News


Opinion: Old Attack Exposes Microsoft Shortcomings

Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Service Pack 2 were both found to be vulnerable to a very old form of Denial of Service attack known as a "Land" attack. The attack involves sending a packet to a machine with the source host/port the same as the destination host/port. This results in the system attempting to reply to itself, causing it to lock up.

European Windows Called 'Windows XP Home Edition N'

Microsoft and the European Commission settled on names for the version of Windows XP stripped of the Windows Media Player-- Windows XP Home Edition N and Windows XP Professional Edition N.

IDC Lowers PC Growth Forecast for 2005

Market research house IDC lowered its PC growth forecast this week for 2005 from the low double digits to the high single digits.

Microsoft Expands Board, Announces Quarterly Dividend

Microsoft on Wednesday added retired J.P. Morgan Chase chief financial officer Dina Dublon to its board of directors and announced a quarterly dividend of 8 cents per share.

Microsoft Pumps Out the Server Goodies

Microsoft is talking up a number of goodies for server infrastructure customers this month. They include a new version of the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer Tool, new customer guidance on isolating servers and domains for security and a new version of the iSCSI Software Initiator.

Startup Offers Clustered Exchange Server With Managed Maintenance

A small Redmond, Wash.-based startup is shipping a new twist on outsourcing and turnkey solutions – a cluster of Exchange 2003 servers in a single box, replete with subscription-based third-party management, monitoring and maintenance. And, no, that’s not a cutesy turn of phrase referring to Microsoft.

Dell Rolls Out Two New High-Performance Multiprocessor Servers

Dell Wednesday rolled out two new high-performance, four-processor servers targeted at database processing and other enterprise-level data center uses. The company also announced the Data Center Environment Assessment, a service aimed at helping customers analyze their current data centers in order to appropriately design for air flow and power requirements of more demanding server environments.

IBM to Ship Eval Copies of VMware With Blades

IBM and VMware announced Wednesday that the computer giant will ship six-month trial versions of VMware’s virtualization products with its blade servers.

Microsoft to Cut Visual Studio Prices for 2005 Versions

Microsoft this week unveiled pricing for its Visual Studio 2005 family of integrated development environment products.

MapPoint Gets New Fleet Edition

Microsoft created new packaging for its MapPoint application and location Web service tailored to organizations managing fleets of vehicles.

Opinion: The No-Spin Zone

In this week's SecurityWatch column, Russ Cooper tackles physical security issues surrounding Bank of America's "loss" of computer backup tapes, the hacking vulnerability inherent in leftover FTP servers and issues raised by a recent Bagle variant.

New Name, Release Candidate for WUS

Microsoft renamed and put out a release candidate for Windows Update Services on Tuesday.

Microsoft Updates .NET Security Bulletin

Users encountered problems after applying a Feb. 8 patch.

IBM Buys Data Integration Firm for $1.1B

IBM announced this week it is buying data integration software firm Ascential for approximately $1.1 billion in cash.

Intel Motherboards to Include Backup and Recovery Tools

FarStone Technology announced a licensing agreement to bundle its software with Intel motherboards to enable system backup and disaster recovery, lost file retrieval and provide virtual CD/DVD drive and disc emulation.

Product Provides High-availability for SharePoint Environments

The Neverfail Group is shipping its Neverfail high-availability solution for end-to-end support of Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server environments.

Microsoft Considering WinFS for Windows XP

WinFS, the Windows future storage subsystem, could end up in Windows XP as well as Windows "Longhorn" when the technology ships, Microsoft officials said.

Visual FoxPro 9.0 Generally Available, Supported Until 2014

Visual FoxPro 9.0, the latest update to a database technology Microsoft acquired in 1992, is generally available this week and will be supported through 2014.

Multi-threaded Engine Boosts Secure Copy’s Performance

ScriptLogic is shipping Secure Copy 4.0, an important update to the company’s Windows server data migration product that adds multi-threaded copying aimed at providing the fastest copying performance among Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003.

Indigo, Avalon Community Technology Previews Released

Microsoft on Wednesday released its first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of "Indigo," the code-name for the company's new communications subsystem for Windows, and a second CTP of "Avalon," a new Windows presentation subsystem.