A New York state appeals court has rejected Microsoft's attempt to throw out a class-action suit alleging deceptive and monopolistic business practices. The state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the lawsuit could continue, overruling part of a lower court's decision that had sided with Microsoft.
Microsoft successfully fended off much of the Justice Department's antitrust suit with a settlement finalized in 2002. But the outcome of the federal suit encouraged a multitude of trial lawyers to assail the Redmond, Wash., giant in state courts. The company has managed to settle the bulk of them so far, but at least seven are still in play.
Oracle's negligence in security expose database information to hackers.
A security vulnerability in Oracle's E-Business Suite could put users at risk
of arbitrary script execution, according to a warning from the U.S. Computer
Emergency Response Team (US-CERT).
In an advisory issued late Tuesday, US-CERT said an unauthenticated attacker
could exploit the flaw to execute arbitrary SQL statements on the vulnerable
system with the privileges of the Oracle server process. "In addition to
compromising the integrity of the database information, this may lead to the
compromise of the database application and the underlying operating system," the
group cautioned.
Microsoft filed a brief, asking the U.S. Court of Appeals to overturn a $565 million patent infringement judgment. The 174-page document, filed June 3, attacks a U.S. District Court decision that said Microsoft violated a patent, owned by the University of California and its Eolas spinoff. The patent describes how a Web browser can run plug-in applications.
Microsoft filed its appeal, as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is pursuing a re-examination of the UC patent. A preliminary finding issued in February by the patent office concurred with claims by standards body the World Wide Web Consortium and others that the patent was improperly granted because of pre-existing similar inventions, or "prior art," by software developer Dave Raggett.
Better not get too fancy with your grocery list, now that Microsoft has patented a glorified form of the to-do list. U.S. Patent No. 6,748,582, granted and assigned Tuesday to Microsoft, covers the use of a "task list" in a software development environment.
The patented technology essentially integrates certain comments left in the source code of an application under development with an accompanying checklist. Leave a "TODO" comment in the source code, and an authoring application automatically creates an item in the task list. Check an item off on the task list, and the corresponding source code comment is changed.
Just in from Ditto. Microsoft Office Live Communications
Server 2005 beta bits have just been released to
http://beta.microsoft.com.
We are happy to announce that the beta release of Microsoft® Office Live
Communications Server 2005 is now available on Beta Place!
To access Beta Place, go to
http://beta.microsoft.com. Sign in using your Microsoft Passport account.
Beta participation is a personal invitation for you only, so please do not share
your Passport or your access to beta.microsoft.com with others.
Microsoft private newsgroups are now available for technical support. Private
newsgroups are accessed from a dedicated news server using your Beta ID and a
Password. If you do not already have a password, you can create a newsgroup
password on http://beta.microsoft.com,
under the "Modify Your Info/Modify Newsgroup Login Info". More detailed
information about accessing the newsgroups is available on
http://beta.microsoft.com.
To access the NNTP private newsgroups you will need a newsreader program. The
newsgroups can also be accessed via your Internet browser by connecting to
http://webnews.microsoft.com. You
will need to use the account information listed below to configure either
newsgroup viewing option. More detailed information about accessing the
newsgroups is available on Beta.Microsoft.com.
All newsgroups for this beta program begin with: microsoft.beta.***.beta
Newsgroup Account Name: 300800 Newsgroup Password: News Server: betanews.microsoft.com
*Note: If you forget the newsgroup password you create on
Beta.Microsoft.com you will need to go to Beta.Microsoft.com to create a new
one.
Access to this specific program page on Beta.Microsoft.com and its private
newsgroups is limited to participants of this beta release. Microsoft will never
request you send your password information to us via email or any other method.
Any attempt to obtain your password could indicate fraudulent activity and
should be reported to us immediately via the email address below. Please do not
share this account information beyond the scope of what is allowed under the
License Agreement for this beta. In addition, please do not discuss this beta in
newsgroups outside of this program, including other Microsoft newsgroups.
If you need assistance, please send e-mail to ******@microsoft.com.
Thank you for participating in this beta program. We look forward to your
valuable feedback!
The Live Communications Server Team
To the gaming community, the Microsoft Xbox console has a lot to offer and promises even more in the future. But the company has not been able to get worldwide sales, especially Japanese sales, to the levels it hoped for. Depending on whose report you read, the Sony PlayStation is outselling the Xbox at a 4 to 1 pace, and that's an optimistic ratio. The Xbox has become the number-two platform in the USA, ahead of the Nintendo GameCube, but it still has not been popular enough to become a profit center for Microsoft. All this has recently been compounded by Microsoft's decision to cancel or delay the release of its online game True Fantasy Live Online.
As expected, Microsoft filed an appeal of its European Union (EU) antitrust case on Monday, and asked the European Court of First Instance to suspend the $612 million fine and required product changes levied against it until the company's appeal could be heard. While legal experts expect Microsoft's request to be granted, EU antitrust chief Mario Monti pledged that the software giant would lose its appeal.
"The commission's decision undermines the innovative efforts of successful companies, imposing significant new obligations on successful companies," Microsoft lawyer Horacio Gutierrez said. "We believe that the interest of consumers and other European companies should be at the heart of this case. Consumers and the industry benefit from product innovation and competition."
Back in January 2002, Microsoft showed Issaquah residents a huge tabletop model of its proposed campus in the city. Two-and-a-half years later, that's as close as anyone has come to seeing any of those buildings on the 150-acre site.
Microsoft hasn't yet started construction of the Issaquah Highlands campus, and it's not saying when it might begin. Even city officials can only speculate how many years might pass before the first Microsoft employees arrive for work there.
In reorganizing the leadership of its business applications division, Microsoft last week said that Doug Burgum, senior vice president responsible for Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS), will report directly to CEO Steve Ballmer and that Orlando Ayala, senior vice president responsible for the Worldwide Small and Midmarket Solutions and Partners group, will add the title of MBS COO and report to Burgum. In an interview with CRN Industry Editor Barbara Darrow, the two executives discussed Microsoft's decision to outsource Solomon Software development and new resources aimed at driving more business applications sales, including new field personnel dedicated to the corporate space.
Microsoft on Thursday posted for download a public beta of the next version of its Visual FoxPro development tool. The public beta of Visual FoxPro 9.0, code-named "Europa," is available on the Microsoft.com download site.
The new version will include a number of user-interface tweaks, as well as some incremental new features for developers, such as IntelliSense support. The final version of FoxPro 9.0 is due to ship by year-end, according to information on the Visual FoxPro Developer Center site.