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Hot on the heels of the release of a utility for bypassing the Windows Marketplace and sideloading your own apps, Microsoft has released a brief statement on the state of the Windows Phone 7 hacking community… and we wouldn’t exactly say they’re too worked up about it:

“We anticipated that people would attempt to unlock the phones and explore the underlying operating system. We encourage people to use their Windows Phone as supplied by the manufacturer to ensure the best possible user experience. Attempting to unlock a device could void the warranty, disable phone functionality, interrupt access to Windows Phone 7 services or render the phone permanently unusable.”

So yeah, we’d say this is more or less a boilerplate quote: “we figured you’d hack this thing, we’d prefer it if you didn’t, and here’s a laundry list of things that could (but probably won’t) happen if you fail to heed our meek warning.” Over the long term, we wouldn’t be surprised if Redmond ended up playing an Apple-style cat-and-mouse game with these folks, breaking hacks with firmware updates only to have them re-hacked within a few days’ time. Considering the lack of spitfire in the statement here, we don’t see them coming down too hard unless legitimate, card-carrying, fee-paying developers throw a fit — and granted, ChevronWP7 could be a step on the road to piracy, so that could very well happen.

Source: engadget

In a blog post on its Dutch website, Microsoft said that the next version of Windows, Windows 8, is in the works, but that the new operating system will not hit the market for about two years.

The news came at the bottom of a post commemorating Windows 7 (Windows 7)’s one-year anniversary, and suggests a substantially later deployment date than the one detailed in a leaked slide deck about the forthcoming product earlier this year.

According to the slide deck, the next version of Windows (Windows) should include a Windows App Store similar to the one Apple unveiled for Mac last week, logins via facial recognition and faster boot-up times. It also cited early 2011 as the intended launch date.

Given that Apple will at minimum release its new Mac OS X Lion operating system by that time, it seems that Windows 8 will have to develop some impressive features to stay competitive.

Yet a three-year gap between operating systems is nothing new for Microsoft. The Seattle-based company has historically taken much more time to develop and deploy new versions of its desktop operating system than Apple. Windows 7 was released a year ago this month, approximately two and a half years after Windows Vista (Windows Vista) became available to most consumers. There was a five-year gap between Windows XP and Vista, a delay so painful that CEO Steve Ballmer publicly pledged that the company would never again allow such a long period to elapse between releases.

Source: CNET

Ray Ozzie, the visionary Chief software architect of Microsoft is retiring from the company.

In what is a surprise exit, Ozzie plans to enjoy his retirement, with no further job plans at this time.

Email memo from Ballmer

Microsoft employees were informed of Ozzie’s exit in an email from Microsoft’s chief exec Steve Ballmer earlier this week.

Ozzie will not depart immediately, but continue to work for Microsoft through this transitionary period.

“While Ray will be onboard for a while, I’d like to thank him today for his contributions to Microsoft,” Ballmer said in the memo.

Ballmer has said that Microsoft will not attempt to replace Ozzie, with plans to eliminate the chief software architect job.

Successor to Gates

Ozzie is perhaps best known for his role in creating Lotus Notes, having joined Microsoft as its chief technical officer (CTO) back in 2005, after Microsoft purchased his collaboration software company Groove Networks.

Ozzie became Chief software architect – a role originally created for Microsoft founder Bill Gates – in 2006, when Gates handed over day-to-day control of his company.

“Since being at Microsoft, both through inspiration and impact he’s been instrumental in our transition toward a software world now centered on services,” added Ballmer.

Read more: http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/microsoft-s-ray-ozzie-leaves-company-901763#ixzz12nSXaIra

Source: CNN

BOSTON (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp issued its biggest-ever security fix on Tuesday, including repairs to its ubiquitous Windows operating system and Internet browser for flaws that could let hackers take control of a PC.

The new patches aim to fix a number of vulnerabilities including the notorious Stuxnet virus that attacked an Iranian nuclear power plant and other industrial control systems around the world.

Microsoft said four of the new patches — software updates that write over glitches — were of the highest priority and should be deployed immediately to protect users from potential criminal attacks on the Windows operating systems.

Microsoft said it also repaired other less serious security weaknesses in Windows, along with security problems in its widely used Office software for PCs and Microsoft Server software for business computers.

Microsoft released 16 security patches to address 49 problems in its products, many of which were discovered by outside researchers who seek out such vulnerabilities to win cash bounties as well as notoriety for their technical prowess.

“This is a huge jump,” said Amol Sarwate, a research manager with computer security provider Qualys Inc. “I think the reason for it is that more and more people are out there looking for vulnerabilities.”

The geeks who report such vulnerabilities to software makers are known as “white hat” hackers. Sarwate warned that there are also plenty of “black hats,” or criminal hackers who look for vulnerabilities in software that they can exploit to launch attacks on computer systems.

Indeed, the world’s biggest software maker said that the patches released on Tuesday include software to fix a vulnerability exploited by the Stuxnet virus — a malicious program that attacks PCs used to run power plants and other infrastructure running Siemens industrial control systems.

The virus, which infected computers at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant, was discovered over the summer. Security research Symantec said that it detected the highest concentration of the virus on computer systems in Iran, though it was also spotted in Indonesia, India, the United States, Australia, Britain, Malaysia and Pakistan.

