the installation of games on the Xbox hard drive, blocks the Windows Media Player media extender, corrupts saves/Gamertags used on the machine, and most significantly prevents the console from accessing Xbox Live.

According to early estimates 600,000 consoles were effected, but more recent estimates put the number at close to 1 million consoles.

The National Security Agency helped Microsoft harden Windows 7 against attacks and is providing similar assistance to Apple, Sun Microsystems and Red Hat too, an agency official said.

The admission came in prepared remarks delivered Tuesday by Richard Schaeffer, the NSA's information assurance director, at a hearing before the Senate's Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security.

At PDC '09 Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live division, revealed the first details of the company's next browser, Internet Explorer 9. Even though the new browser is still in an early development stage, the first few builds are being tested internally. It is poised to come with some fancy improvements - including HTML5 and CSS3 support.

Microsoft is creating technology to give businesses more fine-grained control over access to data stored in the company's upcoming SQL Azure database cloud service, a senior engineer said today. Code-named Vidalia, the technology will provide "trustworthy data collaboration for highly sensitive business data across disparate trust domains," said Microsoft technical fellow Dave Campbell in a talk at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2009 (PDC09) in Los Angeles.

Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference is currently under way, and as usual, the technical fellows at Microsoft gave speeches about the deep architecture of Windows - in this case, Windows 7 of course. As it turns out, quite some seriously impressive changes have been made to the very core of Windows - all without breaking a single application. Thanks to BetaNews for summarising this technical talk so well.

Microsoft says businesses should continue to remain vigilant in protecting their computers against malware attacks and unwanted software, despite new figures which show infection rates are continuing to fall.

The comments come as the company reveals the results of its Security Intelligence Report for the first half of 2009, which show Australia's average infection rate has improved from 4.7 out of every 1,000 computers to 3.9, compared to the global average of 8.7.

Windows users running 64-bit versions of the operating system are less likely to get infected by attack code, Microsoft's security team said yesterday. But that doesn't mean they won't, countered an outside security researcher.

"64-bit Windows has some of the lowest reported malware infection rates in the first half of 2009," said Joe Faulhaber of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center in a post to the group's blog yesterday. "64-bit malware is still exceedingly rare in the wild."

Back in August, I told you how two of us in the PC Pro office had been struck down with an irritating Windows 7 chkdsk bug. The fault saw the check disk utility spring into life every sodding time Stuart Turton and I booted our PCs, yet report a clean bill of health once it had completed its laborious scan.

Microsoft officials confirmed on November 13 — a few days after pulling a Windows 7 download tool that allegedly contained improperly-licensed open-souce code — that the company did, indeed violate the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Microsoft has been having a tough time keeping its Office 2010 bits from leaking.

On November 13, the Professional Plus version of the next version of Microsoft’s productivity suite leaked again. The version that is making its way over the torrents is marked as Beta 2, according to the Neowin.net site, and is build number 14.0.4514.1009.