Given its history of moving deadlines at a moment’s notice, it hardly seems surprising that Microsoft is keeping Windows XP alive even longer than expected, but its latest move looks particularly bad for Vista.

The apparent decision to allow OEM computer sellers to offer disks that downgrade installations of Windows Vista to XP until the end of July next year clearly bumps up against the period when Windows 7 might be released.

Soure: Techradar

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A federal judge has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom its records of which users watched which videos on YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far.

The order raised concerns among YouTube users and privacy advocates that the video viewing habits of tens of millions of people could be exposed. But Google and Viacom said they were hoping to come up with a way to protect the anonymity of the site’s visitors.

Viacom also said that the information would be safeguarded by a protective order restricting access to the data to outside lawyers, who will use it solely to press Viacom’s $1 billion copyright suit against Google.

Full Story At Nytimes

IT pros will come back from the holiday weekend to face a possible four patches in Microsoft’s July patch rollout, according an advance announcement issued by the company. The patches, arriving Tuesday, won’t contain “critical” or “moderate” items, but all four will be deemed “important.”

Microsoft will address a mix of exploit risks with the July patch, including two elevation-of-privilege vulnerabilities, one spoofing security risk and one remote code execution (RCE) exploit. The infamous RCE problem continues to be a concern as the software giant’s 2008 hotfix cycle passes its half-way point.

Full Story At RCPMAG

Without much fanfare, Apple has made a couple of pretty significant price cuts to the MacBook Air. The total of the cuts comes to a pretty nice $500.

First, the price of the 64 GB SSD (meaning flash ram-based) drive has been dropped $400, from $999 to $599 (see above). Second, the price of the CPU upgrade from 1.6 to 1.8 GHz has been dropped from $300 to $200.

So the price of the top of the line MBA has been dropped from $3098 to $2598. While not cheap, it’s in the “dang, that’s a pretty decent price” range now.

Full Story At Realtechnews

News Analysis. Why would anyone pay $150 for Office 2007 Home and Student when they could get it and more for less than half the price?

That’s the question Microsoft is hoping some consumers will ask about Equipt, the new subscription offering formerly code-named Albany. The question Microsoft might not want these same people to ask: Why spend 70 bucks when Google Docs is free?

This morning, Microsoft announced that the subscription product would be available through 700 Circuit City stores on July 15 for a 12-month subscription fee of $69.95. Equipt comes with the aforementioned Office version, Windows Live OneCare, Mail, Messenger and Photo Gallery. The subscription service also connects to Office Live Workspace for document sharing and collaboration. Equipt can be activated on up to three PCs, which is consistent with current Office Home and Student and OneCare licensing.

Full Story At Microsoft-Watch

Nvidia has uncovered a problem with some older graphics chips that shipped in “significant quantities” of laptop PCs, the company said Wednesday.

Nvidia hasn’t determined the exact cause of the problem but said it relates to a packaging material used with some of its chips, as well as the thermal design of some laptops. Modern processors generate considerable amounts of heat.

To tackle the problem, the company is releasing a software driver that will cause system fans to start operating sooner and reduce the “thermal stress” on the chips. The driver has been provided to laptop makers directly, said Derek Perez, an Nvidia spokesman.

Full Story At PCworld

Dell is actively promoting a Microsoft licensing loophole to channel partners eager to keep selling PCs installed with Windows XP, after Microsoft’s official cut off.

The Dell channel blog is pointing resellers to the loophole in the Windows Vista license that enables business customers to downgrade from the unwanted Windows Vista to its dated, but comfortable and better-supported predecessor.

According to the blog: “Dell can sell what we’ve branded ‘Windows Vista Bonus’ which allows us to preinstall XP Professional with a Vista license (on select system categories). This lets customer’s upgrade to the Vista platform when they’re ready. And yes, Dell will support both OSs.”

Full Story At the Channelregister

Writers of a password-stealing Trojan horse program have found that a little patience can lead to a lot of infections.

They have managed to infect hundreds of thousands of computers — including more than 14,000 within one unnamed global hotel chain — by waiting for system administrators to log onto infected PCs and then using a Microsoft administration tool to spread their malicious software throughout the network.

The criminals behind the Coreflood Trojan are using the software to steal banking and brokerage account usernames and passwords. They’ve amassed a 50GB database of this information from the machines they’ve infected, according to Joe Stewart, director of malware research with security vendor SecureWorks.

“They’ve been able to spread throughout entire enterprises,” he said. “That’s something you rarely see these days.”

Since Microsoft shipped its Windows XP Service Pack 2 software with its locked-down security features, hackers have had a hard time finding ways to spread malicious software throughout corporate networks. Widespread worm or virus outbreaks soon dropped off after the software’s August 2004 release.

But the Coreflood hackers have been successful, thanks in part to a Microsoft program called PsExec, which was written to help system administrators run legitimate software on computers across their networks.

Full Story At Infoworld