Microsoft

Microsoft has launched a subscription version of Outlook that will connect to Hotmail or MSN accounts. For $59 a year (£39.99 in the UK), subscribers get a copy of Outlook 2003 for Subscription Services, 2GB of online storage and the ability to send messages with attachments of up to 20MB.

This is the first time Microsoft has made one of its products available through a downloadable subscription service. It will initially be available in the US, UK and Canada, where it will be available in both English and French.

The following is the full text of Microsoft's response to an InformationWeek.com poll and related story regarding Internet Explorer, and whether companies are switching to the Mozilla browser. It came from Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft's public-relations agency.

You mentioned that many or the respondents in the self-selecting survey recommended against IE and that many people have said Microsoft needs to address security issues more fully.

Microsoft has issued patches for two critical holes in Windows NT4 as part of its January patch update.

Support for NT4 officially ended on 31 December, but last week the company appeared to have backed down and offered two critical patches for NT4 server users.

The first concerns users of Internet Explorer 6.0 Service Pack 1, running on any of the supported platforms (NT4, Windows 2000 SP3 and SP4, Windows XP SP1 and SP2, Windows 2003 and Windows 98/Me).

AN ANALYST at corporate crystal ball gazers, JP Morgan, is predicting that the Mighty Microsoft will penetrate the anti-virus market by February 15th.

Adam Holt says that he sees Supreme Vole Bill Gates standing before a large group of people showing them his latest big offering.

It looks like it might be the RSA Security conference in San Francisco on February 15, where Gates is down as the guest speaker

Make mention of Longhorn and Microsoft may still reflexively hold its cards close to its chest. But as the launch date draws closer, the company has begun to show its hand. Nearly three months after granting MSDN subscribers a November sneak preview, Microsoft has made public a consumer technical preview of its Avalon graphics subsystem.

We all know company’s like to detail the algorithms they deploy to ensure our data is safe to help us sleep at night. Microsoft for example employ RC4 to encrypt documents when you password protect them. However what happens when vendors make a mistake on the implementation… well we have just found out..

Microsoft is beefing up its quality control process for engineering software security patches by calling on external testers, according to a report in eWeek. Testers who participate in the program, officially named the Security Update Validation Program, will be given access to patches before they are made available to the public.

Microsoft has denied that an anti-piracy "feature" in its Windows Media Player that allows a Trojan horse to run on a user's PC is a vulnerability.

Panda Software warned earlier this week that hackers are using the player's DRM tool to fool people into downloading spyware and viruses. The Spanish security company said that virus writers had released licence-protected multimedia files containing Trojan horses (WmvDownloader.A and WmvDownloader.B) that can exploit the anti-piracy features in version 10 of the Media Player and Windows XP SP2.

Microsoft Corp.'s Macintosh Business Unit has announced several updates to products at Macworld Conference & Expo on Tuesday including its plans for the upcoming release of Mac OS X Tiger. Microsoft executives also said that Office 2004 and Virtual PC sales have been going very well for the company.

Microsoft said Tuesday that Chief Financial Officer John Connors is leaving the company to take a job with a venture capital firm.