A new version of Microsoft's instant-messaging software for Macintosh computers aims to give the program a bigger presence in corporate settings. Microsoft Messenger for Mac 5.0, to be released as a free download today, is the first version of the Mac program designed to work with a corporate messaging server, Microsoft's Live Communications Server 2005.
The change makes it possible to send messages within a corporate firewall, rather than across the Internet, if a company chooses, said Amanda Lefebvre, marketing manager in Microsoft's Mac Business Unit. It also makes it possible to trade messages with users of other instant-messaging systems, including Yahoo, AOL and others.
A man once accused of being one of the world's top three spammers has agreed to pay $7 million in a settlement with Microsof, the software maker announced today.
The money from Scott Richter and his company, OptInRealBig.com of Westminster, Colo., will be used to boost efforts to combat the illegal sending of unsolicited and misleading e-mail known as spam and other computer misuse, said Microsoft's chief counsel, Brad Smith, in a news release issued this morning.
At the start of last year, Bill Gates told the world's elite at an annual conference in Davos, Switzerland, that the problem of spam would be solved in two years.
Basically, Sender ID checks whether an e-mail that claims to come from a certain Internet domain (such as "customerservice@anybank.com") really originates from the e-mail servers associated with that domain ("anybank.com"). The system uses the Domain Name System, or DNS, to make that determination. Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which merged with Microsoft's Caller ID for E-mail Technology to become Sender ID, also uses the same approach.
Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates took advantage of his company's recent stock run-up to sell 16 million shares over a six day period that netted him $421 million and change.
According to Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Gates sold 16 million shares of common stock starting July 27 and ending August 3 at prices ranging from $25.65 to $27.37.
The transactions ranged in size from the largest sale of 942,181 shares to the smallest of just 100 shares. Gates' biggest days were August 2, when he sold over 4 million shares for just over $106 million, and the next day, August 3, when he sold slightly under 4 million shares for a total of nearly $109 million.
At this week's LinuxWorld conference, Microsoft officials are slated to talk up the Services for Unix features that the company is integrating into the Windows Server 2003 R2.
At this week's LinuxWorld conference, Microsoft officials are planning to play up the Windows-Unix interoperability and cross-platform application-portability strategies that will be enabled Microsoft's pending Windows Server 2003 R2 operating system release.
MSN quietly launched last week a preview version of MSN Filter, a cross between a blog and a wiki. MSN made the move a month after MSN officials made it public that they were looking to hire five "freelance contributing editors" to create blogs in the areas of television, music, technology, sports, and fashion/food/style.
MSN Filter updates can be accessed via desktop, email, or phone, and will also be integrated into MSN's Start.com platform.
Adam Sheppard, lead product manager for MSN Filter, said MSN's model " is essentially Nanopublishing as originally championed by Nick Denton at Gawker Media and Weblogs Inc. Both are great blog networks with their own audiences that they'll continue to be successful with."
What happens when a smaller software maker enters a collision course with giant Microsoft? Adobe Systems, a San Jose-based company with a large presence in Fremont, is poised to find out. Redmond-based Microsoft just announced two products that will compete with offerings from Adobe, and Adobe is about to buy a company with products that challenge Microsoft's.
After that purchase, Adobe will practically own a rich market: software used by photographers, artists and Web developers to manage photos and graphic images and print them or create Web sites incorporating them.
Microsoft hopes to tackle an age-old problem with the next version of Windows: How to keep PCs running like new.
Vista will automatically de-fragment hard disks, make better use of memory to more quickly load programs, and include a new performance control panel that will identify performance bottlenecks, according to the company.
A Vista-based PC might even be faster a few weeks after it's installed, thanks to one new feature called SuperFetch. SuperFetch basically studies the programs that an individual user frequently runs and loads them into memory automatically.
Microsoft has officially lifted the wraps off its Strider HoneyMonkey research project, designed to trawl the dark side of the Internet looking for Web sites hosting malicious code.
Microsoft released a technical report, available here as a PDF, to introduce the concept of an Automated Web Patrol that uses multiple Windows XP machines, some unpatched and some fully updated, to streamline the process of finding zero-day Web-based exploits.
Yi-Min Wang, group manager of the Cybersecurity and Systems Management group in Microsoft Research, said a total of 752 unique URLs, hosted on 287 sites, were identified within the first month of launching the HoneyMonkey project.
Just one day after the first public reports of viruses being written for an upcoming feature of Microsoft's Windows operating system, Microsoft has confirmed that it will not include the feature in the first generally available release of Microsoft Vista, expected in the second half of 2006.
In an interview Friday, Microsoft Director of Product Management Eric Berg said Monad will not be included in the first commercial version of Windows Vista, expected in the second half of 2006. But the product is expected to be included in Windows over the next "three to five years," he said. "Our intention is to synchronize it with both client and server operating systems."