Microsoft

Microsoft Corp said that it had acquired Massive Inc, a company that inserts advertising into video games, and will work to use Massive's technology for other online products.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

The acquisition yesterday is part of the company's efforts to improve its online advertising and better compete with search rivals Google Inc and Yahoo Inc. The deal was announced at an online advertising conference at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters.

Microsoft Corp. has held discussions to buy a stake in Internet media company Yahoo Inc. to compete against Google Inc., the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

Although talks over an equity stake do not appear to be active, Microsoft's top management remains open to a deal with Yahoo as pressure grows from shareholders to perform better against Google, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the situation.

Passwords have their weaknesses; that's a given. One stronger security measure that has been increasing in popularity recently is two-factor authentication. Two-factor authentication works by requiring that a user present two tokens of his or her identity simultaneous, say a USB dongle and a six-digit password. It's like your ATM card—it won't work without your PIN.

The delays for Windows Vista aren't over, according to the Gartner Group. The research and advisory company believes (subscription) that the real release will occur closer to the second quarter of the next calendar year, that is, between April and June. They argue that there will be at least a nine-month lead time between the release of "Beta 2" and the golden master of the OS.

Microsoft Corp. scored an important win against rival Google Inc. over the weekend, as Amazon.com began using its technology to power the Internet retailer's A9 search unit.

Microsoft's new Windows Live is at the core of the company's efforts to win online advertising dollars away from Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.. A9 had previously been powered by Google.

A security researcher has publicly disclosed a security flaw in Internet Explorer, the second unpatched vulnerability in the Microsoft browser to be disclosed publicly within a week.

The flaw lies in the way IE, the world's most used Web browser, handles certain dialogs, bug hunter Matthew Murphy wrote in an advisory sent to the Full Disclosure mailing list earlier this week.

Microsoft's latest update to its built-in antipiracy checks for Windows XP has spurred someone to post a method for bypassing the system on a popular technology blog.

Microsoft plans to turn off half the firewall in Windows Vista when the new operating system ships later this year because it doesn't think most users need all the firewall's functionality or can handle its management.

Although Vista's firewall will ship with both in- and outbound filtering capabilities, the latter will be disabled by default. Corporate users, however, can turn on outbound if they wish.

Security guru Bruce Schneier has warned that Microsoft will be making a mistake by overloading Windows Vista users with security alerts.

Schneier, who has written some of the most important books on cryptography and security practice, told vnunet.com at the Infosec show that users will become inured to constant warning messages and will stop reading them after a while.

Vista has a host of warning boxes planned, including ones for unauthorised access, unsafe websites and malware alerts.

Microsoft claims that businesses planning to use Vista together with its Bitlocker hard drive encryption technology will have an easy and safe way to dispose of their hard disks.

The software giant said on Tuesday that Vista will be so secure that businesses will no longer need to worry about data being compromised when hard disks are sent for disposal, in line with upcoming "green" legislation designed to reduce waste.