Network World

Winners of the Microsoft Subnet June giveaways

We are delighted to announce the winners of our June contests. Our grand prize winner of the free Microsoft training course from Global Knowledge, is Don Cotton,
IT analyst for

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Microsoft admits it knew of the IE, zero-day ActiveX hole for months

Microsoft this afternoon responded to accusastions that it knew about a critical IE ActiveX hole for as long as 18 months. The hole is being actively exploited by hackers. To its credit, Microsoft came clean and admitted it did indeed know since the spring of 2008.

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Microsoft licenses, launches giant library of free IT governance tools

Microsoft has licensed two of the industry's leading methods for IT governance, integrated them with its own IT governance framework and made the whole library of materials available for free.

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Microsoft covers C#, CLI programs with its home-grown, open source license

In a move that actually brought positive comments about Microsoft from the open source community, Microsoft today announced that it is extending its legally binding "Community Promise" licensing to cover C# programs and Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). Developers and users can use and modify implementations without fear of any reprisals.

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Microsoft warns of ActiveX attack found in the wild

Microsoft today issued a warning about an attack that is occurring in the wild against its Video ActiveX Control in Internet Explorer running on XP and Windows Server 2003. (Vista and Windows Server 2008 are not affected.) The company has not rated this vulnerability, although it has some of the earmarks of a critical hole, in that an attacker could gain the same rights as a user, execute code and do so without a user's interaction.

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9 most horrible Microsoft ads (MS is its own worst enemy)

I spent much of yesterday with a case of nausea after viewing the Internet Explorer 8 vomit ad, which was thankfully, pulled from distribution today. I went so far as to call for Microsoft to fire its advertising executives. My colleague Keith Shaw, writer of the Cool Tools Happy Blog has proven my point. He compiled a list of the nine worst Microsoft ads ever, complete with YouTube versions.

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Microsoft yanks 10 old patches down

With nearly no explanation, Microsoft sent out an alert notifying customers that it was removing download information for 10 security patches "because Microsoft Java Virtual Machine is no longer available for distribution from Microsoft." The revised bulletins are rated as critical and affect patches from the years 1999 through 2003.

The affected patches are: MS03-011, MS02-069, MS02-052, MS02-013, MS00-081, MS00-075, MS00-059, MS00-011, MS99-045, MS99-031.

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Microsoft releases a slew of updates for its enterprise class security products

In the past week, Microsoft has unleashed five service packs for its enterprise class security software. These service packs include the beta 2 of its identity management framework "Geneva," the SP3 of Forefront Security for SharePoint, the SP2 of Forefront Security for Exchange Server and trial versions of Antigen Spam Manager for Exchange and Antigen for SMTP Gateways.

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Tactics to sell IE8: free Nickelback track and vomit

Microsoft offers free Nickelback track for IE8 and debuts commercial featuring a woman throwing up

Are Microsoft's latest tactics to get folks to download Internet Explorer 8 funny, disgusting, obnoxious or effective? On the one hand, you have the rather pleasant idea that if you download a copy of IE8 you get a never-before released track from rocker band Nickelback. On the other, you have an ad campagn that displays a woman throwing up (multiple times). Not pleasant.

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Giveaways and goodies from Microsoft Subnet and Cisco Subnet

Microsoft Subnet is giving away training from New Horizons to one lucky reader (entry form can be found here), and 15 copies of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Unleashed, (entry form can be found here). Deadline for entries is July 31.

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Roll your own XP-to-Windows 7 upgrade on a USB drive

While news reports are circulating today that Microsoft may be building a version of Windows 7 distributed on a thumb drive, the bigger news for enterprises is that Microsoft is releasing a tool that let's you roll your own and that it supports XP-to-Windows 7 migration.

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Windows 7 pricing fails to impress

Observers are irritated by Microsoft's pricing approach to Windows 7.

Microsoft is making Windows 7 upgrades available for pre-order now, for the low, low (but not quite as low as Snow Leopard) price of $50. But after two weeks, it will cost you $120.

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That was FAST: Microsoft wins large customer for enterprise search

After investing $1.23 billion to acquire Norwegian enterprise search vendor Fast Search & Transfer in January, 2008, Microsoft today has announced a significant customer for the technology. Market America, a $3 billion Internet marketing company, has implemented Microsoft’s FAST ESP to handle search for over 35 million SKUs on its Web site, marketamerica.com, the company said.

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It's a sale, Windows 7 for $50, for two weeks only

Starting Friday, Microsoft will pre-sell Windows 7 upgrades for as little as $50.

Similar to the deal offered when Microsoft launched Windows Vista, the company will offer pre-orders of Windows 7 at deeply discounted rates. But you have to be eager, because the sale only lasts two weeks, reports Computerworld.

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Microsoft's Virtual Machine Manager R2 to be available by Dec. 21

Yesterday, we asked Microsoft when Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 would ship. (We asked via Microsoft's experimental Twitter hashtag, #qs4ms.) Due to the power of Twitter, the virtualization team answered: "SCVMM 2008 r2 beta is available, and final will be released within 60 after Windows Server 2008 R2 rtm."

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Many IT pros say they are moving to the cloud in 24 months

One-third of 1,200 organizations (33%) plan to convert their application environments away from a traditional, client-server model to one based on virtualization and cloud computing over the next two years, according to a study commissioned by Microsoft and released today. The study sought to broadly determine global IT spending priorities.

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Microsoft limits Morro beta downloads to first 75K

When Microsoft releases the beta of its freebie basic security program at noon ET today, Windows Essential Security (formerly code-named "Morro"), it will cap the number of downloads to 75,000, Microsoft says.

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Microsoft demonstrates interopability with Xandros, OpenView, Tivoli

From the "you've come a long way baby" department, Microsoft today released information on an interoperability lab in which Microsoft wares were working with just about every product that the company had, in years gone by, wanted to destroy. Moreover, the lab was created by pressure by NATO, an organization that, about a year ago, standardized on Microsoft's arch rival, the Open Document Format.

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Sifting the facts about IE from the lies

Microsoft's Windows Internet Explorer Get the Facts website is just about as truthful as any other campaign that falls somewhere between PR and propaganda. And it's causing the kind of backlash that can't be helpful in increasing the browser's reputation. Hundreds of blog articles refuting the so-called facts have appeared since Microsoft launched the site this week.

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Microsoft free anti-malware software "Morro" to be available June 23

Microsoft confirmed that the beta version of its freebie anti-mailware software, code-named "Morro" will be available for download on June 23. The company has officially named the product Microsoft Security Essentials. The beta will be made publicly available in the U.S. (as well as Brazil and Israel) at about 9 a.m. PDT from www.microsoft.com/security_essentials. (The site is not yet live.)

Microsoft has not confirmed when the final version will ship, but has said it will be in 2009.

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