Microsoft yesterday won a judge's order that may temporarily keep a high-ranking executive who defected to rival Google Inc. from doing the job he was hired for.
Citing Microsoft's fear that its trade secrets could be revealed, King County Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez ruled that Kai-Fu Lee, hired by Google to establish and run its China research and development effort, can't be asked to undertake any activities that would compete with projects he handled at Microsoft.
In a three-page order, Gonzalez also said Lee can't disclose trade secrets to Google, and he must return any Microsoft materials he still has.
Microsoft on Tuesday pushed its WGA program over the Internet, hoping to thwart users running illegal or pirated copies of Windows XP and Windows 2000.
However, online enthusiast sites reported on Thursday that the verification method had been broken in 24 hours.
According to one site, the hack is simply a short JavaScript string that is pasted into the address bar of Internet Explorer before users make a choice in one of the Windows Update screens.
WGA certifies that a user's system is running a genuine and legal copy.
Security remains one of the biggest concerns for Microsoft over the coming year and beyond.
Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie, a Microsoft chief technology officer, spoke on a wide range of issues, but they singled out security as among the key focuses of the company. The two spoke in a fireside chat format at the Microsoft Financial Analysts Meeting here Thursday.
"If you look at our whole R&D effort, security would be the biggest thing," Gates said.
Opera Software on Thursday shipped an updated version of its Opera for Windows Web browser to fix a trio of potentially serious security vulnerabilities.
The Norwegian company recommends that Windows users upgrade to Opera 8.0.2 to protect against malicious hacker attacks.
The most serious of the three flaws is due to an error in the handling of extended ASCII codes in the download dialog.
Security research outfit Secunia Inc., which discovered the flaw, has tagged it as "moderately critical" and warned that attackers could trick users into executing malicious files.
The percentage of the Windows XP installed base protected by the firewall, Automatic Updates, virus subscription warnings, rewritten code and other baseline security measures in Service Pack 2 keeps inching up.
Earlier this month, Microsoft reported distributing more than 218 million copies of SP2 since releasing the service pack nearly a year ago. While Microsoft doesn't publicly disclose figures, they frequently refer reporters to the data collected
by analysts at IDC.
"As of the middle of 2005, IDC estimates the installed base of Windows XP Professional and Windows XP Home to be 371 million operating systems installations," IDC analyst Al Gillen said. That means Microsoft distributed 58.8 percent as many copies of SP2 as of Windows XP.
A month after closing its acquisition of Sybari Software, Microsoft is weighing the fate of roughly half of the security software maker's work force.
East Northport, N.Y.-based Sybari, which employed roughly 280 people worldwide before the Microsoft acquisition, will retain only 150 workers, with the remainder under review, a Microsoft executive said Wednesday.
"Sybari still has 282 employees," Janet Cho, a senior manager in Microsoft's human resources department, told CNET News.com's sister site ZDNet Germany. "We will keep 150 of them. With the rest, we are in negotiations. This is no mass dismissal--we try to be very cautious with all these people. We want to keep as much people as possible and integrate them into Microsoft."
Microsoft said it has sold 100,000 copies of its Windows XP Starter Edition, the first indication of the popularity of the low-cost operating system.
Will Poole, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Client unit, gave out the sales figure on Thursday here, at the company's yearly meeting with financial analysts.
For months, the software company has been expanding the number of countries in which it sells the operating system, a basic version of Windows that is sold in conjunction with a new PC. Microsoft initiated the program in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. It has since expanded sales to India, Brazil and, more recently, to Mexico and Spanish-speaking Latin America.
Less than 24 hours after Microsoft announced the release of Windows Vista Beta 1 and Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 to testers and MSDN subscribers, both betas have leaked to Internet sites and newsgroups along with a crack for Windows Product Activation, according to BetaNews sources.The Vista download weighs in at close to 2.5GB, but the operating system's heft did not keep the pirates away. The next-generation Windows beta likely uses the same activation technology found in Windows XP, which was compromised long ago.
The Tablet PC market is set for steady growth between now and the end of the decade, research firm In-Stat said Wednesday.
However, the biggest hurdle to this growth could come from the Tablet PC's main backer, Microsoft, if that company decides it is serious in promoting a new lower-priced, consumer-oriented product category, In-Stat said.
The Tablet PC market is due to grow from $1.2 billion in 2004 to $5.4 billion in 2009, with the U.S. remaining the biggest market followed by Europe then Asia, according to Brian O'Rourke, a senior analyst at the company. In-Stat classifies Tablet PCs as devices that run the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told analysts Thursday that Microsoft is planning new, higher-priced versions of both Windows and Office in the coming years as part of its effort to grow sales.
Ballmer said that the company will add both high-end desktop editions and new server options in the next versions of Windows and Office.
Microsoft's chief executive made his comments at a company-sponsored financial analyst conference here.
Ballmer noted that the existing premium Windows XP Professional version had added billions of dollars of extra revenue for Microsoft. "We have plans in the Vista generation to introduce an Enterprise edition," Ballmer said in a speech kicking off the Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting.