Microsoft

Windows Vista is months away. Maybe a lot of months. And so is the additional security it's promising.

Or is it?

Microsoft Corp. said on Thursday it sees no reason why its new Windows Vista operating system would be delayed, but it stopped short of committing to its previously stated launch target.

"We will ship Windows Vista when it is available," Kevin Johnson, co-president of Microsoft's platforms and services unit, said at the company's annual financial analyst meeting.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrapped up a meeting with financial analysts Thursday by promising that the company would make sure it releases new Windows versions more quickly.

"We will never have a five-year gap between releases of flagship products," he said, referring to the gap between Windows XP's October 2001 release and the debut of Windows Vista, currently slated for January.

Microsoft has not said when Vista's successor, code-named Vienna, might ship or what features it will contain.

Microsoft's Security, Access, and Solutions Division has finalized purchase of Whale Communications, maker of secure access products for enterprise clients, including secure-socket layer, virtual private network (SSL VPN) technology. Microsoft said it hopes that the acquisition deal, announced in May, will help bolster its plan to offer to businesses a full security-access platform--particularly with regard to SSL VPNs and Web application firewalls. So far, that hasn't been an easy task for the software giant.

Microsoft plans to distribute its forthcoming Internet Explorer 7 browser as a "high priority" update through its automatic update service, Microsoft group program manager Tony Chor said in a posting on the IE Blog.

The application will automatically download as a background process or when users run the auto update service when the wish to download and install security updates.

Windows Vista could be less stable than XP, and prey to a whole new set of security issues, a report from Symantec has suggested. With the operating system still in beta - and not due to ship until January 2007 at the earliest - Symantec?s researchers examined the part of the software that handled networking in build 5270 of the software. They concluded that since large parts of Vista had been rewritten from scratch, it had introduced a new set of problems.

It appears Sysinternals has been acquired by Microsoft... From the page:

Following an outcry from corporate customers, Microsoft is removing an add-on feature to Windows that allowed users to create password-protected folders.

The feature was introduced as a free download last week. Almost immediately, people raised questions over how businesses would grapple with the ability of individual workers to encrypt their data.

Microsoft has come up with a new tool to contain spammers using search engines to direct net traffic to Spam sites. The tool, Strider Search Defender, detects spam URLs, usually passed on through social networking and forum and blog hosting websites, and prevents them from being indexed by search engines.

Microsoft plans to give a hacker conference in Asia an inside look at new security features on Windows Vista later this year, the organizer of the event said Tuesday.

The company's commitment to show off Vista to the hacker and security community is part of a long-term trend aimed at gaining greater feedback from users prior to product debuts. More and more software and hardware vendors are trying to weed out vulnerabilities before products go to market, and they often turn to the underground and above ground security community for advice.