Microsoft

More than $250,000 is offered by Microsoft to programmers who can develop new security defense for Windows OS family to protect users against attacks that exploit the software bugs.

Microsoft's Blue Hat Prize announced on Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference will pay $200,000 for the best “novel runtime mitigation technology designed to prevent the exploitation of memory safety vulnerabilities.” The two runners up will receive $50,000 and a MSDN Universal subscription valued at $10,000, respectively.

Some speculations in the media say that Nokia and Microsoft may announce their new smartphone on August 17. The rumors are based on a joint invitation sent by the two companies Monday for a “party” scheduled for this date. The party will be held in Cologne, Germany.

The invitation does not specify what the event will be all about. It only mentions that there will be a live act, great djs, and free grub. Still, this fact gave some feed for the speculations that the event will be crowned with the announcement of Nokia's first Windows Phone 7-based smartphone.

On Thursday Microsoft Corp stated that a review of its US tax obligations in past years by a government would negatively impact its financial statements in case it is not resolved in its favor.

Among other things the Internal Revenue Service was looking at Microsoft's use of transfer pricing, or methods of booking prices and sales between subsidiaries which allows big companies to avail of opportunities to report earnings in lower-tax jurisdictions.

On Thursday a fourth-quarter report will be posted by Microsoft. The company will report a 9% increase in its profit while investors are not satisfied as they believe the Redmond company will never again recapture its old growth rates.

Microsoft’s shares have grown by 10% over the past month but they still remain in the mid-$20 range, a level they have circled since 1998, adjusted for splits.

Addressing an audience at the 2011 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC 2011) Monday Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, acknowledged that their Windows Phone 7 platform was a failure.

Ballmer was lauding the company success in other sectors saying that Windows 7 sold 400 million licenses in just two years while Office 2010 sold over 100 million licenses over the same period.

However, talking about Windows Phone 7, Ballmer noted that Microsoft simply hasn't gained any traction:

Social networking leader Facebook is adding Skype video chat to its pages in a move to boost up its appeal while at the same time preparing to diminish competition from Google.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg announced the agreement which strengthens the relationship between Facebook and Microsoft Corp who is in the process of acquiring Skype.

Zuckerberg said Facebook has hit a record 750 million users. The new service, rolling out from Wednesday, could be a huge boost for Skype, which currently has about 145 million regular users.

Next week Microsoft may present an early build of its next generation operating system Windows 8 to the technical community, according to some rumors.

A Twitter account MSFTtm who previously was accurate reporting Windows 8 build details, says that at its Worldwide Partner Conference from July 11 through July 14, Microsoft will release a Community Technical Preview (CTP).

A Chinese search engine giant Baidu entered into an agreement with Microsoft to offer English-language search results to Baidu’s users.

As a part of the partnership users will be able to enter English-language queries into Baidu’s search box to automatically activate Bing and Bing’s search results will be delivered to Baidu's Web pages, Baidu said in an emailed statement on Monday.

Analysts said the tie-up would help Bing to gain greater access to China's more than 450 million Internet users and further dent Google's business in the country.

Microsoft is moving its Office applications including Outlook email, Excel spreadsheets and SharePoint collaboration tools into the online sector. Now consumers may use them from wherever they can access the Internet.

"It's obvious that Microsoft has to do this if they're going to remain competitive with Google," said Michael Yoshikami, chief executive of money manager YCMNET Advisors. "It's something they have to do."

Pictures of the upcoming Nokia phone on Windows Phone 7 platform leaked the Internet. The images were published by the Hungarian website TechNet. Earlier Nokia unveiled its plans to launch first Windows Phone 7 smartphone this year, while the sales are scheduled for the next year.

The handset codenamed Sea Ray almost absolutely replicates recently announced N9 excluding the flash light placed in another corner and camera button on the side. The smartphone runs Windows Phone 7 Mango.

According to some speculation Microsoft is introducing its Hyper-V virtualization software into its coming Windows 8. WindowsNow.com blogger Robert McLaws alleges he uncovered code for Hyper-V version 3.0 in a leaked, early build of the Windows 8 code base.

According to McLaws there are some enhancements in Microsoft's hypervisor including support for more than four cores on a processor, and there's also NUMA, a new .VHDX virtual hard drive format, plus hardware acceleration, CHCP, and router guard on networking.

This week Microsoft released a beta version of a development kit for its Kinect motion sensing device. Now developers will be able to build applications to use the Kinect on PCs running Windows 7. The SDK is currently available only for noncommercial use.

With the SDK developers can access a number of streams from sensors in the Kinect including the depth sensor, color camera sensor and the microphone array.

Developers will also be able to track the skeleton image of one or two people moving in view of the Kinect for the creation of gesture-driven applications.

Microsoft reported that its February security update for Windows XP and Vista has reduced the AutoRun abusing malware infection rates by as much as 82%.

In February Microsoft offered optional update to XP and Vista users, later it was changed to automatically download and install. The update was meant to disable AutoRun.

On Windows 7 system Microsoft changed AutoRun’s behavior to block automatic execution of files on a USB drive.

According to the report provided by Sophos Naked Security blog a new phony anti-virus scam is infecting machines on the Internet in the guise of a Microsoft update. The fake Microsoft pop-up appears only on PCs using Firefox browser.

Sophos says that infected in drive-by downloads from compromised sites receive the scareware that appears as urgent update notifications. These updates are fake and only come to affected machines that use Firefox. Authentic updates from Microsoft come only through the Internet Explorer.

Apple made a statement that it will not give access to its iCloud services to users of aging Windows XP platform. Apple said that users will need a PC running Windows Vista or Windows 7 to access the cloud computing service.

To access contacts and calendars users are encouraged to have Outlook 2010 or 2007.

Basing on the latest figures on the usage of operating systems it may be said that the bar means half of all PC users will be blocked from accessing iCloud.