Microsoft will begin alpha testing the next version of Office in November or December, according to a blog posting by a Microsoft employee that was later pulled from the Web.
According to the blog posting, by Hayley Rixon , who works on the Microsoft business intelligence team, Microsoft is calling for people to be part of a technology adoption program (TAP) that will give them an early opportunity to test the monitoring and analytics components of Office PerformancePoint Server.
The TAP for this product will be a part of the TAP for Office 14, the alpha test of which will begin in the "November/December timeframe this year," according to the blog posting. Office PerformancePoint Server is business performance analysis software that will be a part of the Office 14 release.
While the blog posting was live on Microsoft's Technet site on Monday afternoon Eastern time, by afternoon on the West coast the Web site was no longer working. The post also no longer appears on Rixon's blog.
Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry is examining three reports of overheating iPod Nanos sparking fires, Reuters reported.
The government agency said Apple had reported two other cases in which people had suffered minor burns.
The trade ministry said iPod Nanos with known overheating incidents were sold in Japan between September 2005 and September 2006.
Faulty batteries may be the cause of the incidents, the agency said.
Batteries have been traced to a host of issues with laptops and other mobile devices. Apple was one of several companies that had to recall notebooks in 2006 after problems led to overheating and fires.
Apple officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
A European court has asked Britain to delay sending a computer expert to face trial in the United States until it can review his request to block his extradition.
The European Court of Human Rights said on Wednesday it needed to examine Gary McKinnon's complaint that he could face inhumane prison conditions if convicted in the United States.
"The applicant should not be extradited to the United States before midnight on 29 August," so the court can examine his request at its next meeting on August 28, it said in a statement.
McKinnon lost his appeal last month to Britain's highest court to block extradition to face charges over what U.S. prosecutors call "the biggest military hack of all time."
He could face up to 70 years in prison if convicted of illegally accessing computers, including the Pentagon, U.S. army, navy and NASA systems, and causing $700,000 worth of damage.
Gmail users, including those who use it for work as part of the Google Apps hosted suite, are again reporting problems accessing the service.
Reports started streaming into the official Gmail and Google Apps discussion forums on Thursday and continued Friday morning.
It's the third time in the past two weeks that Gmail users have been locked out of their accounts due to the "502 Server Error" login problem.
In the middle of last week, an undetermined number of individual and Apps Gmail users were hit, and it took Google about 15 hours to restore the service for them.
Then on Monday of this week the problem resurfaced. A broad group of Gmail users, including organizations that use it as part of the fee-based Premier version of Google Apps, were affected.
Now the problem is back, according to multiple reports from users. It's not clear how many people have been affected by this latest problem, but those who are detailing their troubles in the discussion forums describe the outages as prolonged.
Benjamin Legeri of Rehoboth, Mass., claims to have attracted 3.5 million video views through his YouTube accounts and he believes that's worth something.
So he's suing Google, YouTube, and several members of YouTube's support staff for revenue that he believes he should have received.
"...[D]espite the traffic (and notoriety) that Plaintiff and Plaintiff's content has generated for YouTube.com, and despite hundreds to thousands of hours the Plaintiff has Labored in creating said content, generating said traffic, and managing his YouTube channels and Web pages, Plaintiff has not been paid so much as one cent by Defendants," the complaint alleges.
Legeri claims to have applied to YouTube's revenue sharing Partner Program but was rejected, a slight he attributes to a deliberate attempt by YouTube's support staff to mislead him.
"Defendants are quite duplicitous in their dealings," the complaint states. "They induce and manipulate their account holders and prospective account holders into believing that a certain amount of work on YouTube.com will lead to their success. Defendants do so to create a frenzy of Laborers working to serve the growth of their Web sites."
To support such claims, Legeri in the complaint points out that he "received two 'get-rich' e-mails on his Google e-mail account; one e-mail was entitled 'Living the American Dream Thanks to YouTube' and the other was entitled "Why is YouTube the next big money maker?"
Microsoft is launching its Windows 7 blog, but it still doesn't have much to say.
On the plus side, Windows engineering boss Steven Sinofsky did at least put a date to when he would share some more details.
"The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) on October 27 and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) the following week both represent the first venues where we will provide in-depth technical information about Windows 7," Sinofsky and Windows Core operating system head Jon Devaan wrote in a posting on Thursday. "This blog will provide context over the next 2+ months with regular posts about the behind the scenes development of the release and continue through the release of the product."