So far Microsoft has patched three of the four vulnerabilities exploited by Stuxnet’s unknown creators.

The total of 49 vulnerabilities exceeds the previous record of 34, which was set in October 2009 and matched in June and August of this year.

The constant patching of PCs is a time-consuming process for corporate users, who need to test the fixes before they deploy them to make sure they do not cause machines to crash because of compatibility problems with existing software.

Source” Yahoo!

Back in 2006, we covered the launch of Windows Live Spaces, a blogging service for Windows Live users. Today the service is headed in a new direction: Microsoft has teamed with Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, to transition its users over to the popular hosted blogging platform. The news was just announced at TechCrunch Disrupt by Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management for Windows Live and Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic.

Microsoft says that it decided that instead of building its own competing blogging service, it should go with WordPress’s fleshed-out feature set, which has 26 million users and powers over 8.5% of sites across the web. Users will be migrated through a process that preserves all of their content, and will automatically redirect visitors who head to their existing Microsoft Live Spaces sites.

Users will have a few choices when they hit the transition page: in addition to transferring their content to WordPress, they can also opt to download and store it locally, delete it entirely, or put off their decision for a while). But Microsoft is going to be killing off the existing Spaces product in six months, so they users won’t be able to put off the decision indefinitely. When Live users go to establish a new blog, they’ll be directed to a WordPress signup screen.

Schneider says that this isn’t a financial deal.

Another feature launching as part of the partnership is the ability to connect WordPress.com blogs to Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger. The feature is pretty straightforward: publish a new post on your WordPress blog, and Messenger will send notifications to your friends’ feeds.

Source: TechCrunch

Last week Microsoft uncovered their Internet Explorer 9 beta to the world, showing off the tremendous power behind the totally revamped web browser. Loaded with features and improvements, Internet Explorer 9 showed that Microsoft still knows how to come out on top, and put on a good show on while doing it too.

Today, Microsoft announced in a press release, that they had over two million downloads of Internet Explorer 9, in just two days. Not only did Internet Explorer 9 surpass its predecessor, which had 1.3 million downloads over the course of a five-day period, but it even beat the Firefox 4 beta downloads, which managed to achieve just over 100,000 in a single day. However, Internet Explorer 9 did not beat spreadfirefox day, a special event held by Mozilla back in 2008 when they launched Firefox 3, managing to have over 8 million downloads in a single day, earning the a place in the Guinness World Records.

Furthermore, Microsoft mentioned that they had over 9 million visits and 26 million pages views on the Beauty of the Web website since it’s launch last Wednesday.

Don’t forget to checkout our very own benchmark of Internet Explorer 9 beta against Chrome, Safari, Opera and Firefox.

Source: neowin

Download Internet Explorer 9 Beta from vip4soft.com

Facebook and Microsoft are discussing an agreement that would significantly expand the search relationship the pair have shared for many years, said several people with knowledge of the situation.

According to those sources, that includes the possibility for the software giant’s Bing search service to mine anonimized data from consumer usage of the social networking site’s recently introduced Like buttons.

The Like button, which Facebook has been trying to proliferate around the Web, allows users to indicate an interest in a page with one click that then tells their Facebook friends.

While the deal is not closed and talks could end without result, such information might yield a treasure trove of insight for both search users and advertisers.

That’s because it represents search based on what people are actually interested in rather than just crunching massive amounts of information and muscling it into something useful.

And it would also presumably give Bing a little leg up on Google (GOOG), since data will be available on it that is not available on the search giant, made more important as Facebook’s information-generating audience grows ever larger.

But because of Facebook’s many privacy snafus, sources said that any expansion of the search relationship will never involve providing any information except that which users have agreed to make public.

Facebook and Microsoft (MSFT) already struck a nonexclusive agreement almost a year ago to integrate Facebook’s real-time feeds of public status updates into Bing.

It’s part of a longtime search–as well as investment–relationship between Microsoft and Facebook that stretches back for years.

Currently, Bing provides global Web search to Facebook, yielding branded results whenever someone searches within the service.

Microsoft also invested $240 million in Facebook in late 2007 and has since had a mostly cooperative relationship with the fast-growing Silicon Valley company.

It also has provided a hedge against Google for Facebook, as that pair’s relations has worsened over the years due to intensified competition.

Source: allthingsd

It’s been a highly successful year for Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which started off as Live search, and was almost named Kumo. The little search engine that could has grown so much in the last 14 months.

Only months after Bing launched into beta, Microsoft was in talks to acquire Yahoo!’s search technology and take over the falling search giant. In December 2009, the two giants finalized a search deal that would replace Yahoo!’s search engine with Bing for 10 years.

Today marks the beginning of that deal that will see Microsoft begin the organic (algorithmic) transition, which means that Bing will replace the English version of Yahoo!’s organic search results. As posted by Neowin last month, the partnership will see Bing capture as much as 31.6% market share in North America. Bing currently owns 7.07% market share in North America, and 3.44% worldwide.

This will be the first time in years that any search engine has gained any kind of traction on Google, which still dominates with 84.53% in North America.

The organic search take-over should see Bing jump more than 24% next month, as it acquires more than 159 million new users. The organic search change will see 15 million new users from Canada, and 144 million users from the United States.

Source: neowin