WinInsider

Microsoft, tacitly acknowledging the continued popularity of Windows XP, said this week it was updating the operating system's anti-piracy technology to detect illegal copies installed with newly stolen or faked product keys, or with new activation cracks.

The company has also acknowledged that Windows XP Professional is preferred by pirates over Vista by wide margins, and last year promised it would roll out a campaigns during 2009 to warn people that XP is widely counterfeited.

Kochis touted installation changes to WGA Notifications, although he wasn't clear on what those changes were.

Microsoft is again delaying the release of the anticipated upgrade to its Identity Lifecycle Manager 2.0 software that has been years in development.

The 2.0 version includes a number of user self-service features, such as password reset. It also includes a new delegation model, a business process framework, "code-less" provisioning, and a set of services that users and partners can tap to extend the server's functionality. ILM 2.0 also integrates its group management, workflow, and other features with SharePoint and Outlook.

Microsoft Research this week released a Web application that can automatically translate Web sites into other languages.

Microsoft said its goal with the widget is to provide "useful" translations rather than exact human translations, at least for the time being.

"While the technology is improving month to month, it will still take a long time before it can match human translation quality," the company said on the blog post. "We don't recommend using machine translation for sensitive or highly critical information.

" Microsoft also posted links to information about the quality of the translation and how Microsoft performs machine translation.

Charlie Miller, the security researcher who hacked a Mac in two minutes last year at CanSecWest's PWN2OWN contest, improved his time Wednesday by breaking into another Mac in under 10 seconds.

PWN2OWN's sponsor, 3Com's TippingPoint unit, paid Miller the $5,000 for the rights to the vulnerability he exploited and the exploit code he used. As it has at past challenges, it reported the vulnerability to on-site Apple representatives. "Apple has it, and they're working on it," added Miller.

According to Terri Forslof, the manager of security response at TippingPoint, another researcher later broke into a Sony laptop that was running Windows 7 by exploiting a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8. "Safari and IE both went down," she said in an e-mail.

Microsoft officials confirmed that the latest version of the company's market-leading browser, Internet Explorer 8, will be released as a public download as of Thursday morning.

"Tomorrow, we'll make available the 'release to Web' version of IE8 in 25 languages," James Pratt, senior product manager for Internet Explorer, told InternetNews.com on Wednesday afternoon briefing. Since IE is free, users can freely download it immediately without waiting for it to go through what's called "release to manufacturing."

The announcement comes during Microsoft's MIX09 conference held this week in Las Vegas. InternetNews.com first reported that IE8 would be released at MIX09 in early March.

Rather than being a time for retreat, the current tough economy presents an opportunity for designers to shine, a Microsoft official stressed Wednesday at the company's Mix09 conference for software designers and developers.

On the brink of the Great Depression, industrial designers were developing products such as the Coke bottle and logo and a repackaged Kodak pocket camera, Buxton pointed out. "What idiot would do a startup of a design consultancy on the eve of the Great Depression? But every one of these companies is still in business today," Buxton said. "They didn't just survive the Depression, they thrived in it, as did their clients because they got the return on experience.

Adobe Flash and AIR, watch out. Microsoft Silverlight will soon work outside the browser as part of the next version of the multimedia browser plug-in.

Microsoft on Wednesday released the beta version of Silverlight 3.0 and announced a slew of other technologies at its Mix Web developer conference, all aimed at attracting Web developers to the Microsoft platform.

Silverlight 3, a final version of which will ship later this year, includes -- in addition to the ability to run Silverlight applications offline and outside of the browser -- a number of new video, graphics, and data-related features. Despite the added features, Silverlight 3 will actually come in a smaller download package than its predecessor.

Microsoft will deliver a release candidate of Windows 7 to the public in late May, according to a report from a noted Windows Web site.

Pirated post-beta builds of Windows 7 have also been regularly leaking to the Web. The latest, build 7057, reached BitTorrent last week and contained references to "Release Candidate 1" in its end-user licensing agreement.

While Microsoft has not promised that it will issue Windows 7 RC to the public, Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president in charge of the Windows engineering group, has repeatedly hinted that it will do so.

It's interesting to compare how Microsoft and Apple market their respective products. When Apple announced the beta version of its Safari 4 browser last week, it made sweeping claims like "world's fastest browser," "more than four times faster," and "up to 30 times faster than IE." Well, Microsoft is gearing up to ship its next browser, Internet Explorer (IE) 8, sometime soon, and it's addressing the performance issues as well. It's just being a lot humbler than Apple. As usual. "Internet Explorer is fast, just like other browsers," the company claims, using thorough testing against all major browser competitors as its proof. "Internet Explorer 8 loads faster on 5 of the top 10 web sites, and 12 of the top 25. It's faster on three times as many sites as Firefox. And one-third more sites than [Google] Chrome." Unlike Apple, Microsoft provides a whitepaper describing its exact methodology and results: It uses real-world Web sites to test and not micro-benchmarks that are meaningless in the real world. You know, like Apple does.

Microsoft is just weeks away from shipping the release candidate of Windows 7. In the meantime, the company's developers are rushing to pack in a few more last-minute changes to the system, with the latest tweaks primarily affecting the system's user interface.

But the question remains whether all of the last-minute changes will derail Microsoft's very tightly scheduled plans for getting Windows 7 out the door on time.

A release candidate, or RC, is the last phase of testing for a Microsoft product before it ships to the Web and to manufacturers.