Microsoft had already said that Windows 7 would be on the PDC docket in some manner.
Sinofsky acknowledged that Microsoft continues to say less than many people would like, but repeated his standard line that the company doesn't want to share details until they have reached a certain level of concreteness.
An Italian judge has ordered the country's Internet service providers to block access to The Pirate Bay, a Swedish file-sharing Web site, as part of a probe into copyright law violation, officials said Thursday.
Since last week, Italy's anti-fraud police have been informing providers they must heed the order of a judge in the northern city of Bergamo, police Col. Alessandro Nencini said.
Nencini said the judge had granted a request by Italian prosecutors, who have placed four Swedes under investigation for organizing the Web site. The ruling can be appealed.
Nencini said the probe stemmed from a complaint by a Milan-based anti-piracy group backed by Italian recording labels.
The Pirate Bay Web site carried a statement Thursday denouncing the ruling and giving users instructions on how to bypass filters installed by Italian providers.
The Dutch High Tech Crime Unit has arrested two people and shut down the Shadow botnet, which is thought to contain over 100,000 compromised computers.
A 19-year-old Dutch national is accused of running the botnet and police also arrested a Brazilian man who was trying to buy the use of it. The police have now asked security software vendor Kaspersky Labs to help shut the botnet down.
Eddy Willems, security evangelist with Kaspersky Labs Benelux, who worked closely with the High Tech Crime Unit, believes this case clearly illustrates how the security industry can help law enforcement in the fight against cybercrime.
A spokesperson for the Public Prosecution Service agreed: "The Public Prosecution Service and the police worked together with Kaspersky Lab on this case with full contentment."
The Dutch police are asking anyone who finds that they were part of the Shadow botnet to contact them and register a complaint. Kaspersky Labs have set up a web page detailing how to remove the Shadow malware.
The FBI is also reported to have taken part in the case, as the organisation is mounting a major campaign against criminal use of botnets. Previous successes have included the arrest of a teenager in New Zealand who was writing botnet code.
Intel has released part of the draft specification for USB 3.0, a move that could speed up the release of the next-generation data transfer standard.
The Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) draft specification revision 0.9 is available under royalty free licensing terms to all USB 3.0 Promoter Group members, and AMD, Dell, Microsoft and NEC were among those to back the move in Intel's press release.
USB 3.0 -- also known as SuperSpeed USB -- is expected to enable transfer speeds of up to 4.8Gbps, a significant leap from the 480Mbps supported by the current USB 2.0 spec.
"The future of computing and consumer devices is increasingly visual and bandwidth intensive," said Phil Eisler, corporate vice president at Intel rival AMD. "Lifestyles filled with [high-definition] media and digital audio demand quick and universal data transfer. USB 3.0 is an answer to the future bandwidth need of the PC platform. AMD believes strongly in open industry standards, and therefore is supporting a common xHCI specification."
Intel said it expects to release a revised xHCI 0.95 specification in the fourth quarter, and the technology should become widely available in 2010.
According to new figures, Facebook is now top dog among social network sites, having overtaken MySpace.
Online tracking company comScore has released new figures that show Facebook striding ahead to be top of the social network sites. It hit 132 million unique visitors for a remarkable 153% growth rate.
By comparison, MySpace managed 113 million unique visitors, scoring just 3% growth. The big surprise, and coming up on the outside, has been the largely unknown Hi5. It might have only had 56 million visitors, but its growth was 100%.
Worldwide, social networking sites experienced a 25% growth in the last year, although in the US, the most mature market, that growth was just 9%. Looked at by region, the expansion was 35% in Europe, 23% in Asia, 33% in Latin America, and a very healthy 66% in Africa and the Middle East.
Yahoo has finally launched Fire Eagle, its location mapping service. For months, Fire Eagle was open only to a limited number of beta testers. When location mapping devotees surfed over to the site they were greeted with a message that simply said, "Fire Eagle is sleeping right now." Now Yahoo is hoping Fire Eagle is awake enough to start attracting users anxious to share their location on the Web with friends.
Location mapping is a development in social networking that allows users to share their location on the Web with the goal of finding out where friends are and going to places that attract like-minded people. Users of the service can also post notes about various places they've been to help others on Fire Eagle get an idea of what a hot spot is like.
