Microsoft

Microsoft will be launching a bunch of updates for its Office application suite and Internet Explorer in a few hours' time; eight patches issued by the software giant will be addressing 23 vulnerabilities.

Of the eight security bulletins for this April's Patch Thursday, five have been labelled as critical; the most notable of them will take care of a zero-day flaw in Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet package that was discovered back in February 2009.

Will Windows 7 be the most secure operating system ever? Microsoft seem to think so. Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner made the following bold statement yesterday:

Microsoft is trying to ease the confusion about Windows XP support, and so the company is circulating on Monday details about what will change and what will remain the same.

Let's start with the brief but noteworthy changes. Microsoft confirms that XP is now entering the Extended Support phase, where it will reside for five years. What that means is that IT shops will need to have a Premier support contract with Microsoft to get non-security hotfixes, and those will carry a fee.

Microsoft Corp. will begin pushing Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) to users running the older IE6 and IE7 browsers next week, the company has announced.

Although people running earlier versions of IE8 have been seeing upgrade offers since Microsoft released the final code last month, only now is the company getting around to posting the new browser on Windows Update.

With the release of its latest Security Intelligence Report, Microsoft is encouraging its partners and customers to become more security aware and educated, as new attack tactics are on the rise.

Microsoft Corp. was forced to pick up the patching pace in the second half of 2008, the company admitted last week, as it fixed 67 percent more flaws and released 17% more security updates in the period than it had in the first six months of the year.

Included in the bugs patched during the latter months of the year was the vulnerability exploited by Conficker, a worm that led to the biggest infection outbreak in years and a minor media frenzy last week.

‘TIS EASTER SUNDAY and it seems Microsoft is commemorating the resurrection with a little resurrecting of its own, dragging us away from our chocolate egg hunt with snooze, er, news that its talks with Yahoo are back on again.

After restraining himself from any talk of MicroHoo!! for the duration of Lent, Ballmer purportedly cracked like an Easter egg and met with Yahoo's new chief executive Carol Bartz face to face last week.

After some comparatively light patch rollouts in past months, Microsoft's April Patch Tuesday promises a fuller slate with eight security bulletins. Five are rated "critical" and two "important," with one rare "moderate" patch.

Windows XP will pass another milestone on the road to retirement next week when Microsoft withdraws mainstream support for the operating system.. While the company said that it will continue to provide free security fixes for XP until 2014, any future bugs found in the platform will not be fixed unless customers pay for additional support.

Mainstream support for XP will end on 14 April 2009, over seven years after the operating system originally shipped.

Some court rulings are just rich with irony. Today a jury found that Microsoft infringed on Uniloc patents for product activation. Microsoft uses the technology to protect its software from theft. Who's stealing from whom?

I expect to read lots of comments on this blog praising today's jury verdict, which ordered Microsoft to pay Uniloc $388 million. Gauging from comments to past posts about product activation, many of you don't much like it.