Microsoft

An outfit called Digital Armaments has announced a $20,000 bounty for hackers that cook up and exploitable vulnerability or working exploit for Windows applications.

The contest’s deadline is Feb. 29.

Aside from the creepiness of the whole effort, Ryan Naraine points out that there’s not much known about Digital Armaments. The company is privately held and its backers are a mystery. In any case, Digital Armaments is upping the ante for acquired exploits relative to previous efforts.

Vista Service Pack 1 comes with an important update for gamers - DirectX 10.1. The catch? You need brand new hardware to support it, and NVIDIA enthusiasts are left totally out in the cold.

We interrupt our ongoing series of Microsoft reorg posts to speculate on one heck of a speculative post by pundit Robert Cringely.

Cringely thinks an Apple-Adobe merger makes sense on a variety of fronts. If it ever did come to pass, it would make for interesting competitive times vis-a-vis the pair’s relationship with Microsoft.

While the the Microsoft depature upon which most company watchers focused this week was that of Bruce Jaffe — the former Mergers & Acquisitions Chief — another Microsoft veteran is moving on, as well.

Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft’s General Manager of Platform Strategy, is leaving the company to join a startup.

MSN Messenger was the instant messaging client of choice for hackers, thieves and many types of malware in 2007.

The IM client received 45 percent of all malware threats -- more than double the amount any other service received, according to a report released yesterday by Foster City, Calif.-based security solution provider Facetime Communications. Yahoo received 20 percent, AOL Instant Messenger received 19 percent, and all other IM networks received 15 percent combined.

Will 2008 be a challenge for Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)? That's not the message one would necessarily glean from an examination of the just-ended year. Microsoft had a solid 2007. In its last full quarter of the calendar year, sales were up 27% and profits jumped 23% percent. The company could also boast that it sold twice as many copies of its new Windows Vista operating system in the weeks following Vista's January launch than it did copies of Windows XP during XP's honeymoon period.

Microsoft has offered to buy enterprise search software company Fast Search And Transfer for 6.6 billion Norwegian kroner (US$1.2 billion).

The acquisition will bring Microsoft powerful high-end search technologies to complement its enterprise infrastructure offering, the company said.

Microsoft kicked off 2008 with two patches -- one "Critical," one "Important."

Although the release is light, security experts call the roll out an intriguing mix of both server- and client-side concerns. Redmond said the critical update resolves two privately reported vulnerabilities in TCP/IP processing.

Soon after Windows Vista came out, many suggestions for tweaking the operating system to improve performance emerged. Unfortunately, most of those tweaks turned out to be pretty disappointing: they either provided the illusion of better performance but did nothing of substance, or they were rehashes of existing Windows XP tips that might note even be valid on Vista.

A new Microsoft patent has the Internet abuzz with tinfoil-hat-like conspiracy theories. The patent, which covers biometric feedback that can trigger certain features in software, has triggered adverse reactions by bloggers who are convinced that this is all part of a sinister plot by corporations and governments to closely monitor their citizens. But is it? The answer lies in the patent itself, and like all patent documents, it's long and tedious reading. Fortunately, you have Ars Technica to do it for you.