Last week Mr Ponosov was convicted by a Russian judge on a charge of using pirated Microsoft software that was pre-installed in 12 computers he bought for his school in the remote Urals region. However, instead of a maximum five years prison term, he was let off without sentence because the judge deemed that the financial damage caused to Microsoft was insignificant.

The case of the principal of a remote provincial middle school had captured worldwide attention, not least because Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the prosecution as ridiculous and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mikhail Gorbachev publicly appealed to Bill Gates in an open letter to intervene.

However, Microsoft, which is on a crusade to stamp out piracy in parts of Eastern Europe and Asia, stood firm and did not intervene. Piracy in all sectors of the economy is rife throughout Russia and the authorities are desperate to get it under control because of the Government’s desire for Russia to become a member of the World Trade Organization.

On the other hand, picking on a dedicated middle school principal who obviously bought the computers for his school without any intent on making a profit was obviously not a wise choice for the prosecutor. The persecuted principal instantly became a champion of the common folk throughout the nation and the case was televised.

Boston - Microsoft landed in the Wikipedia doghouse on Tuesday after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced web encyclopedia site.

While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public-relations firms, campaign workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest from posting fluff or slanting entries. So paying for Wikipedia copy is considered a definite no-no.

“We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach,” Wales said.

Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by Microsoft.

Spokesperson Catherine Brooker said she believed the articles were heavily written by people at IBM, which is a big supporter of the open-source standard. IBM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tokyo - Microsoft Corp will extend the free support period for its Windows XP Home Edition until after 2010 in response to consumer appeals, a report said on Wednesday.

Microsoft has originally planned to end its support service in late January 2009 as it prepares the global launch of the Windows Vista next-generation operating system for personal computers next Tuesday.

But Darren Huston, president of Microsoft’s Japan unit, said there had been requests from consumers, especially in Japan, for a longer support period.

“It is going to be significantly extended” he said in an interview with Kyodo News. “When I say significantly, it’s more than 1 year.”

An official announcement will be made on Thursday, the report said.

A vote to make Microsoft Office document formats an international standard was approved last Thursday, according to a Microsoft representative.

At the general assembly of ECMA International in Zurich, Switzerland, Microsoft’s Office Open XML — a set of specifications detailing the document formats in Microsoft’s office — was certified as a standard.

In addition, the membership-based standards organisation voted to propose Office Open XML to the larger International Organisation for Standardisation (known as ISO) for standards approval through its fast-track process, a Microsoft representative confirmed.

The vote to accept Microsoft’s submission as a standard was expected. The ISO standardisation process typically takes about nine months, according to experts.

IBM, which has been a vocal advocate of another standard called open document, or ODF, voted against making Open XML a standard. ODF was passed earlier this month as an ISO standard.

Microsoft said on Thursday that it will release five security fixes for this Tuesday’s patch release. A sixth patch will fix a known issue with Visual Studio that is spreading in the wild.

The company did not mention exactly how many flaws and vulnerabilities these updates will fix, but it did warn users that the recently disclosed security hole in Microsoft Word was not included. This exploit found by researchers at CERT is listed as severe to critical and was reported earlier this week. They are working to release an update for this but need more time to do so.

As always when Microsoft releases its Tech Bulletins there was no mention of exact details of the exploits, which are the cause of these security issues. Of the updates released Tuesday, the highest rating is Critical with the others being of lesser ratings.

The new version of the MSW-MSRT (Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool) will also be included with the updates offered.

On top of the Security releases, Microsoft will release fourteen non-security related updates. Four of these are flagged as High-Priority and ten of these will be rated with various levels.

Despite all the talk surrounding its security and beefed up anti-piracy measures we all knew that it wouldn’t take long for hackers to take a stab at Vista’s activation scheme. Cracked copies of Windows Vista started flooding the internet soon after the operating system was released to manufacturing and ahead of its official release.

Microsoft’s new Volume Activation 2.0 system requires that each copy of Vista for volume licensees be activated through Microsoft servers. This wasn’t the case with Windows XP numerous pirated “corporate” editions of the operating system flooded the internet.

Microsoft’s solution for making Volume Activation 2.0 easier for administrators has been attacked, however. Hackers have spoofed Microsoft’s Key Management Service (KMS) server which allows corporations with 25 or more networked computers to activate Vista installations. The software hack is making the rounds around the web and in a nod to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is named after his wife, Melinda.

