28/09/2007 by swordfish.

Bowing to pressure from customers and computer makers, Microsoft plans to keep Windows XP around a little longer.

Large PC manufacturers were slated to have to stop selling XP after 31 January. However, they have successfully lobbied Microsoft to allow them to continue selling PCs with all flavours of Windows XP preloaded until 30 June, a further five months. Microsoft also plans to keep XP on retail shelves longer and will allow computer makers in emerging markets to build machines with Windows XP Starter Edition until June 2010.

The move indicates the continued demand for the older operating system, some nine months after Windows Vista hit store shelves.

In recent weeks, several PC makers launched programs that allow new PC buyers to more easily “downgrade” their Vista Business and Vista Ultimate machines to Windows XP. Fujitsu, which was among those lobbying for the change, has started including an XP restore disc in the box with all of its laptops running Vista Business.

Source: ZDNET

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27/09/2007 by swordfish.

Microsoft Corp’s “Halo 3″ video game set an opening-day U.S. sales record of $170 million (84.3 million pounds), outdoing any video game or movie debut and giving the company’s money-losing entertainment unit a strong boost toward profitability.

Alien-shooting fans also surged onto Microsoft’s Xbox Live online service. More than a million members took up virtual arms in “Halo 3″ in the first 20 hours on September 25, the day the game debuted, Microsoft said on Wednesday.

“Halo 3″ easily surpassed its predecessor, 2004’s “Halo 2,” which racked up $125 million on the first day. The $60 game also beat the $59 million U.S. opening-day movie box office record, set by “Spider-Man 3″.

Source: Yahoo UK News

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27/09/2007 by swordfish.

Microsoft has unveiled major changes to its Live Search service intended to give it a better foothold in its ongoing battle with Google.

The Redmond giant has concentrated its improvements on the nuts and bolts of the search engine, enhancing its core search technology and strengthening the vertical search areas of entertainment, shopping, local and health.

“With this update, our engineering focus is on the areas that matter most to the 185 million consumers who use our service every month,” said Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Search and Advertising Platform Group.

Up to 40 per cent of searches fall into the categories of entertainment, shopping, health and local search, and the enhanced Live Search is geared towards delivering relevant content in a compelling way across these key vertical search areas.

A new video search feature offers smart motion previews, facts and news on celebrities and a new xRank celebrity ranking tool. The shopping and health searches have also been refreshed to derive the most relevant content from trusted sources, allowing consumers to refine searches faster and with more accuracy.

Source: Yahoo News UK

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26/09/2007 by swordfish.

Someone used an eBay Inc. discussion forum on Tuesday to post confidential information about eBay users along with what may be their credit card numbers.

The incident, which was first reported by AuctionBytes.com, a technology news site that focuses on e-commerce, led the e-commerce giant to shut down the forum, which ironically is devoted to the discussion of security issues.

Nichola Sharpe, an eBay spokeswoman, confirmed that on Tuesday morning someone the vendor describes as “a malicious fraudster” posted the names and contact information of 1,200 eBay members on the company’s Trust & Safety discussion forum.

“This information could have been obtained as part of an account takeover. Since this time, our Trust and Safety team has been proactively addressing this situation,” she said via e-mail.

Along with members’ information, the “fraudster” also posted what appear to be credit card numbers. However, if that’s what they are, they don’t match the ones eBay has on file for the members whose contact information was disclosed, Sharpe said.

Source: Computerworld

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26/09/2007 by swordfish.

Windows Vista is facing stiff competition from an unlikely source: Windows XP.

The six-year-old operating system is showing surprising strength more than half a year after the full launch of its successor. In April, Dell acknowledged continued XP demand and resumed offering XP as an option on new systems. In July, Microsoft chief financial officer Chris Liddell ratcheted up the percentage of OS sales the company expects XP to account for in fiscal year 2008 from 15 percent to 22 percent. Finally, in August, Microsoft announced an XP Service Pack 2c release that does nothing more than add new Windows XP product keys so the company can keep selling the OS to businesses through January 31, 2009.

In addition, customers who purchase a Vista machine from Dell, HP, or Lenovo (among other vendors) can use a vendor-supplied XP Pro recovery disc to replace the Vista operating system on their system with XP Pro.

Chris Swenson, director of software industry analysis for the NPD Group, says that, from January through July of this year, XP sales accounted for a healthy 42.3 percent of online and brick-and-mortar retail OS sales. By contrast, from January through July of 2002, after XP’s launch in October the year prior, Windows 98 accounted for just 23.1 percent of retail sales. (Windows Me launched after Windows 98, but it didn’t supplant the older OS.)

Source: PC World

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26/09/2007 by swordfish.

Fraud investigators are struggling to cope with vast quantities of data sent to them by financial institutions, meaning some crimes may go uninvestigated or even unnoticed, experts said on Wednesday.

The issue is prompting banks and other financial institutions to ask law enforcement and regulators to share with them more of the data they have about suspicious transactions, in order to better combat fraud.

Banks and transfer agencies are required by regulators in the U.S. and the U.K. to file reports when they detect a potentially illegal transaction, said Olga Maitland, head of the International Association of Money Transfer Networks, at the Fraud World 2007 conference in London.

Up to 300,000 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) are filed per month in the U.S., and up to 200,000 a year in the U.K., but most of those reports “disappear into a black hole” because law enforcement agencies don’t have the resources to investigate each one, she said.

Source: Computerworld

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