After a strange game of financial chicken with movie-industry bigwigs, Microsoft has decided to pursue alternative financing for the upcoming "Halo" movie, currently in preproduction. The movie will be based on the successful Xbox video game series.
Earlier this month, Universal and 20th Century Fox attempted to refinance the funding and distribution of the movie just ahead of a key October 15 milestone date, after which both studios would have been bound by the previous agreement. When Executive Producer Peter Jackson (director of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy) and Microsoft refused to meet the studios' new terms, Universal and 20th Century Fox pulled out of the project, taking their money with them.
Microsoft said Tuesday it will help holiday-season computer buyers upgrade to its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system, in some cases paying 100 percent of the upgrade cost.
The upgrade-assist program, which begins Thursday, is meant to bolster PC sales during the critical holiday period despite the discouraging absence of the long-delayed Vista.
Windows director Kevin Kutz said major computer makers such as Dell, Gateway and Sony are free to set the discounts themselves, while Microsoft will manage the discount program for the smaller computer makers known as system builders.
A senior Microsoft executive has revealed details of the European Commission's anticompetition probe into the upcoming Windows Vista operating system.
Microsoft and the Commission have been in protracted discussions regarding Vista since March, over regulators' concerns that parts of Vista may violate anticompetition laws.
"There were four different areas where the Commission gave feedback on Vista: two security components and two other components," said Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of Microsoft's security technology unit.
New statistics from Microsoft's anti-malware engineering team have confirmed fears that backdoor Trojans and bots present a "significant" threat to Windows users.
However, according to data culled from the software maker's security tools, stealth rootkit infections are on the decrease, perhaps due to the addition of anti-rootkit capabilities in security applications.
The latest malware infection data, released at the RSA Europe conference in Nice, France, covers the first half of 2006. During that period, Microsoft found more than 43,000 new variants of bots and backdoor Trojans that control millions of hijacked Windows machines in for-profit botnets.
Unlike rivals Symantec and McAfee, U.K.-based Sophos won't criticize Microsoft for locking down the kernel of the 64-bit version of Windows Vista. Instead, a company researcher on Monday took the competitors to task for their lack of foresight.
"With the amount of time and effort spent adjudicating this publicly, they could have made more progress if they had worked with Microsoft," said Ron O'Brien, a Sophos senior security analyst.
The company's chief technology officer, Richard Jacobs, was even more blunt. "Symantec and McAfee may be struggling with HIPS host intrusion prevention system because they haven't coded their solutions with 64-bit Vista in mind," said Jacobs in a statement Monday. "We've taken a different approach to HIPS, by focusing more on catching bad behavior by analyzing code before it executes.
Microsoft released Oct. 20 the first beta of its AJAX tool, ASP.Net AJAX, formerly known as Atlas, making it available under three download options.
The first option is the ASP.Net AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) v1.0 "Core" download, which contains the features that will be supported by Microsoft Product Support and includes support for the core AJAX type system, networking stack, component model, extender base classes and the server-side functionality to integrate within ASP.Net, said Scott Guthrie, a general manager in the Microsoft Developer Division, in a blog post on Oct. 20.
As part of an ongoing initiative to give users access to its technology, Microsoft Monday added a format for fighting
spoof e-mail to a list of specifications that can be used freely for development.
Sender ID, an e-mail specification for detecting when an e-mail address is being spoofed to send spam, can now be used as
a basis for new technology by anyone under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise, said Jason Matusow, senior director
of interoperability for Microsoft.
Through the OSP, published in September, Microsoft promised it would not take any patent-enforcement action against people
that want to use specifications on a list of Web services technologies for which it has patents. Now Sender ID has been added
to the list of specifications that are freely available for use, he said.
The long-awaited Windows Vista and Office 2007 will make their Canadian debut with a launch event in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on Nov. 23, according to
Microsoft's MSDN Canada Web site.
Microsoft will hold a series of events to introduce Vista and Office 2007 -- along with the next version of its Exchange messaging
server, Exchange Server 2007 -- to its business customers throughout Canada.
Following the Edmonton event, which will be held at the Shaw Conference Centre, Microsoft will hold events in Toronto on Dec.
For more than two decades, Microsoft's software and Intel's processors were so wedded that the pairing came to be known as Wintel. But as that computing era wanes, Microsoft is turning to a new source of chip design: its own labs.
The design effort will initially be split between research labs at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters and its Silicon Valley campus here. Tentatively named the Computer Architecture Group, the project underscores sweeping changes in the industry.
Noted security analyst Joanna Rutkowska, who this summer demonstrated attack tactics that would get around Windows Vista's new anti-rootkit protection, said Thursday that the newest build of the OS blocks that exploit route.
In the 64-bit version of Windows Vista, all kernel-mode drivers must be digitally signed, a change from earlier Windows, which encouraged signed drivers but didn't require them. This summer, Rutkowska, who works for Singapore-based security company COSEINC, showed off an attack that allowed unsigned drivers to access Vista's kernel, a technique that if used by hackers, would let them drop a rootkit into the new operating system.