Microsoft

Microsoft appears to be preparing themselves to step into the streaming media field alongside Apple, Netflix, Hulu, and other competing providers who have joined their ranks over the past year. According to two anonymous sources quoted by Reuters in a report published on Monday, Microsoft is holding talks with media conglomerates in an attempt to license networks for a new subscription service they are planning to offer via Xbox, PC, and other devices. ...

Microsoft says Google is a bad habit, and it’s hard for people to break it in order to try alternatives, such as the company’s search engine, Bing. “It’s a hard thing. Habits die hard,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s Senior Vice President of Online Audience Business, said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, according to PC World. Mehdi is referring to users’ tendency to use Google for online searches without a second thought. It’s almost second nature to them. Many people even head to Google as their first webpage when they’re testing to see if they have an Internet connection. ...

Oh look, Microsoft is late to the party again? They are finally launching full-session SSL encryption to Hotmail a mere 2 years after Google did the same thing for Gmail. It looks like the release of FireSheep really has had an impact on web-application vendors due to the amount of mainstream media coverage it got and the sheer number of downloads. ...

Mashable: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has sold 12% of his stake in the tech giant in a transaction worth over $1.3 billion. According to a filing with the SEC, Ballmer has sold 49.3 million Microsoft shares over the last three days, bringing his total ownership to 358.9 million shares, or approximately 4.2% of the company. Essentially, he sold 12% of his shares at a price between $26 and $28. ...

The Redmond company today published its announcement for the upcoming November Patch Tuesday. Microsoft wants to release 3 security bulletins which deal with 11 security vulnerabilities within Office and PowerPoint (up to the brand new Office 2011 for Mac) and Forefront Unified Access Gateway. A patch for the just recently detected 0-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer is not in the list. ...

Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report posted something interesting in ZDNet: You want a good, solid, free antivirus program? Microsoft Security Essentials fills the bill nicely. Unfortunately, even though it was officially released more than a year ago, it’s still one of the best-kept secrets in personal computing. Its installed base of 30 million users worldwide might sound big in raw numbers, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the billion-plus Windows PCs in use. ...

SANS.edu: We received a couple of reports about Microsoft’s “Smart Screen” flagging harmless sites as malicious. Initially, we considered the possibility of an infected ad service. But it may be a bug in Smartfilter as well. Some reports on twitter show that the problem has been resolved. Please let us know if you have sample URLs that are still affected. ...

Microsoft has released a security advisory concerning a vulnerability affecting Internet Explorer versions 6, 7 and 8. This vulnerability may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code. Full details here. Visit Microsoft’s page here to get full instructions. You can find the workarounds under the “Suggested Actions” twisty. The workarounds include overriding the Web site CSS with a user-defined style sheet, deploying the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, enabling Data Execution Prevention (DEP) for Internet Explorer 7 and setting Internet and Local intranet security zone settings to “High” to block ActiveX Controls and Active Scripting in these zones. ...

Microsoft’s Hotmail rolled out its new service that allows streaming mail from other vendors like Gmail and Yahoo, in an attempt to make Hotmail the primary destination for email management rather than just a repository of spams. The new service is a feature that is borrowed from Microsoft Outlook that allows adding accounts from other email services. Dick Craddock, Group Program Manager at Windows Live Hotmail, said in a blog post: “We understand. You already have at least one email address and you probably don’t need another. You may also use your existing address for things other than just email, such as signing in to online shopping sites, which makes changing even more challenging. Also, you might have an address that you really like, but a similar name might not be available on another email service. “ ...

At the latest PDC conference, only a very few mentions of Silverlight were observed. It seems that Microsoft is betting on HTML5 as the future for cross platform development. They even claim that Silverlight is now a Windows Phone development toolkit (read this article from ZDNet). So it is really safe to continue your developments on this platform ? The interest of Microsoft to buying Adobe is now more clear, as I think Adobe will be best positioned for generating HTML5 interfaces, mixing Flex and Dreamweaver experiences. ...