WinInsider

Microsoft is introducing its free PC-scanning service outside the U.S., part of an international push for its security tools.

The Windows Live OneCare safety scanner is now available around the world, Microsoft said in a statement Monday. The online scanner removes viruses and spyware, rids a hard drive of clutter, and runs defragmentation.

The service is similar to Trend Micro's House Call and McAfee's FreeScan, though those only remove malicious software.

Peter Cullen, Microsoft's chief privacy strategist, and Simon Davies, director of London-based watchdog group Privacy International, took some time before Thursday's forum to talk specifically about Microsoft. Here's an edited transcript of their remarks: Q: In January, Microsoft complied with a Justice Department subpoena to turn over users' search records in the federal government's attempt to uphold an online pornography law. If the company is so concerned about privacy, why did it comply? Cullen: When we first received the request, we went back and got the government to narrow it. The information we ended up providing was much less than they had asked for. It was very, very anonymized, aggregated, with all identifying data stripped out of it.

Microsoft confirmed this week that it has hired a well-known security and anti-virus executive.

"Microsoft is very excited that Vincent Gullotto will be joining Microsoft as the general manager of Security Research & Response and we look forward to working with him in his new role," a spokesperson said in an e-mail.

However, the company is being cagey about exactly what his job will be. Microsoft declined to provide any further information about Gullotto's new role or where it fits in the org charts.

Windows Live Writer, a first beta of which Microsoft has made available for download, will allow users to post to a variety of blogging platforms, not just Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces.

Microsoft has released a first public beta of a new blog-authoring tool, Windows Live Writer, and made it available for download starting on August 13.

According to J.J. Allaire, the architect of the tool, Windows Live Writer is the evolution of Onfolio Writer, a tool developed by his former company Onfolio Inc., which Microsoft acquired in March 2006.

Microsoft said it will repurchase $16.2 billion shares of additional stock, expanding the buyback program announced in July to $36.2 billion.

In July, the software giant said it would buy back $20 billion in shares by August 17, 2006 with an option to purchase another $20 billion before June 30, 2011.

Microsoft announced it would repurchase 155 million common shares of its stock, amounting to $3.8 billion. The news followed the closing of yesterday's Dutch-auction based tender offer.

Microsoft saw $44.28 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ending June 30, a rise of 11 percent.

Microsoft grabbed 15 percent of the retail market for computer antivirus software in June, taking sales from Symantec and McAfee Inc. after releasing its own product in April.

Microsoft used low prices for its new backup and security software, named Windows Live OneCare, to capture sales, said researcher NPD Group Inc.

With OneCare, Microsoft is angling for a piece of the $4.02 billion market for antivirus software.

Sales of such software increased 14 percent last year, according to market researcher Gartner Inc. That's faster than Microsoft's overall sales gain of 11 percent.

Microsoft is shipping the first Community Technology Preview of its next generation data access libraries for the .NET programming framework.

The data access technology, known as Active Data Objects, or ADO.NET, provides a way for Visual Studio developers to deal with data sources and services programmatically. Officially called The ADO.NET vNext August CTP, the availability of the libraries for download was published on the ADO.NET team blog, Tuesday.

Provided in this preview is the ADO.NET Entity Framework including the Entity Data Model, which lets developers to model data at a higher level of abstraction, Pablo Castro, ADO.NET technical lead said in the post. The CTP also provides a client-views/mapping engine to map to and from store schemas, and full query support over EDM schemas using Entity SQL and Microsoft LINQ.

Extending its support for scripting and dynamic languages, Microsoft is hosting a project on its CodePlex site to deliver a PHP language compiler for the .Net Framework.

Known as Phalanger, the project reached Version 2.0 Beta 2 on July 30.

The primary goal of the project, released under Microsoft Shared Source Permissive License, is to enable full functionality of existing PHP scripts on .Net without any modification, Microsoft said.

Unlike the original PHP interpreter, Phalanger compiles scripts into MSIL.

Microsoft has begun beta testing its upcoming Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager on schedule, the company disclosed this week.

Word came out on the blog of a Microsoft technical writing lead in the Enterprise Management Division. However, the blog cautions that the beta code is only suitable to be run in "test/lab environments." A Windows Live ID or Microsoft Passport account is needed to access the downloads page.

The company announced in last May at its annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference that it would begin shipping Beta 1 within 90 days.

Despite calls by some beta testers for Microsoft to release a third beta of Windows Vista, the company appears to be instead readying to push its first golden code candidate out the door.

Windows enthusiast and blog site Neowin.net has reported that Microsoft recently created a Release Candidate "branch" in the code testing process for Vista. That usually means that the company is nearing the date when beta testing ends and the RC stage begins.

An RC is a candidate for "release to manufacturing," or RTM, the final step before the product goes to customers. RTM code is sometimes referred to as "golden" code. Microsoft typically releases a series of RCs beginning when the beta test phase ends.