Microsoft

Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail Webmail service remained inaccessible to a portion of its users for several hours on Friday, but the problem has been resolved. Windows Live Hotmail, which has about 310 million active users worldwide, became unavailable between approximately 6:30 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time and "late morning," a spokeswoman for Microsoft said.

She declined to specify how many users were affected, saying only that the problem affected "a limited set of customers."

Microsoft Windows will run more PCs than there are cars in the world by the end of Microsoft's fiscal year 2008, said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer July 26 at the company's analyst day here. The software giant announced it sold 60 million copies of Windows Vista this year, more than the entire installed base of Apple, and is well on the way to reaching 1 billion Windows users by the end of the fiscal year, Ballmer and Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner told analysts and reporters. The latest number includes 40 million copies sold in the first 100 days of the product's January release.

Microsoft will broker online ad sales for social news site Digg.com, the two companies said on Wednesday.

Microsoft also announced a similar deal this week involving its in-game advertising subsidiary Massive. Massive will serve contextual ads inside five select Electronic Arts video games.

"This move gives us an advertising partner with a larger organization and a more scalable technology platform to keep pace with Digg's growth," said Kevin Rose, CEO of Digg, in a blog post. "Best of all, it lets the Digg team completely focus on new feature development."

At an internal meeting for its sales force this week, Microsoft confirmed the code name and approximate timing for Windows Vista's successor. The details, such as they are, aren't a huge surprise, but given the dearth of information from Microsoft on its next PC operating system, any confirmation seems notable.

According to a series of PowerPoint slides presented at the company's internal "MGX" global sales meeting this week, the new version is, as expected, known by the internal name "Windows 7," and it's due out in approximately three years.

Microsoft researchers are working on a variety of location-based tools, some of which could turn into interesting commercial applications.

In one project, the researchers gave cheap GPS (Global Positioning System) devices to drivers and asked them to leave the devices on the dashboards of their cars for a couple of weeks, said John Krumm, a researcher at Microsoft Research. He discussed the results of his work at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit in Redmond, Washington, on Monday.

Chris Pirillo leaned away from his webcam and pointed to his printer/scanner/fax machine, which stopped scanning and faxing after he installed Microsoft Corp.'s new Windows Vista operating system. "I can't live in Vista if the software that I use in my life for productivity does not work," said Pirillo, in the third minute of a 52-minute video he posted on YouTube.

Nearly six months after it launched, gripes over what doesn't work with Vista continue, eclipsing positive buzz over the program's improved desktop search, graphics and security.

The Zune may not be the most popular portable media player, but you wouldn't know it based on the game of cat and mouse that has been going on for nearly a year between Microsoft and "hackers" who have continually found ways to defeat Microsoft's DRM.

Ars Technica has been able to confirm that the latest attacks on Microsoft's Windows Media DRM work as proclaimed. Via an update of the Individualized Blackbox component (IBX), FairUse4WM can now remove DRM for Microsoft IBX versions 11.0.6000.6324 and earlier, on both XP and Vista.

Vista—Microsoft’s latest operating system—may prove to be most appropriately named, especially for those seeking evidence of how a computer was used. Available since late January, Vista offers a host of new security and built-in backup features. But from a litigator’s perspective, the interesting point is that it keeps a lot more information—and more detailed information—about what a person does with a PC. This means lawyers can potentially discover more forensic evidence about what is on a computer and construct more detailed time lines about what was done with that information. R.

It must be the dog days. Or maybe all the hackers are too busy trying to crack the iPhone.

Or maybe, just maybe, Microsoft is just getting caught up to fixing all the worst security bugs in its products. (Not my first guess.)

At any rate, while the company released a grand total of six patches for its July "Patch Tuesday" drop today, only three were rated "critical" on Microsoft's severity rating scale. Of those three, two really demand your attention.

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) won't say what went wrong inside of its Xbox 360 video game consoles that could lead to $1 billion in repairs, but bloggers and their online readers seem to have their own answer: Heat stroke.

Frustrated Xbox 360 gamers have been going to blogs and forums to swap horror stories and voodoo-like solutions for problems with the consoles, which first went on sale in November 2005.