"Microsoft last week killed an anti-piracy service that checked whether customers were running legal copies of Office, saying that the program had "served its purpose." | more

"Microsoft says it will offer a privacy setting in the next version of Internet Explorer that will make it easy for users to keep their browsing habits from being tracked by advertising networks and other third-party websites." | more

"A bug in Microsoft's Internet Exploder 9 appears to have the advantage that it allows the browser to sale through the SunSpider JavaScript performance benchmark. The benchmark was devised by the developers of the WebKit browser engine, is used and quoted widely as a measure of browser scripting performance. IE 9 did extremely well in the test and this had people scratching their heads a bit. One of them Mozilla developer, Rob Sayre, made some minor changes to the test and saw Internet Explorer 9 slow down considerably.

"Consumers have turned their backs on Microsoft. A company that once symbolized the future is now living in the past. Microsoft has been late to the game in crucial modern technologies like mobile, search, media, gaming and tablets. It has even fallen behind in Web browsing, a market it once ruled with an iron fist..." | more

"Late last week Ronald Guilmette, the managing member of network security software vendor Infinite Monkeys, told The Register that he discovered two hacked Microsoft servers handling the DNS of fraudulent websites--including seizemed.com, yourrulers.com, and crashcoursecomputing.com--since "at least" September 22. The hack was reportedly done by a notorious group of Russian criminals who have hijacked other machines across the globe." | more

"The U.S. has by far the highest number of bot-infected computers of any country in the world, with nearly four times as many infected PCs as the country in second place, Brazil, according to a new report by Microsoft. The quarterly report on malicious software and Internet attacks shows that while some of the major botnets have been curtailed in recent months, the networks of infected PCs still represent a huge threat." | more

"Microsoft applied for the patent titled “Accelerated video encoding using a graphics processing unit” in October 2004 and was granted a patent to its invention today. It outlines a concept where the GPU is used, among others, to perform motion estimation in videos, the use of the depth buffer of the GPU, to determine comprising, collocating video frames, mapping pixels to texels, frame processing using the GPU and output of data to the CPU.

"Microsoft's security chief Wednesday pitched a plan that would block some botnet-infected computers from connecting to the Internet. A noted botnet researcher said the proposal didn't attack the problem at its root, and like many technical solutions, was unlikely to do much good.

Blu-ray will probably be around a bit longer than Microsoft would like, but with external HD's and Internet, who needs an optical disk anyways?

Microsoft's Halo Reach will be available for purchase at midnight! Or will you wait for the game to go on special first?