Microsoft

Following the public release of a serious flaw in the way Windows resolves hostnames that do not include a fully-qualified domain name (FQDN), Microsoft has issued a security advisory to acknowledge the issue and offer pre-patch workarounds.

Redmond’s advisory comes more than two weeks after hacker Beau Butler discussed the issue at the Kiwicon 2007 event in New Zealand. The issue affects Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista users. It also relates to all versions of Internet Explorer, including IE 7 for Windows Vista.

Despite years of refinement and the collective experience of millions of users, Windows remains as buggy, enigmatic, and failure-prone as ever. Each new release of the operating system adds a little glitz and a handful of new features, but also just as many new headaches. Sometimes Vista's new features and improved functions seem to be more trouble than they're worth, and older sibling XP certainly isn't getting any easier to live with as it ages.

Instead of labeling the next version of its Silverlight cross-platform browser plug-in 1.1, Microsoft will call it 2.0, and will release a beta version early next year, according to a corporate blog post Thursday.

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac will let users port PowerPoint presentations to iPhones and video-equipped iPods, Microsoft Corp. said yesterday as it unveiled the latest details of the suite scheduled to ship in January.

PowerPoint 2008, the presentation maker included in the bundle, can export creations as a series of pictures -- but not video -- to iPhoto '06 and later. Alternately, users can save the slides to the Mac's Pictures folder.

Microsoft is working on a fix for an eight-year-old flaw in Windows that lets hackers exploit a Web proxy autoconfiguration protocol and take over groups of machines via a single attack. Microsoft has yet to release the update it has been working on since last week that addresses the vulnerability in the Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol (WPAD) in Windows.

Microsoft Corp. will face more than 40 vulnerabilities in Windows Vista next year, as the operating system climbs past the 10% market-share milestone and malware authors really start to find flaws, a McAfee Inc. analyst said today.

"Most of the current malware has ignored Vista," said Craig Schmugar, a threat researcher at McAfee's Avert Lab -- but that's not because the operating system has been frustratingly secure. In fact, Schmugar argued, Vista has been a worthwhile target in the first year of its release.

A group of Haifa researchers has found a security vulnerability in Microsoft's old-but-still-used Windows 2000, enabling the tracking of e-mails, passwords, credit card numbers and all correspondence produced by any computer using that system.

"This is not a theoretical discovery," says Dr. Benny Pinkas of the University of Haifa's computer science department. "Anyone who exploits this security loophole can access this information on other computers."

Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3), the update scheduled to release next year, runs Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite 10% faster than XP SP2, a performance testing software developer reported Friday.

Devil Mountain Software, which earlier in the week claimed Windows Vista SP1 was no faster than the original, repeated some of the same tests on the release candidate of Windows XP SP3, the service pack recently issued to about 15,000 testers.

Microsoft's next version of its instant messenger application will have a new security feature to report users who send unsolicited messages, known as SPIM (spam over IM).

That's one of several new features in Windows Live Messenger 9.0, which was released to some private beta testers on Tuesday, according to Liveside.net, a site that focuses on Microsoft's Live brand of Web-based applications.

Xbox 360 firmware modders currently enjoying the bliss of free gaming heed this warning: Microsoft has begun a new phase of fresh bans on those detected with firmware mods.

A thread on the MaxConsole forums details the developments, as a number of users playing backup copies on Xbox Live sounded off about their newfound bans. Posts noted that the only way to get unbanned from Xbox Live is to get a new console.