What if you could rig it so that competing with your flagship product was against the law? Under 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, breaking an anti-copying system is illegal, even if you’re breaking it for a legal reason. For example, it’s against the law to compete head-on with the iPod by making a device that plays Apple’s proprietary music, or by making an iPod add-on that plays your own proprietary music. Nice deal for Apple.

Microsoft gets the same deal, courtesy of something called “Information Rights Management,” a use-restriction system for Office files, such as Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and Excel spreadsheets.

http://www.informationweek.com

Microsoft Corp.’s latest tactic against those pirating its software in the U.K. appears to be paying off, and has reduced the piracy rate sooner than expected.

The software maker’s “Keep IT Real” programme, which it first launched back in February, has seen piracy rate for its Windows XP operating system drop from 16.7 percent to 12.4 percent according to its head of antipiracy for the U.K., Michala Alexander. “We were really pleased to see the rate dropping so quickly,” she said.

Microsoft had originally hoped to reduce the rate to 11.7 percent within three years of starting the campaign — in which members of the company’s anti-piracy team visit computer retailers and PC building outlets accross the U.K. inquiring about piracy issues — but now aims to hit that goal by next February.
Source: infoworld

Vistatorrent.com received the well known “cease and desist” letter from Microsoft. They had been instructed to remove the bittorrent from their wesbites which they had been seeding. This they did because people had complained that they had ben unable to download a copy of the Microsoft Vista Beta. Who knows if the “cease and desist” notice was ever real?

Our cooperation in this matter is a given; the tracker is dead. We were only trying to help Microsoft by doing this, assuming the costs and responsibilities associated with serving and seeding larger files. We did not alter, crack, hack, or patch any of Microsoft’s files - merely provided a mirror for them when Microsoft was worried that “people might have problems with World Cup viewing, etc.” due to the high demand of Windows Vista Beta 2. If the reprinting of your “Cease and Desist Letter” also infringes on Microsoft’s copyright, we will remove it as well.

Everyone’s been in a meeting like this at one time or another: the group is sitting around, pounding out thoughts both verbally and on their laptops. All of a sudden, boom, someone comes up with a great idea which is expressed in a certain file, say a .vsd (Visio) file. Each person needs a copy of it, which means each person busts out a thumb drive that needs to be passed around the room to each PC. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone had the same software installed that could share the file on demand?Now I know what you’re saying, “There’s already software out there to do that,” but Microsoft felt that it would be much easier to coordinate if that software were built right into the operating system. Thus, the company is including an upgrade to the Windows Collaboration tool, called Windows MeetingSpace, in Windows Vista. Windows MeetingSpace is a type of peer-to-peer software that is used by Wi-Fi users for file sharing, and it leverages the company’s “People Near Me” technology.

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Yahoo! is the world’s largest email services provider and handles 200 million accounts, but it said on Monday that only “a very small fraction” had been infected.

The worm has been dubbed Yamanner and landed in Yahoo! mailboxes bearing the subject line “New Graphic Site”. Once opened, the message infects the computer and spreads to other users listed in Yahoo! users’ email address books, security companies said.

The email containing the virus need only be opened - in contrast to most worms that are hidden in attachments and require users to take an additional step - to release the virus, according to computer security company Symantec.

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Microsoft is cutting the cord on its antipiracy tool.

The software maker this month plans to update the Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications program so that it only checks in with Microsoft once every two weeks, instead of after each boot-up, a company representative said Friday. By year’s end, the tool will stop pinging Microsoft altogether, the representative said.

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Microsoft has admitted that Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) will phone Redmond every day - something it neglected to tell users before they installed it.

WGA is designed to detect pirated copies of MS software but is also creating some false positives - two UK dealers have contacted the Reg to report customers complaining that WGA had branded their software as an illegal copy.

The software checks what is installed on your machine and then reports back to Microsoft - it sends your IP number and information on your software set-up. If your software is dodgy you will start receiving pop-up reminders from Microsoft.

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What exactly happens in the event that the tool finds a PC that is suspected of running a counterfeit version of Windows (what info, if any, is then shared with Redmond)?:

“WGA Notifications is for Windows XP users. Our client software does not collect any information that can be used to identify or contact a user. We use the same process used by many popular search engines and Web sites to determine where their users are from — a form of IP lookup. This IP lookup process does not include any information that is used to identify you or contact you, and only gives a rough geographic representation of where users are located.”

The US Department of Justice says Microsoft is doing a lousy job complying with the antitrust settlement, and quoted Machiavelli to support its case for an extension to the monitoring program.

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