Microsoft has restricted its Wi-Fi-powered geolocation database after a researcher investigating Wi-Fi geolocation and position tracking raised privacy concerns about the information recorded. This follows a similar move from Google, amidst identical privacy complaints.
A 20-year-old gamer has died after playing a marathon session on his Xbox 360 console.
Chris Staniforth from Sheffield suffered deep vein thrombosis after sitting in the same position playing games for twelve hours. He collapsed after telling friends he had experienced a strange felling in his chest according to the Sun.
In two years, Microsoft’s Bing has doubled its share of the U.S. search market, from 7.2 percent to 14.4 percent. If you add Yahoo’s Bing-powered portal, it’s 27 percent. So why are loud voices clamoring for Microsoft to give up on search?
Bing’s Online Services Division doesn’t make money. Shortly after Microsoft released its quarterly earnings results, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan called the OSD an “online sinkhole,” noting that the division last turned a profit in 2006 and had lost $8.5 billion over nine years. Last year, it lost a record $2.56 billion.
Microsoft is serious about this whole "eliminating botnets" thing. The company's offering a bounty for the operators behind the Rustock botnet, which the company helped disable in March. Before it went offline, the botnet proved capable of sending billions of spam e-mails per day.
In exchange for information leading to those operators' arrest and conviction and whatnot, Microsoft is now willing to pay some $250,000. That's a pretty big chunk of change, and the company's probably betting it's enough to persuade someone to sell their botnet-building buddy out.
Microsoft decided to extend their efforts to establish the identity of those responsible for controlling the Rustock botnet by issuing a $250,000 reward for new information that results in the identification, arrest and criminal conviction of such individual(s).
Residents of any country are eligible for the reward pursuant to the laws of that country.
For quite some time now, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his executives have been touting an “all in” strategy regarding the cloud.
The 343 changes made by Microsoft developer K. Y. Srinivasan put him at the top of a list, created by LWN.net, of developers who made the most changes in the current development cycle for Linux 3.0. Along with a number of other "change sets", Microsoft provided a total of 361 changes, putting it in seventh place on the list of companies and groups that contributed code to the Linux kernel. By comparison, independent developers provided 1,085 change sets to Linux 3.0, while Red Hat provided 1,000 and Intel 839.
Internet Explorer 9's dual-pronged approach to blocking access to malicious URLs—SmartScreen Filter to block bad URLs, and Application Reputation to detect untrustworthy executables—provides the best socially engineered malware blocking of any stable browser version, according to NSS Labs' latest report.
Passwords are a perennial problem in computer security. We all know that we're meant to pick "secure" passwords and never reuse them, but few of us actually bother. One consequence this can cause is losing access to our accounts; some bad guy figures out the password to our World of Warcraft, Steam, or e-mail account, and then proceeds to trash it. To try to ensure that Hotmail accounts don't fall prey to such attacks, Microsoft will soon be changing its password policy, to forbid the use of particularly common passwords.
According to Microsoft reps, speaking at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference keynote in Los Angeles this week and writing on the Windows team blog, Windows XP's upcoming end-of-life means that some 200 million PCs will need upgrading or replacing.
