papamike writes:  

With Internet Explorer 9 barely out of the labs, Microsoft yesterday caught many developers by surprise, with the launch of the first platform preview of the latest incarnation of their popular web browser, Internet Explorer 10, at this years Mix conference.

The latest version of Internet Explorer, currently only three weeks into the development cycle, already boasts an impressive array of improvements, particularly in terms of CSS3 support, addressing many of the areas missed by IE9. For this release, Microsoft has paid particular attention to the CSS3 layout modules, with the platform preview offering implementations of the CSS3 Multi-column Layout module, the Flexible Box Layout module, and the recently announced CSS3 Grid Layout module.

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32-bit IE 9 is what you want to run, but Microsoft makes installing it on 64-bit Windows a little confusing so here's how to do it and what's actually going on.

First, as many of you have discovered, if you try to download and install 32-bit IE 9 on a 64-bit Windows PC, you’ll get the error message: “This version of setup doesn’t support your Windows system type (32-bit/64-bit).” It’s right. You can’t.

Read Full Story at ZDNET By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols | March 11, 2011, 9:58am PST

nb1 writes:  

U-Prove, a powerful framework that couples strong privacy with high security for online authentication, has been released as an open source preview by Microsoft. Unfortunately, even open source is unlikely to ensure widespread adoption of this clever—and highly desirable—technology

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Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit has effectively shut down the Waledac botnet, cutting off cybercriminal access to hundreds of thousands of infected Windows computers around the world.

In partnership with security vendors and law enforcement officials, Microsoft implemented “Operation b49″ and moved to the federal courts to get a temporary restraining order cutting off 277 Internet domains believed to be run by criminals as the Waledac bot.

According to Microsoft associate general counsel Tim Cranton, the action quickly and effectively cut off traffic to Waledac at the “.com” or domain registry level, severing the connection between the command and control centers of the botnet and most of its thousands of zombie computers around the world.

Waledac is one of the 10 largest botnets in the US and is responsible to distributing billions of spam messages around the world. According to Microsoft, the botnet is estimated to have infected hundreds of thousands of computers around the world and, prior to this action, was believed to have the capacity to send over 1.5 billion spam emails per day.

Read the entire article at Microsoft's *Operation b49* chokes Waledac botnet

Many a Linux user has already stumbled upon .pst documents, such as attached to emails in "Outlook Format." Microsoft now wants to publish documentation for the file format.

Under the keyword "interoperability," Microsoft group manager Paul Lorimer indicated in his blog that the company will make its Outlook Personal Folders format (.pst) specification available to more than just its developers. The publication should make it easier for anyone to write a program or library to handle the file format without needing written permission from Microsoft.

However, releasing the documentation is not under a free license, but under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, an intellectual property rights implementation initiated in 2006 whereby Microsoft promises not to file claims against use of certain of their licensed or patented technologies. A similar Community Promise from 2007 applied to the free Mono .NET implementation.

According to Lorimer's blog, the PST specification is still in an early draft, with an exact release date still TBD.

NB1 writes:  

Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center used to make news by partnering with SugarCRM, MySQL, and other commercial open-source projects. Those partnerships seem to have hit a dry spell over the past two years, with little in the way of new announcements, but this doesn't mean that Microsoft's OSTC has been inactive.

Quite the contrary. As its work with the PHP community suggest, the OSTC has actually been in overdrive. In an interview with the PHP Classes blog, Microsoft gives some background as to the motivations behind its work with the scripting language...

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