Daemonise.t Trojan infecting thousands

Daemonise.t is beginning to make itself felt on the Internet. Early reports from an email security company indicate that the new security threat is propagating quickly. ...more

IT Forum 2005: Office 12 Technical Beta released

Slightly earlier than expected, the next generation of Microsoft's office Suite has gone into a technical beta release, available only to nominated Microsoft customers and partners. Codenamed Office 12, the new functionality of the productivity suite was highlighted in the keynote of Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's Business Division. As we reported on Tuesday, Microsoft had scheduled a closely controlled release, with a broad public beta planned for the spring of 2006 (you can register to be notified of its availability at www. ...more

UPDATED: Microsoft denied patent for FAT filing system

Microsoft has lost the first round in the battle to patent the FAT filing system used in DOS and which formed the basis of the disk management system of early versions of Windows. The US Patent and Trademark Office decided in a review of the patent granted to Microsoft in 1996 that it did not differ sufficiently from the work of other programmers to merit legal protection. The challenge to the 1996 patent was mounted in April of this year by the Public Patent Foundation (Pubpat) after Microsoft began to start collecting royalties on the patent. ...more

The pointy clicky things get optical

There are two new Microsoft mice: the Trackball Optical and the Wheel Mouse Optical. The Wheel Mouse Optical combines IntelliEye technology with the popular Wheel Mouse. The absence of moving parts, to wear out or stick, should add to the shelf life of this particular rodent. ...more

IE team zaps bugs first, meets standards second

Microsoft's lead engineer for Internet Explorer 7 has admitted that the browser will not meet a popular test for CSS 2 compliance. The development team, he said, is putting bug fixes before standards in the rush to get the browser out. Following the release of the first IE 7 beta, Chris Wilson announced in the IE blog that the browser will not pass the Acid2 test when the final version ships. ...more