Two flaws in RealNetworks' popular media player could let attackers commandeer Windows computers running the software, a security company has warned.
The vulnerabilities affect RealPlayer on all versions of Windows, according to two short advisories that eEye Digital Security published Thursday. To exploit the flaws, an attacker would craft a special media file and host it on a Web site or trick a user into opening it, Steve Manzuik, security product manager at eEye, said Friday.
"I don't think there is an immediate risk to users. We have no evidence of others knowing or exploiting the flaw," Manzuik said.
Microsoft said Friday that some people who use its Hotmail and MSN e-mail services are not receiving e-mail sent from Comcast accounts and other Internet service providers.
Brooke Richardson, a group product manager with Microsoft's MSN online division, said the problem appears to be due to an increase in e-mail volumes, which it is attributed in part to the Sober Internet worm.
She said the high volumes are causing e-mail to either be delayed or not make it to MSN and Hotmail users at all.
A lawsuit seeking to potentially cover hundreds of thousands of America Online Inc. subscribers accuses the Time Warner Inc. unit of illegally billing customers by creating secondary accounts for them without their consent.
The lawsuit, filed last month in St. Clair County Circuit Court on behalf of 10 AOL customers in six states, claims the company confused and deceived customers about the charges, stalled them from canceling unauthorized accounts and refused to return questioned fees.
Microsoft's research arm Thursday released a free tool to help users slog through e-mail messages in their inbox in the order of importance, according to one of the researchers who developed the software.
Created within Microsoft Research, the Social Relationship and Network Finder, or SNARF, is an application that uses the same database as a user's e-mail client to count the number of times users send and receive e-mails from people, said A.J. Brush, a researcher in the community technologies group at Microsoft Research.
Microsoft is moving more quickly to develop tools competitors can use to create software that runs smoothly on the Windows operating system, a judge overseeing the 2001 antitrust settlement with the Bush administration said.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who in October questioned the pace of Microsoft's efforts to fulfill a key component of the settlement, praised the company at a hearing Wednesday in Washington for its more "proactive" approach to compliance.
"I'm pleased at the renewed vigor" Microsoft has shown, she said. "We seem to be at least back on track."
Microsoft is working on a significant new feature for Windows Vista, known as Restart Manager, which is designed to update parts of the operating system or applications without having to reboot the entire machine.
Microsoft officials have not talked much publicly about this new feature, but Jim Allchin, the co-president of Microsoft's platform products and services division, recently told eWEEK that this is an example of just how important the reboot issue was to the Redmond-based software giant.
"If a part of an application, or the operating system itself, needs to updated, the Installer will call the Restart Manager, which looks to see if it can clear that part of the system so that it can be updated. If it can do that, it does, and that happens without a reboot," he said.
Microsoft's Windows OneCare PC security bundle is now available to the general public. The consumer-facing tool, which features virus scanning, firewall protection, data backup and PC cleanup tools, has been released to the Windows Live portal as part of Microsoft's plan to extend the beta testing process to a wider audience.
As previously reported, Windows OneCare was recently refreshed to handle automatic scans of files received from the MSN Messenger IM client and the ability to back up computer data to external hard drives.
Under fire for a marketing plan that may have improperly favored Windows Media Player, Microsoft on Wednesday told a federal judge that it's trying hard to avoid any anticompetitive behavior by employees.
At a conference in the same courtroom here last month, the company
took heat from U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly amid news that one of its employees had devised a marketing agreement that would have forbidden portable music player makers from bundling anything except Windows Media Player with their devices.
Microsoft says it is speeding up the internal development schedule for the next version of Windows -- hoping to improve the quality of its biggest product by giving testers more time to use a full-featured version before the final release.
The company is aiming to integrate all of Windows Vista's planned features into the preliminary version of the program by early next year, said Amitabh Srivastava, corporate vice president in the Windows Core Operating System division.
Such a step is significant because it lets software development teams focus on fixing bugs in established features, rather than making new features.
With the release of its Dynamics GP 9.0 suite earlier this month and additional Dynamics releases expected throughout the coming year, Microsoft is well into Wave 1 of its two-wave business applications modernization plan.
While it will eventually merge the code of Microsoft's four ERP suiteswhich came from separate acquisitionsDynamics also brings the Microsoft Business Solutions division technically and culturally into the fold.
That integration of the MBS development team with the Office SQL Server, Visual Basic and other technology development teams is key to the company's success in the ERP sector.