WinInsider

After a six-month search, Microsoft UK has chosen a new security chief, and it's a man with plenty of experience of the criminal underworld. The company announced late last week that it had appointed Edward Gibson as its chief security advisor in the U.K. Gibson, who will take up his new role in July, has worked for America's Federal Bureau of Investigation as an assistant legal attache for the UK. He started at the FBI in 1985 as a special agent and has a track-record of fighting money laundering, fraud, financial crime and intellectual-property theft, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft took another step toward releasing a beta version of Longhorn, the next edition of Windows, with the debut Monday of developer tools for the operating system.

The company is providing free downloads of a toolkit that will let developers write applications for Avalon and Indigo, two of the main additions to Windows due with Longhorn. A beta, or test, program for the client version of the Longhorn operating system is due "this summer," according to Ari Bixhorn, lead product manager for Web services strategy at Microsoft. A completed version is expected in the second half of next year.

Microsoft wants the Senate to rewrite anti-spyware legislation in order to protect companies that provide spyware removal utilities. The software maker warned Tuesday that two bills approved by the House of Representatives this week fail to prevent "frivolous lawsuits" filed by adware and spyware companies that are upset when their code is removed.

"These bills leave companies that are responding to consumer demand for strong anti-spyware tools vulnerable to frivolous lawsuits brought by the very companies responsible for the proliferation of spyware and other deceptive software," Jack Krumholtz, the head of Microsoft's lobbying office, said in a statement. Microsoft began offering a spyware removal utility this year.

Computers running Windows XP Service Pack 2 are 15 times less likely than those running XP or XP SP1 to be infected by some of the most dangerous forms of malware, according to a Microsoft security guru.

He added that spyware could be responsible for up to one-third of all Windows crashes, citing data culled by the Windows error reporting tool, which sends data back to Microsoft when an application crashes.

"The primary problem that users have with spyware is that their systems crash or are really slow or don't behave in the way they expect them to," Garms said.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates previewed new satellite-mapping technology designed to compete with local-search offerings from Google, Yahoo and Amazon.com.

Gates, presenting at the "D" conference in Carlsbad, Calif., on Monday introduced MSN Virtual Earth, a map service that lets visitors zoom in on a local area and get information about restaurants, cafes, hotels, dry cleaners, and so on. Gates said the service will be available this summer.

MSN Virtual Earth will provide a "core set of reference points," such as maps, aerial imagery, photos, consumer and business directories, and ratings and reviews, according to the company.

Companies should not ban employees from writing down their passwords because such bans force people to use the same weak term on many systems, according to a Microsoft security guru.

Speaking on the opening day of a conference hosted by Australia's national Computer Emergency Response Team, or AusCERT, Microsoft's Jesper Johansson said that the security industry has been giving out the wrong advice to users by telling them not to write down their passwords. Johansson is senior program manager for security policy at Microsoft.

With the next version of Office, Microsoft plans to let businesses set rules, enforced by server-based software, to determine how those documents are handled. The shift is just one of several trends the software giant is labeling part of a "new world of work" that its next generation Office software will address. But at the same time that Microsoft is saying it understands the shifting tides, it's trying to make sure it doesn't miss any undercurrents.

Along with its long-standing research efforts, the company has stepped up its efforts to look at how different people are working, across industries and geographic boundaries as well as in different age groups.

Microsoft is throwing its weight into the work of unifying a growing patchwork of different identity management protocols for Web services.

Call it the latest lessons learned from what not to do with its .Net Passport identity management system. Passport, which was bedeviled by proprietary platform and security issues, is all but defunct.

Now, with the latest beta1 release candidates of the Indigo and Avalon development platforms for Web services and next-generation graphics subsystems, Microsoft is loosing a new and improved version of its Identity Metasystem Architectural Diagram.

Microsoft makes most of its profits on the Windows operating system and the Office suite of desktop applications, but the company also is heavily invested in future markets. Several of them, including business applications, are barely profitable at the moment but may pan out big for the Redmond, Wash., vendor, Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman said last week.

In addition, Microsoft is sitting on a hoard of $60 billion in cash, which puts it in a position to make as many small acquisitions as it wants, or perhaps a large one. "The talks with SAP indicate that they're open to a large acquisition, an acquisition that could take them in an entirely new direction," Bittman said at the Gartner ITxpo in San Francisco.

A group of five large technology vendors, including IBM and Oracle, have officially been approved to raise their voices against Microsoft in an appeal of the European Commission's antitrust case.

IBM, Oracle, Nokia, RealNetworks, and Red Hat have applied to participate under the umbrella group to support the Commission's efforts.

The acceptance of ECIS makes no difference from Microsoft's point of view, according to company spokesman Dirk Delmartino. The ECIS members were already participating through other intervening groups, he said.