Microsoft

Microsoft's chief trustworthy computing strategist, Charney underscored the need for the software maker to clearly outline its plans and get partners and customers onboard for its security efforts to work.

"As a leading player in the IT ecosystem, we're required to go out and talk about what were doing," Charney said.

In addition to working on building more secure products by design, promoting security training and development and easing patch management, the company is partnering with hardware makers and security companies, Charney said.

Unless you've been living in a cave for the past few months, you already know Microsoft Corp. has released Windows XP SP2 (Service Pack 2), the biggest update ever to XP. You also know that it's supposed to fix the security holes that have become all too apparent in Windows XP SP1. You know what SP2 is; what you might not know is what it actually does and how it works.

Internet junkies, take heart: Microsoft chairman Bill Gates receives four million e-mails daily, most of them spam, and is probably the most "spammed" person in the world.

But unlike ordinary users, the software mogul has an entire department to filter unsolicited e-mails and only a few of them actually get through to his inbox, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said here Thursday.

Ballmer was speaking to government information technology and development officials from the Asia-Pacific at the start of a two-day Microsoft-sponsored Asia Leadership Forum in Singapore.

As a founding member of the Business Software Alliance (BSA), Microsoft is a strong proponent of anti-piracy regulation, software copyright protection and consumer education. Despite all of its anti-piracy bravado, Microsoft found itself on the receiving end of accusations that it used an illegal copy of SoundForge to edit wave files that shipped as part of the Windows Media Player Tour in Windows XP.

Microsoft Corp. developed policies stressing the systematic destruction of internal e-mails and other documents crucial to lawsuits it has faced in recent years, a California software company alleges. Burst.com, in court papers unsealed this week, also accuses Microsoft of destroying e-mails crucial to Burst's lawsuit against the software giant even after the trial judge ordered it to retain the documents.

Microsoft has re-released a security patch for Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server after a major code revision.

The updated patch, first released on 9 November, is for ISA Server 2000 and Microsoft Proxy Server 2.0. Details can be found here.

Users of Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 Premium Edition and Small Business Server 2000 are also advised to patch since this software uses the ISA code.

The patch is intended to plug a hole that could allow hackers to pretend that their code had been cleared as trusted content.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates on Tuesday detailed his company's plan for computer management software and announced a long-awaited Windows update tool.

During a keynote speech at the company's IT Forum conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, Gates outlined Microsoft's ambitious effort to trim the cost of managing corporate data centers, called the Dynamic Systems Initiative.

IT Forum, Microsoft's largest conference in Europe, is expected to draw roughly 4,000 IT professionals.

In the days before Microsoft Corp. released the hotly anticipated Halo 2 video game for the Xbox game console, some gamers noticed a sudden spike in the number of people being kicked off the company's online game service. That was no coincidence. With Halo 2 expected to entice a new batch of users to the Xbox Live online gaming community, Microsoft says it got tougher with people suspected of making unauthorized modifications to their Xboxes.

US SOFTWARE monolith Microsoft has unleashed its mighty briefs on another group of spammers.

In a lawsuit filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles, Vole is seeking financial damages from an unidentified number of unnamed spammers.

The suit will enable Microsoft to get court orders against the sites of suspect spammers so that it can find out who they are and drag them kicking and screaming into court.

Microsoft made a minority investment Monday in Unix/Linux management vendor Vintela. Neither Microsoft nor Lindon, Utah-based Vintela would comment on the size of the investment. But sources said the amount was less than $10 million. Vintela has acted as a key participant in Microsoft's Unix/Linux interoperability strategy. Nonetheless, Vintela is an unlikely Microsoft partner.