Microsoft

Microsoft plans to ship a new security product in June, charging $49.95 (£29) a year to shield up to three PCs against viruses, spyware and other cyberthreats, the company said on Tuesday.

As previously reported, Windows OneCare Live's June debut marks Microsoft's long-anticipated entry into the consumer antivirus market. That space has long been the domain of specialised vendors, led by Symantec and McAfee. Microsoft announced its intent to offer antivirus products in June 2003 when it bought Romanian antivirus software developer GeCad Software.

Companies beta testing Vista have been quick to praise new security features in the operating system which is due out by year's end.

Vista will include a number of new features, especially in its graphical user interface (GUI), that are not yet completely realized in competing operating systems such as Apple Computer's Mac OS X or the open-source Linux OS.

Microsoft's Windows OneCare Live program will be launched in June and made available online and via retailers for an annual fee of $49.95 on up to three machines. Customers who beta test Windows OneCare Live between April 1 and April 30 get to take advantage of a special $19.95 promotional price. Microsoft's pricing means Windows OneCare subscribers are likely to pay less up front than if they bought traditional anti-virus software like Symantec, for example, whose Norton AntiVirus 2006 protection pack for three PCs lists at $89.99.

People didn't lose any time in finding bugs in the latest preview release of Internet Explorer 7.

It's been but a day since Microsoft publicly released a test version of Internet Explorer 7, but Internet news groups and blogs are already teeming with bug reports. Also, one security researcher claims he found a security vulnerability in the new Web browser.

The XBox hacking community has now claimed that with the original Xbox, players everywhere no longer need to purchase and have a mod-chip installed in order to play backed up games.

Traditionally, Xbox users were using hardware modifications that were installed to bypass certain checking and verification schemes that Microsoft implemented. Eventually through the Xbox Live! service, Microsoft was able to enforce a certain amount of authentication, banning those it detected to have modified Xbox units.

Microsoft Corp. is tightening its policies regarding shutting down Web journals after its much-publicized shutdown of a well-known Chinese blogger at that government's request.

The Redmond software company, which operates a popular blogging technology called MSN Spaces, said Tuesday that the changes will include efforts to make the banned content available to users elsewhere in the world even if Microsoft decides it has a legal duty to block it in a particular country.

The firewall component in Microsoft's Windows OneCare security bundle has holes, experts have warned.

The security software, available in a public beta version, by default allows applications that use the Java Virtual Machine or have a digital signature to connect to the Internet.

Like any blanket security-bypass rule, these default settings are a bad idea, said Mark Curphey, vice president at vulnerability management specialist Foundstone, a part of McAfee.

If new features won't get you to upgrade to Vista, security enhancements should, Windows chief Jim Allchin has urged.

Microsoft has already touted the bells and whistles it is putting into Windows Vista, the operating system successor to XP that's due out by the end of the year. There will be flashy new graphics, a spiffed-up user interface and advanced search features. Other changes include improved touch-screen support and a Windows sidebar that can display all kinds of information such as upcoming appointments, just-in e-mail messages and a clock.

Microsoft Corp. on Thursday confirmed that it's considering plans to build its own portable music player to rival Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod, which has captured the lion share of the market at the expense of competitors offering devices with Microsoft's music player.

Microsoft is readying a highly configurable firewall for its upcoming Windows Vista operating system that is designed to give administrators much greater control over which applications are allowed to run on the systems they manage.

After just over one month of testing by users of Microsoft's CTP (community technology preview), the firewall is "very much on track" to be in the final Vista release scheduled for later this year and the company is thinking about adding a similar feature for its consumer users, said Austin Wilson, a director in Microsoft's Windows Client group.