Microsoft

Microsoft acknowledged Thursday that hackers booby-trapped its popular MSN Web site in Korea to try to steal passwords from visitors. The company said it was unclear how many Internet users might have been victimized.

Microsoft said it cleaned the Web site, www.msn.co.kr, and removed the dangerous software code that unknown hackers had added earlier this week. A spokesman, Adam Sohn, said Microsoft was confident its English-language Web sites were not vulnerable to the same type of attack.

Windows is taking the server OS market by storm - and Linux has no hope of catching it, according to market researcher IDC.

Its latest quarterly server survey found that income from sales of Microsoft Windows servers even matched enterprise Unix server revenues.

German Computer magazine C'T (Heise) is describing in its current print issue how to change Windows XP Home to a Windows XP Professional version before install.

Microsoft is not going to like this. The C'T magazine apparently found out that by changing 2 bytes in the installation file of Windows XP Home, it will install a Windows Professional. Some functions are missing, but Remote Desktop and User management and enhanced security features are present.

The next version of Microsoft's Internet Information Services Web server (IIS7) will integrate the ASP.NET development technologies and turn many core features into optional modules.

In addition, the software's admin tool has been completely revamped, allowing more secure and complete Web-based remote administration.

Microsoft's MSN Hotmail service is taking very seriously measures against spam.
Microsoft unveiled on Friday a new service named MSN Postmaster which is going to act as a clearinghouse for e-mail information.The MSN Postmaster service is dedicated to ISPs
and bulk mailers and it offers detailed information on email sent to its Hotmail accounts through its Smart Network Data Services monitoring.

The confusion over Wi-Fi security certification and interoperability has moved into a new gear, with Microsoft shipping a Windows XP update that is not fully compliant with the latest wireless security specification. Microsoft Corp.'s update, released earlier this month, promised support for WPA2, aka Wi-Fi Protected Access 2, the newest wireless security specification approved by the IEEE.

Microsoft has alerted consumers that Netscape's latest browser appears to break the XML rendering capabilities in Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Dave Massy, a senior program manager for IE, warned users in a blog posting that after installing Netscape 8, IE will render XML files as a blank page, including XML files that have an XSLT transformation.

Microsoft did not make clear what versions of IE were affected, but a user of the DeveloperDex forum said he experienced the problem on version 6 of IE, which had been patched with Windows Service Pack 2.

The greatest feature of Windows is that the current version is compatible with software developed for the earlier versions. And nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to the flaws in Internet Explorer (IE). It seems that no matter how often this great internet tool gets patched, it remains compatible with hackers' software.

What we lovingly call Internet Exploder is one of the main routes into PCs for malware such as viruses, spyware, adware and buffer overflows. The obvious remedy is to remove it from the system.

Developers say there's a dirty little secret about Longhorn that few Softies are discussing publicly: Longhorn won't be based on the .Net Framework.
We're still expecting that the .Net Framework will ship with Longhorn – on the CD and/or "in the box" in some way. But the .Net Framework won't be at Longhorn's core, we hear. Instead, the .Net Framework will be the core for a small subset of Longhorn, specifically the Windows API Platform (WAP), which consists primarily of the "Avalon" Windows presentation system and the "Indigo" Windows communications system, our tipsters say.

Computers running Windows XP Service Pack (SP) 2 are 15 times less likely than those running XP or XP SP1 to be infected by some of the most dangerous forms of malware, Microsoft said.