Microsoft

Microsoft employee Laurent Chavet was arrested last week on allegations that he had illegaly accessed former employer AltaVista's computer system. According to a report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the 29-year-old French national copied source code related to AltaVista's crawler technology to his home computer.

Chavent's role at Microsoft has apparently not been defined officially by the company, but it has been suggested that he was involved with MSN search development.

Microsoft will pitch security as a "competitive advantage" at its worldwide partner conference in Toronto next week, but it may be a tough sell to attendees who are still waiting for the software maker to deliver on some of last year's security-related promises. Microsoft's second annual Worldwide Partner Conference is focused on helping its partners to sell more Microsoft products.

As some of you may have guessed by now, one of my side interests when I'm not sitting in front of a computer is the study of history. A year ago, I read a short biography of Napoleon (no pun intended) and decided it was time to get more acquainted with the French Revolution, the turbulent time that spawned the great general. One of the more noble events during an often ugly, tyrannical series of events occurred on 20 June 1789, when the King, in an attempt to halt the democratizing process he had inadvertently begun, disbanded the legislature, known as the States-General.

Eamon O'Tuathail, an Irish software developer, has triumphed in the Microsoft Security Developer Championship, seeing off his rivals in the race for the $10,000 prize.

The software, due in the 2H’05, represents a different approach to high-end computing than the company’s currently available DataCenter edition of Windows.

DataCenter is designed for use on symmetric multiprocessing servers, where a single version of Windows can run on up to 64 processors. Microsoft’s in-development high-performance computing (HPC) platform will split the workload across many smaller machines, each of which has its own imprint of Windows.

Doubts have been raised about the effectiveness of a workaround issued by Microsoft to guard against a potentially devastating vulnerability in IE. Left unchecked the flaw creates a means for hackers to turn popular websites into conduits for viral transmission.

Microsoft Corp. was delivering software updates Friday to close a loophole that had allowed hackers to convert popular Web sites into virus transmitters. Though the updates do not entirely fix the flaw with Microsoft's nearly ubiquitous Internet Explorer browsers, they change settings in Windows operating systems to make it impossible for hackers to use the flaw to deliver malicious code to users' computers.

It's been a bad week for many users of Microsoft Corp.'s nearly ubiquitous Internet Explorer browser.

A pair of virus attacks exploiting its vulnerabilities had led security experts to recommend that Web surfers consider such alternatives as Mozilla and Opera.

Until Microsoft made a software update available Friday, continuing to use Internet Explorer was "like playing the lottery," said Johannes B. Ullrich, chief technology officer of the nonprofit SANS Internet Security Center.

It would seem that even Microsoft is telling people to use Firefox, just days after the federal government did the same. An editorial posted on Microsoft's own slate.msn.com on June 30th explains how writer Paul Boutin, scared of getting infected by the Scob (also known as Download.ject) keystoke logger worm, converted to the 'fox.

Boutin explains, "I've been using it (Firefox) for a week now, and I've all but forgotten about Explorer."

OK, I confess it: I've used Internet Explorer a lot. After being a die-hard Netscape user, I finally got fed up with the sheer bulk of that browser and started using Internet Explorer on my Windows machines.

As time went on and open-source Mozilla matured, I started using Mozilla as my main Linux Web browser and as my secondary Windows browser. This past Friday, though, I started installing Firefox, the browser-only side of Mozilla, on every one of my production Windows machines.