Microsoft

Microsoft on Saturday restarted its roll-out of the Windows 7 beta, 24 hours after it aborted the launch when heavy demand stalled its servers. As of noon PST, Microsoft said that the primary beta download site, an off-shoot of the Windows section Microsoft.com, was "up and working."

Springboard Series, another public download location targeting IT professionals, was also live. Also on Saturday, Microsoft was providing beta activation keys, offering them to users just prior to beginning the download.

Microsoft's first security update rollout of 2009 may be a quiet one, according to an advance notification released Thursday. January's Patch Tuesday will consist of just one "critical" patch.

The light release follows a December patch cycle that covered the most vulnerabilities in the history of Patch Tuesday, as well as included an out-of-cycle patch for Internet Explorer. This latest bulletin addresses remote code execution and will cover Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Its severity has been deemed merely "moderate" for Vista and Windows Server 2008.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked off the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show on Wednesday with an impassioned endorsement of PCs and a sneak peek at the company's future Windows 7 operating system.

It’s not much of a secret at this point, but CEO Steve Ballmer is expected to announce official availability of the closed Windows 7 Beta 1 release during his Consumer Electronics Show keynote address on January 7. The official (non-Torrented) Beta 1 bits should be available to pre-approved Windows 7 Beta 1 testers later Wednesday night or early on January 8.

Over than past few months, the Microsoft Virtual Earth team has been preparing the service for one of it's biggest updates since the release. What's the definition of "one of it's biggest"? Well it's over 48TB of new and improved imagery. Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth technical evangelist at Microsoft, announced that the service has updated it's global vector data for the majority of it's tile sets.

My colleague Jason Perlow has been playing with Windows 7, and he hates it. The sad thing is, all the things he hates are improvements, in my opinion, which just goes to show that you really can’t please everyone. But what’s sad to see is that every setting Jason describes as broken is in fact easily customizable so it works the way he wants it.

The crux of Jason’s complaint is simple: “I learned how to use Windows in 1998. Don’t change a thing.” Here’s his main argument in a nutshell:

The rumor that Microsoft was set to lay off people on January 15th, 2009 is no longer a rumor but a fact. Staff at Microsoft have been informed that the company is readying major layoffs to its worldwide operations and it's not a small cut, either.

Currently Microsoft employs about 90,000 people across the world and from what we're hearing, some 15,000 of those are expected to be giving marching orders come January 15th. That's almost 17 percent of Microsoft's total work force, not exactly a small number.

BitTorrent brought the Christmas present Santa didn't: Leaked build of Windows 7, whose official Beta 1 release is perhaps days away. Was this a craftily timed Microsoft marketing leak?

Who leaked Windows 7? Was it Microsoft? Or hackers? Or the 1991 Denver Broncos?

Microsoft's Windows 7 beta 1 was not officially intended for release until January. However, the release somehow hit torrent sites this week. Many, including commenters here at DailyTech, suspected the "leak" was really a clever ruse by Microsoft to drum up tech community excitement for its upcoming release.

Now Microsoft Watch's Joe Wilcox, an observer on all things Microsoft, has thrown in his support for such theories.

Researchers reckon a security bug in Windows Media Player creates a means for hackers to inject hostile code onto vulnerable systems. However Microsoft has denied this, saying that the bug only creates a means to crash the software without posing a more damaging security risk.

The WMP integer overflow bug reportedly kicks in when the media player attempts to process maliciously constructed WAV, SND, or MIDI files. Security researchers have created proof of concept code demonstrating the vulnerability, the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Centre reports.