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Eight people who allegedly ran online scams to pilfer personal information from Internet users worldwide were arrested in Bulgaria last week.

Bulgarian law enforcement agents conducted raids in three cities and dismantled what is believed to be an international phishing operation, Microsoft said in a statement Friday. The Redmond, Wash., software giant helped investigate the alleged cybercrimes, which played off its MSN Web property, it said.

Microsoft is in full court press for this year's release of Windows Vista. Maybe that's why it has taken its eye off the U.S. antitrust judgment ball.

In a response to Microsoft's monthly status report, the plaintiffs in the case slammed the software vendor for falling behind on replying to requests from the monitoring Technical Committee (TC). The TC monitors Microsoft's compliance with the terms of the November 2002 settlement of the antitrust case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Microsoft has asked for more time to comply with a European Commission antitrust ruling forcing it to ensure full interoperability with its workgroup server software, a Commission spokesman said on Monday.

If the Commission agrees to the company's request, it would give Microsoft (Profile, Products, Articles) more time to comply with the ruling before the company is fined up to 2 million ($2.43 million) a day.

The Commission, the European Union's antitrust watchdog, had given the company until Wednesday to comply with its March 2004 decision to require Microsoft to provide documentation allowing its competitors to interoperate with the company's workgroup server systems.

Microsoft, the world's biggest software maker, will spend $120 million a year on an advertising campaign to fight its image as "a huge American company."

The campaign, using television, print and the Internet, highlights Microsoft's education and economic development projects in 32 countries, including France and Taiwan, according to group advertising manager Mike Lucero. Actor William Macy of the movie "Fargo" narrates the ads.

"We are often perceived as a huge American company," Lucero said Friday in an interview.

Microsoft confirmed Friday that it has changed the codename for the next version of Windows beyond Vista, though it revealed little else.

"The codename for Blackcomb has changed to "Vienna" . . . [but] this does not reflect a big change for us [because] we have used city code names in the past," a Microsoft spokeswoman said in an e-mail statement.

For instance, Windows 95 was codenamed "Chicago." More recently, Microsoft had settled on ski resort names as monikers. Windows XP was previously codenamed "Whistler" for a ski area just north of Seattle in British Columbia, Canada.

Microsoft is planning several major changes to beef up features of Software Assurance, the company's maintenance and upgrade program that has been criticized for its expense and slow follow-up with new products.

The program, started in 2002, streamlined what was often a complex and expensive licensing routine for Microsoft products. Licensees who purchased Software Assurance had the right to upgrade their programs for no cost when new versions were released, in addition to receiving training and support.

Screenshots and code for the most recent build of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 browser have leaked to the Internet, several Windows devotee sites reported Friday.

Internet Explorer 7, which is being co-developed for the upcoming Windows Vista and the current flagship Microsoft OS, Windows XP -- has been posted to at least one German Web site -- links are available from JCXP.net -- where it can be downloaded as an 11GB file in .rar format.

Other sites, including ActivWin.com, have posted numerous screenshots of the new browser that show such things as its thumbnail-style QuickTabs and the long-awaited tabbed browsing interface.

Microsoft is working toward the release of the Team Foundation Server component of its lifecycle tools suite and is expected to release it later this quarter as part of the renamed Visual Studio Team System 2006, sources said.

Meanwhile, with the release of the new version of the lifecycle tools suite, Microsoft and some of its partners will provide support for agile development methodologies, including Scrum.

Microsoft released Beta 3 of TFS in September and a December CTP of the technology last month. And the company is slated to deliver a "release candidate" of TFS early in February, before making the commercial version of the technology available later this quarter, Microsoft officials said.

With a new conference slated for March, Microsoft will attempt to woo a developer segment that's traditionally been a hard sell -- creative types who build and design multimedia Web applications.

The first-ever MIX 06 conference, which will be held in Las Vegas from March 20-22, will provide a forum for showing Web designers and developers how they can use Microsoft technologies to deliver state-of-the-art business Web sites and Web-based applications, according to a Web site about the show (http://www.mix06.com/).

Microsoft on Wednesday released a JDBC Driver that allows developers to link Java applications to its SQL Server databases.

The driver is available free of charge to all SQL Server users. It hooks into both SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000 from any Java application, application server or Java-enabled applet.

Microsoft first came out with a Java driver for SQL Server 2002 in 2002, in response to customers' demand for interoperability between the database and Java.

The new driver, like the first, is a Type 4 driver that works through standard JDBC APIs that are available in J2EE.