After last week's deluge of information about the next iteration of Microsoft's new mobile operating system, the company is letting additional details trickle out. Microsoft revealed last week that Windows 8 Phone will be available in 180 countries when it launches later this year, but it didn't tell us which countries that would be until today.
Microsoft claims Windows 8 is "a better Windows" than Windows 7. In particular, the company has focused on improving security to ensure users of Windows 8 tablets can securely connect to corporate networks. It is building antivirus (AV) and secure, role-based authentication into Windows 8 to make the operating system (OS) enterprise-ready.
This is smart, and long overdue. Google said today that it will begin releasing an Android Platform Development Kit (PDK).
This will give Android device makers access to coming versions of Android 2-3 months before its official release. As is well-documented, most Android devices are way behind. 65% today run Android 2.3 Gingerbread which, with the release of 4.1 JellyBean today, now lags 3 versions behind.
The General Court of the European Union has made a small reduction in the fine that Microsoft has to pay for its abuse of its dominant market position and refusal to provide interoperability documentation. The 1998 case, brought by the Free Software Foundation Europe and the Samba Team and assisted by SIIA, ECIS, IBM, Red Hat and Oracle, was being appealed by Microsoft, which wanted a 2008 ruling and fine to be annulled and to have its costs paid by the Commission and others.
Microsoft has announced the $1.2 billion purchase of Yammer, the social network aimed at enterprise users. Yammer will become part of the Office division, led by Kurt DelBene.
Microsoft security strategist Scott Charney has urged organisations to dump verbose privacy documents, saying they only confuse users.
Charney said users were “overloaded” with information in lengthy privacy documents and could not be reasonably expected to trawl through dozens of pages.
“Even if you had the knowledge to read it through, you’d never finish,” Charney said. “There’s a lot of debate on notice and choice, but now users get so many privacy statements they don’t know what to do with them.”
If you want something done properly, as the old adage goes, you have to do it yourself.
For the longest time, the failure to produce a good, usable Windows tablet was twofold. Microsoft lacked an operating system usable with finger input, and the PC OEMs failed to produce devices that were thin enough and light enough to be comfortable when handheld.
Google's Motorola Mobility unit has made offers to Microsoft in hopes of settling a pair of contentious patent infringement suits in which Motorola's smartphones were using Microsoft's patented ActiveSync software, while Microsoft's Xbox 360 was using Motorola's patented video compression system.
In August 2011, Microsoft announced a plan to offer a lot of money to developers that created better security programs. It launched the BlueHat prize as part of the annual Black Hat conference. This new competition was designed to give out a total of over $250,000 for “novel runtime mitigation technology designed to prevent the exploitation of memory safety vulnerabilities.”
Microsoft is facing pressure to patch a zero-day threat that is being exploited in the wild, as vulnerability seller VUPEN has found a way to make the exploit work across all Windows platforms.
Attack code for the CVE-2012-1889 flaw, which affects Microsoft XML component found in Internet Explorer, was published earlier this month. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user visits a specially-crafted webpage on Internet Explorer.
