WinInsider

Microsoft is teaming with Kia Motors America to port an in-vehicle communications and entertainment system into the latter's vehicles. Known as Uvo, and built on the Windows Embedded Auto software platform, drivers and passengers will theoretically be able to use the system make and receive phone calls and SMS text messages, as well as access music from various devices (Uvo will feature 1GB of media storage, and allow users to rip music from CDs). At first glance it appears very similar to Sync, the in-car connectivity system designed in joint partnership by Ford and Microsoft.

The key to a huge plurality, if not a majority, of exploits that have plagued Microsoft Windows over the past two decades has been tricking the system into executing data as though it were code. A malicious process can place data into its own heap -- the pile of memory reserved for its use -- that bears the pattern of executable instructions. Then once that process intentionally crashes, it can leave behind a state where the data in that heap is pointed to and then executed, usually without privilege attached.

Microsoft is aggressively pushing its small and medium business clients to make the move to Windows 7 and Office 2007. It announced an expansion of an existing promotion allowing business customers to upgrade to Windows 7 and the Office 2007 productivity suite at half off the suggested retail pricing.

People who read this also read: To be eligible, customers must be part of Microsoft's Open Value Subscription program and currently running one of the listed prior versions of those products. The original program--which expires June 30, 2010--included customers migrating from Windows Vista and Office 2003. Microsoft has now expanded the scope of the promotion to include customers upgrading from Windows XP and Office XP as well.

Rejoice, gamers with sore thumbs and artists with hand cramps. Microsoft Research has a new technology that takes input from muscle movements and it's looking to score a patent. There will be no more clicking, pressing buttons or dragging a mouse, just make some muscle movements. Or so the company says. Datamation has the details.

Over the past 18 years, Microsoft's Research Division, a large group of computer researchers in key locations worldwide, has come up with some interesting and useful technologies, as well as a few that may seem on the wackier side of things.

Which kind of dulls the excitement of the "we're number one" chants over at Adobe, I'd imagine. According to security experts at McAfee, vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Flash will be the top electronic threats of 2010, surpassing issues with Microsoft Office. This, of course, is simply an indication of a wider trend, that of hackers targeting applications instead of operating systems. And with Adobe Reader and Flash being the top two most widely deployed applications worldwide, attacking them at least makes sense. McAfee says we will also see threats against social networking sites and HTML 5 in 2010. It's only a matter of time before we're required to take off our shoes and walk through a metal detector before we can use a browser.

A French court has found Google guilty of copyright infringement for its ongoing efforts to scan books and put the content online. The court imposed $430,000 in damages against the online behemoth and ordered it to remove online extracts of books published by French publisher La Martiniere. The court also imposed a daily fine of $14,300, effective until Google pulls La Martiniere extracts from its search results.

Though the French ruling applies only to France and only to a single publisher, it could provide a legal precedent for Google's increasingly controversial book scanning practice. Google began scanning books from US-based libraries five years ago and has now scanned about 10 million volumes; only 2 million of those books were scanned with the explicit consent of publishers, and about 2 million are no longer are in copyright.

Once a monopolist, always a monopolist? Not in Microsoft's case. While no one will accuse Microsoft of being a forlorn Tiny Tim, it's also no longer the Ebeneezer Scrooge that it once was. In fact, Microsoft seems haunted by the ghost of monopolies past, to the point that it has lost its ability to fight on equal terms for new markets.

Government, in other words, probably solved little. But what it did was create a culture of caution within Microsoft that stultifies its ability and desire to compete.

Perhaps the next time Brad Smith heads to Brussels, it will be for a vacation.

After years of wrangling with Microsoft, the European Commission announced an accord with the software giant Wednesday on several fronts that seems poised to put an end to its antitrust concerns with Redmond.

In the wake of the announcement, I spoke to Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, about the decision, what it means for the future of Windows, and whether the company sees its spot on the antitrust hot seat now being taken up by other companies, including Google.

Microsoft said on Thursday that it would delay by "a few weeks" the launch of its Visual Studio 2010 developer tool suite and version 4.0 of the .Net Framework.

In a blog posting, developer division head S. Somasegar said the company needs more time as it continues to work on some performance issues.

Microsoft had planned to launch the product in March. The company now plans an added test version--a release candidate--to launch in February, with the final version coming a few weeks after the planned March launch.

"Since the goal of the release candidate is to get more feedback from you, the team will need some time to react to that feedback before creating the final release build," Somasegar said. "We are therefore moving the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 back a few weeks."

There are many ways to measure how Windows 7 is doing. There are reports on new PC sales, tallies of boxed copy sales, and surveys of planned enterprise adoption, to name a few.

But one of the most encouraging signs for Microsoft is the lack of phone calls it is getting from people with problems. Overall, Microsoft said the volume of calls to its support lines is half of what it expected.

"Overall we are finding our call center volume is down significantly more than we expected," said Barbara Gordon, vice president of customer support for Microsoft.