"We're here to help people take their location to the Web by giving them the ability to control how much detail about their location they want to share and which applications they want to share it with," said Tom Coates, head of product at Yahoo Brickhouse.
HONG KONG--As software gets more powerful, privacy issues pose an "interesting software challenge," says Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.
Recounting a short history of software development, Gates said innovations in natural interaction technology are making technology more pervasive. "When interaction gets more natural, computers can be everywhere to listen to you," he said, adding that "society will have to have more explicit rules" governing privacy boundaries around software as technology develops.
Gates was speaking here to mark the 10th anniversary of Microsoft Research Asia, one of the software giant's research arms.
Explaining the company's focus on software research and development, he said its $7 billion investment in that direction is necessary to push innovation in a market that is "increasingly software driven."
"Even in a field like astronomy, it's not just looking through an eyepiece but testing theories, and software lets you do that," he said.
If you enjoy buying music from iTunes, movies from Amazon.com's Unbox, or computer software from anywhere, be warned: the halcyon days of tax-free digital purchases may be over.
With retail e-commerce sales now estimated to exceed $130 billion a year, and iTunes song purchases topping 5 billion, state politicians and tax collectors have begun to levy new fees on digital downloads.
Call it the iTax. In 2008 alone, at least nine states have considered digital download taxes, and at least five of those states have enacted them into law. Nebraska's governor signed a digital download tax bill into law in April, and a similar measure was adopted in Tennessee in June. As CNET News reported a few months ago, Indiana, South Dakota, and Utah also enacted digital download taxes this year.
The push stems from an odd legal quirk: because most states' tax laws were written long before the Internet existed, they may accidentally immunize downloads from taxation. This is the case even in otherwise high-tax states like California, where physical CDs are taxed heavily but iTunes downloads remain tax-free for now.
Tech industry groups like NetChoice, which counts eBay, AOL, and Yahoo as members, have been lobbying against the rise in so-called iTaxes--with limited success.
Microsoft has released updates for two of its most popular developer tools.
The company has released the first copies of the Service Pack 1 versions of Visual Studio and .Net Framework 3.5 to manufacturers.
Along with the cumulative security updates and big fixes, the service pack releases also add a number of new features to both products.
For .Net users, the update will include the Framework Client Profile, a tool which reduces the size of the .Net framework by 86 per cent, making applications built with the framework smaller and easier to deploy, claims Microsoft.
"This is a huge step forward for the more than four million .NET developers worldwide," said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .Net developer division. "The .Net Framework Client Profile significantly speeds up the installation of Windows and enables a much more consumer-friendly experience."
Much of the Visual Studio update revolves around web-based applications. The 2008 SP1 release sports improvements to the AJAX and Javascript components, as well as improved tools for ADO.Net Entity Framework and better WPF development tools.
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Microsoft will begin alpha testing the next version of Office in November or December, according to a blog posting by a Microsoft employee that was later pulled from the Web. 
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Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry is examining three reports of overheating iPod Nanos sparking fires, Reuters reported.
News source: 
A European court has asked Britain to delay sending a computer expert to face trial in the United States until it can review his request to block his extradition. 
Gmail users, including those who use it for work as part of the Google Apps hosted suite, are again reporting problems accessing the service. 
Benjamin Legeri of Rehoboth, Mass., claims to have attracted 3.5 million video views through his YouTube accounts and he believes that's worth something. 
Microsoft is launching its 
An Italian judge has ordered the country's Internet service providers to block access to The Pirate Bay, a Swedish file-sharing Web site, as part of a probe into copyright law violation, officials said Thursday. 
Intel has released part of the draft specification for USB 3.0, a move that could speed up the release of the next-generation data transfer standard. 
According to new figures, Facebook is now top dog among social network sites, having overtaken MySpace.
Yahoo has finally launched Fire Eagle, its location mapping service. For months, Fire Eagle was open only to a limited number of beta testers. When location mapping devotees surfed over to the site they were greeted with a message that simply said, "Fire Eagle is sleeping right now." Now Yahoo is hoping Fire Eagle is awake enough to start attracting users anxious to share their location on the Web with friends. 
HONG KONG--As software gets more powerful, privacy issues pose an "interesting software challenge," says Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.
Published: August 12, 2008
Microsoft has released updates for two of its most popular developer tools.