Microsoft Research has released a new tool to help pinpoint large-scale typo-squatters that are known to be gaming pay-per-click domain parking services.
The lightweight prototype, called Strider URL Tracer, builds on the work within Microsoft's Cybersecurity and Systems Management group to keep tabs on a sophisticated typos-quatting scheme that uses multilayer URL redirection to make money from Google's AdSense for domains program.
Yi-Min Wang, who heads up the group's work in Redmond, Wash., said URL Tracer can be used as a parental control tool to block inappropriate ads from being served from Web sites that are set up to deliberately lure kids who accidentally misspell a popular domain.
With ever more songs, pictures, and video clips being sent over the airwaves to mobile phones, Microsoft plans to beef up its investment in digital rights management technologies to help protect copyrighted material, the company said Wednesday on the opening day of CTIA Wireless 2006 in Las Vegas.
Microsoft provided no financial details, saying only that the investments will be "significant." It plans to extend its Windows Media Digital Rights Management software to support new types of wireless services, it said.
A company that began trading in secondhand licenses for Microsoft software last autumn has been attracting business from within the U.K and internationally.
Disclic has been able to sell more than 2,500 secondhand software licenses from insolvent or downsizing companies to other businesses through discount-licensing.com.
"As long as we stick to Microsoft terms and conditions, we can pretty much do what we want," Disclic director Noel Unwin told ZDNet UK. "We've had interest from America, Australia, India--which is quite surprising as we've specifically focused our marketing in the U.K.," added Unwin, who estimated that discount-licensing.com offers savings of about 35 percent.
Microsoft Thursday at LinuxWorld is expected to unveil a new Web site for users to find information about its Linux and open-source interoperability efforts, according to the executive in charge of those plans.
Bill Hilf, general manager of platform strategy group for Microsoft, will discuss the site, at www.port25.technet.com--during his keynote at the conference in Boston Thursday morning. The site will also go live on Thursday.
Hilf, who formerly worked on Linux deployments at IBM, has been overseeing Microsoft's Linux and open-source interoperability lab at its Redmond, Washington, campus for the past two years. He recently moved into a more senior position, replacing Martin Taylor, who has moved over to the Windows Live team.
Microsoft's Windows Vista will run on just about any PC available today, but it will only show its true colors on about half of them, according to a new report from Gartner.
Whereas today's mainstream processors and hard drives offer plenty of performance and capacity to keep up with the new OSnow scheduled to arrive for large businesses in November and consumers in January 2007IT managers and their counterparts, in addition to consumers buying PCs, should take care to specify at least 1GB of memory. If they aim to tap Vista's Aero user interface, they will need a recent graphics processor, a new report by Gartner said.
I signed up for my first Hotmail account in 1996 when a tech-savvy friend told me it would be part of the wave of the future.
"Imagine it, this e-mail address travels with you," he said. "You don't even have to be on your home computer." I quickly signed up and have been hooked ever since.
But somewhere along the line, it seemed as if Microsoft just stopped caring about the free Web-based e-mail service it bought in 1997. The once-groundbreaking Hotmail quickly became a dinosaur to feature-rich rivals from Yahoo, Google and Time Warner's AOL.
Attacks that rely on "social engineering" tricks to fool users into visiting malicious Web sites are just as dangerous as any that exploit software vulnerabilities, a Microsoft security researcher argued this week.
According to Matt Braverman, a program manager with Microsoft's Anti-Malware Technology Team, data from the group's Malicious Software Removal Tool shows that dupes are as crucial to attackers as bugs.
February's update of the Malicious Software Removal Tool -- the utility is refreshed on the same schedule Microsoft uses to release security patches -- discovered an unusually high number of Alcan.b worms on users' PCs.
Microsoft's MSN search engine stopped working for about four hours Thursday. Microsoft spokesman Justin Osmer said in an e-mail that the company was still trying to determine what went wrong.
During the outage, which began about 8:30 a.m. and was being restored as of about 12:15 p.m., users who tried to find Web pages were told the service was unavailable and that, "Our team is working to restore service as quickly as possible."
Microsoft's MSN Search is the No. 3 search provider in the United States, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, behind market leaders Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. Nielsen/NetRatings said MSN provided 10.7 percent of all U.S. search results in February, compared with 48.5 percent for Google and 22.5 percent for Yahoo.
Microsoft will continue its efforts to stop software piracy by announcing an agreement with two Chinese computer makers to use only licensed versions of its Windows XP operating system.
Microsoft plans to announce it will sign deals with Tsinghua Tongfang Co. Ltd., of Beijing, the third largest computer manufacturer in China, and TCL in GuangDong, China.
Under these "genuine Windows cooperative engagement agreements," the companies will agree to help educate end-users about the benefits of using licensed software instead of pirated versions, said John Litten, communications manager in the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) division of Microsoft in Redmond, Washington.
After failing to penetrate the tough Japanese video game market with the initial launch of its Xbox 360 video game system, Microsoft this week said it wasn't giving up: The software giant will triple the number of Xbox 360 games it offers in Japan by the end of the year. Furthermore, Microsoft has bolstered its in-house game making capability by purchasing Lionhead Studios.
"Our message is this: We're prepared to do everything that's needed to make Xbox 360 a success around the world, including Japan," said Takashi Sensui, who heads Microsoft's Xbox efforts in Japan. "Xbox 360 has created such a stir in overseas markets including the United States and Europe. As the manager of Xbox operations in Japan, my task is to achieve the same success in Japan."