Microsoft

Microsoft may make more large acquisitions than it has done historically and become a more distributed company as opposed to moving key employees to its Redmond, Washington, headquarters, Chief Financial Officer John Connors said this week.

Although Microsoft has decided to return a significant piece of its $60.6 billion cash hoard to shareholders and not pursue a takeover of German ERP (enterprise resource planning) giant SAP, large acquisitions are likely to increase, Connors told an audience of Silicon Valley businesspeople at an event organized by the Churchill Club.

The number of new viruses and worms aimed at Microsoft's ubiquitous Windows operating system has risen 400 percent between January and June from the same year-earlier period, leading computer security company Symantec says.

Nearly 5,000 new Windows viruses and worms were documented in the first half of the year, up from about 1,000 in the year-earlier period, said Symantec, the world's largest computer security company by revenue.

Fans of the Seattle music pop station Kiss 106.1 FM usually have to sit through an array of disc-jockey antics and advertising between listening to favorite artists like Avril Levigne and Ashlee Simpson.

But not anymore. As part of its much-touted new MSN Music offering, Microsoft Corp. is testing a Web-based radio service that mimics nearly 1,000 local radio stations, allowing users to hear a version of their favorite radio station with far fewer interruptions.

It's a move analysts say is annoying, but not seriously threatening, the stations.

L33tdawg: Much love to Mark McCarron for bringing this article to our attention.

Context, context, context. I was sick hearing that phrase from Egyptologists in regards to my research on the Great Pyramid. They never could grasp that context is irrelevant to the scientific process or methodology, science examines facts, not interpretation. In saying that, they taught me a lot, it is funny how the entire aspect of a thing or situation can change, just by applying a different context to it.

A three-hour system shutdown that affected South California's airports was reportedly caused by a technician who failed to reboot an MS-based system

A bug in a Microsoft system compounded by human error was ultimately responsible for a three-hour radio breakdown that left hundreds of aircraft aloft without guidance on Tuesday, according to a report in the LA Times.

Nearly all of Southern California's airports were shut down, and five incidents where aircraft broke separation guidelines were reported. In one case, a pilot had to take evasive action.

Microsoft Corp. announced Tuesday it has found a new security flaw with its Windows XP operating system and warned that an attacker could infiltrate other computers by persuading their owners to open a specialized graphics file.

The company released a patch to fix the flaw as well as a tool that allows users to scan their systems to see if they need it. Users who have already downloaded Microsoft's recent security update, Service Pack 2, are not affected.

Just when you thought the browser wars were over and Internet Explorer had won, Mozilla's Firefox has been making considerable in-roads into the browser world.

With the security concerns over Internet Explorer, Firefox has been able to capitalize on users fearing intrusion into their PCs. Moreover, when security flaws are found in Firefox, updates are fast in coming (see related story).

Fear has been mounting in the open source community that Microsoft could start suing users any time for alleged patent violations.
That possibility became even more worrisome to some with a new disclosure by Sun this week regarding terms of its sweeping legal settlement with Microsoft, hammered out earlier this year.
According to the settlement between the two, Microsoft and Sun agreed not to sue each other or their respective customers for patent infringements that were alleged to have occurred before April 2004, as well as 10 years into the future.

The old bromide that promises you can't get a computer virus by looking at an image file crumbled a bit further Tuesday when Microsoft announced a critical vulnerability in its software's handling of the ubiquitous JPEG graphics format.

The security hole is a buffer overflow that potentially allows an attacker to craft a special JPEG file that would take control of a victim's machine when the user views it through Internet Explorer, Outlook, Word, and other programs. The poisoned picture could be displayed on a website, sent in e-mail, or circulated on a P2P network.

Michael Dickopf, spokesman for the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), has told the Berliner Zeitung that internet users should switch from Internet Explorer to Mozilla or Opera. Dickopf says Internet Explorer is hazard-prone, attracting too many viruses and worms. BSI already uses a combination of alternative browsers, Dickopf told the paper. Dickopf's comments are bad news for Microsoft. BSI is the central IT security service provider for the German government. Its recommendations are usually taken extremely seriously.