Microsoft has hired Paul Laudanski, the man behind the anti-phishing Castlecops.com Web site, to help with the software company's phishing and spam investigations.
Laudanski, a former volunteer firefighter, announced the move on Castlecops.com last week, saying that he's looking to find someone else to run the site that he founded in 2002.
After outcry from various constituencies over the past couple of days, Microsoft has pulled from its CodePlex site its Sandcastle project for failure to comply with the terms and conditions required in order to be qualify as bona-fide open source.
Sandcastle is a documentation compiler for managed class libraries that was labeled as being available under the Microsoft Permissive License, one of two Open Source Initiative-approved licenses under which Microsoft provides access to its source code.
Microsoft says it plans to test-release a feature-complete version of its Internet Explorer 8 Web browser in August.
Microsoft released a first test version of IE 8 in March, providing developers and web designers a preview of the latest update to the world's most widely-used browser.
The next test release, IE 8 Beta 2, will be targeted more at ordinary web users. It will come with all the features that the browser will have when it is officially launched - although it may still contain bugs, since it is a test version.
Microsoft’s monthly security update is coming up next week and the company has issued its usual list of bugs to be quashed which includes three critical updates, three important updates and one classed as moderate.
Microsoft plans to issue seven sets of security patches next week, including critical fixes for DirectX, Internet Explorer and Bluetooth wireless software for Windows.
The updates are due Tuesday, the day Microsoft had previously scheduled to release its security patches. Fixes are also slated for Active Directory, the Windows Internet Name Service (WINS) and the Pragmatic General Multicast (PGM) protocol, used by Windows to stream media to many recipients. These updates are all rated "important."
While Apple is encouraging its install base to upgrade to the latest version of the Mac OS X operating system, a new sales pitch by its Redmond-based rival to the north recommends that customers unhappy with Vista take a step in the opposite direction 'for free.'
Speaking at an event Tuesday in the nation's capital, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said his company's licensing policy allows for customers to install the previous generation of Windows should Vista not impress.
In what Microsoft chairman Bill Gated described as his last keynote before he stops working full-time at the company he co-founded, the enigmatic tech visionary showed developers attending the company's 16th Tech-Ed conference Tuesday that he still has the drive to promote upcoming products even as he's cleaning out his office.
Amid reminiscences about the evolution of the software industry –Microsoft's first product was a Basic language interpreter, after all – Gates took the time to show off forthcoming development platforms and programming tools.
At TechEd today Bill Gates said that the second beta of Silverlight 2 will be available for download at the end of the week with a Go Live license. The Go Live license is similar to the one that was used late in the beta process for Silverlight 1 and it allows developers to roll out applications to production but with limited support from Microsoft.
If you can't kill it, at least try to figure out how to make money off it.
That appears to be the lesson Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has learned from Windows XP recently.
The company announced Tuesday that, given the demand for XP on so-called "ultra low-cost PCs," or ULCPC, it is extending availability of XP to a new category of ULCPC which it refers to as "nettops." (Pronounced 'net tops.')
Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) ships with an out-of-date version of Adobe's Flash Player that's vulnerable to recently-spotted attacks, according to Microsoft's support documentation.
Windows XP SP3 includes Flash Player 9.0.115.0, a version released by Adobe Systems Inc. in December 2007 . That version of Flash Player, however, was superseded by version 9.0.124.0 on April 8, nearly two weeks before Microsoft decided SP3 was done by giving it a Release To Manufacturing (RTM) label and sending it out for distribution.
