If you visit www.live.com today, you will no longer be redirected to Bing.com, but instead you’ll be taken directly to Windows Live Home. No surprises there as Windows Live Home finally takes its rightful place. Although do remember that Windows Live Home is due for a major revamp coming up in Wave 4, and it will also become the “Today” page for Hotmail too.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has lost market share in major European markets, such as France, Britain and Italy, after the U.S. software firm started to make it easier for European consumers to use competing browsers. Microsoft’s pledge to allow easier access to rival browsers in Windows by the middle of May, ended a long antitrust dispute with the European Union. The company has started to send a choice screen, where consumers can easily click on rival browsers, to almost 200 million old and new computers. According to web statistics firm Statcounter, Internet Explorer’s share of all Web surfing has in March dropped in France by 2.5 percentage points from February, in Britain by 1 percentage point and in Italy by 1.3 points.
last week there have been a lot of reports from the users of an antivirus program called BitDefender. The owners of this program could not start their PC if they were running 64-bit version of Windows. The experts have concluded that the cause has been in the recent update, that made the program think that some core system files were infected with Trojan.FakeAlert.5. The software is now free of this defect, and a special set of instructions has been released for those, who have lost their PC’s to this error.
If you use Google Docs and Microsoft Office, you’ll appreciate the new Outlook sidebar from Mainsoft. Called Harmony, and currently in beta, the sidebar lets you share, e-mail, download, upload, and edit your Google Docs right from your desktop using Outlook 2007. Starting on Tuesday, Harmony is available as a free download from Mainsoft’s Website, and there is also a version for Microsoft SharePoint users
Popular instant messaging, voice chat, and video conferencing client Skype and Skype Lite are no longer available on Windows Mobile devices. The company says, “We’ve chosen to withdraw Skype Lite and Skype for Windows Mobile because we want to offer our new customers an improved mobile experience — much like the version that has proved so popular on the iPhone, and which is now available on Symbian phones. Our focus is on providing a rich user experience that allows you to enjoy free Skype-to-Skype and low cost calls as easily on the move as you do at your desktop. We felt that Skype Lite and Skype for Windows Mobile were not offering the best possible Skype experience.”
Software giant Microsoft Corp has won a U.S. court approval to deactivate a global network of computers that the company accused of spreading spam and harmful computer codes. A federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, granted a request by Microsoft to deactivate 277 Internet domains, which the software maker said is linked to a “botnet”. A botnet is an army of infected computers that hackers can control from a central machine. The company aims to secretly sever communications channels to the botnet before its operators can re-establish links to the network.
Adobe Systems has released updates for Acrobat and Adobe Reader 8 & 9 closing the security breaches that could allow computer access, and fixing a but that might have caused emergency program shutdown. This updates is for Acrobat 8 and 9, and the finale version of the software now are 8.2.1 and 9.3.1.
The new microblogging service from Google has received a lot of criticism lately, for the lake of confidentiality protection. Since the account in Buzz is connected to Gmail account, with certain knowledge one is able to access your whole address book and even get your geographical location(through the GPS navigation systems in iPhone and Nexus one mobile phones. Google is reacting quickly to the outrageous report last week from a woman, whose husband got to know about all her friends through this system. They also claim that the weakness in integration with RSS will be closed in a few days? making the security protection even stronger.
There have been a lot of speculations about the battery lifetime being reduced by Windows 7 operating system. However Microsoft position on this topic is: Battery problems on Windows 7 machines are not caused by the operating system. Tests have shown that in every case of this occurrence the battery being reported on was in fact in need of recommended replacement, but it has not been caused by the operating system – Windows 7 simply accurately detected a failing battery, meaning that the customers who have upgraded their PCs to Windows 7 just weren’t aware that they needed a battery replacement until the message from the operating system popped up (if the battery performs at less then 40% of it’s designed capacity the recommendation to consider battery replacement appears).
Police in central China have shut down a hacker training operation that openly recruited thousands of members online and provided them with cyberattack lessons and malicious software. Police in Hubei province arrested three people suspected of running the hacker site known as the Black Hawk Safety Net that disseminated Web site hacking techniques and Trojan software, the China Daily newspaper said. Trojans, which can allow outside access to a computer when implanted, are used by hackers to illegally control computers. This recent anti-hacker activity of Chiniese government however seems a bit suspicious as it only started after China has been accused of cyber attacks on a number of companies, including Google.