Microsoft

Microsoft Corp. Monday announced the hiring of Bill Buxton, a leading computer scientist and designer specializing in the human aspects of technology, to work with Microsoft Research and assist on various projects in the company's research labs around the world. Buxton, who will hold the title of senior researcher at Microsoft, brings a pedigree that includes research efforts at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), SGI, Alias|Wavefront (now Alias Systems Corp.) and other academic and commercial pursuits.

Microsoft will borrow an icon for its Internet Explorer 7 browser from rival Firefox, developers said late Wednesday.

The orange icon, which in Firefox 1.5 appears at the far right in the address bar, designates an RSS feed, will be used by IE 7, said Jane Kim, the program manager for RSS on the browser's official developer blog.

After meeting with Mozilla Corp. developers, said Kim, "we all agreed that it’s in the user’s best interest to have one common icon to represent RSS and RSS-related features in a browser."

Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday warned users of its Windows operating system of a "critical" security flaw in its software that could allow attackers to take complete control of a computer.

The world's largest software maker issued a patch to fix the problem as part of its monthly security bulletin. The problem mainly affects the Windows operating system and Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser.

Microsoft has detailed some significant changes in Internet Explorer 7's "security zones" that it claims will eliminate some of the browser's most notorious vulnerabilities.

Security zones are groupings of sites that give them different levels of access to the local system. The zoning system has been an achilles heel for Explorer in the past, with malicious sites able to gain access to the user's system by tricking the browser.

IBM has been posting papers from the recent Fall Processor Forum 2005, and the papers include plenty of info on the hardware inside of two of the three next-gen consoles: the Xbox 360's Xenon CPU and the Playstation 3's Cell.

A Microsoft investigation into the sale of counterfeit software on eBay has led to the closure of an online operation responsible for the sale of over £3 million worth of fake Microsoft software.

The activities of internet trading outfit Zoobon first came to light after Microsoft received a number of complaints from Zoobon customers unhappy with the quality of the products they had been sold.
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Microsoft Corp. will get the jump on Sony this Saturday when it introduces the next generation Xbox 360 in its rival's backyard, but winning over Japan's notoriously finicky video game fans will be an uphill battle for the American interloper.

Microsoft is still smarting from the failure of its original Xbox in Japan, the world's second-biggest video game market after the United States and a realm long dominated by Sony Corp.'s PlayStation. This time it's determined to break into the stronghold.

Part of its strategy is beating Sony to stores.

Microsoft has confirmed that it will release a public beta of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP sometime in the first three months of 2006.

Dean Hachamovitch, who leads the IE team, said that IE 7 will hit the beta trail "during the first calendar quarter of 2006".

Less than a month after it reached a $30 million settlement with South Korean Internet portal Daum, Microsoft has been fined another $32 million by the country's Fair Trade Commission. The Korean FTC has also ordered Microsoft to unbundle its instant messaging client and media player from Windows, and link to competing software.

Microsoft Corp. plans to offer its Xbox 360 game console in Asian markets outside of Japan by early March, despite tight supply in the United States.

The head of Microsoft's Xbox business in Asia, Alan Bowman, said the console would hit the market in Korea on February 24 and Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore on March 2.

Microsoft's second offering in the game console market went on sale in the United States on November 22, and has been sold out at many shops. It went on sale in Europe on December 2 and is scheduled to reach shops in Japan on December 10.