Andy Patrizio

Microsoft has revised its controversial Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program in an attempt to improve accuracy, reduce false positives and fight tampering. Microsoft  took a considerable amount of heat over the WGA program earlier this year. Customers were angry to discover the program was installed on their system as a mandatory update, as though it […]

One of the most notable changes to Office 2007, its Ribbon interface, is now available to software developers wishing to adopt a similar look and feel for their applications. Microsoft  said it will make the Microsoft Office 2007 user interface broadly available to volume license customers, both commercial software developers and corporate customers, for internal […]

Universal Music Group (UMG) sued News Corp.’s MySpace subsidiary late on Friday, claiming that the social networking site has been indifferent to copyright violations of Universal’s songs and videos. In the suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, UMG claims that MySpace and its parent corporation, News Corp., have built […]

In today’s That-Was-Quick Department, pirates have already gotten their hands on Windows Vista and are circulating a “cracked” version of the operating system on the Internet. Vista and Office 2007 have just finished development and are being made available to corporate customers in advance of their January 30 release. But if you know where to […]

Adobe Systems has released LiveCycle Policy Server 7.2, an update to its enterprise rights management (ERM) software that adds fine-grain encryption and protection to document files. LiveCycle Policy Server allows an organization to attach specific privileges to individual documents, dictating if and how they may be stored or distributed, who can access them, and who […]

In a twist from their usual methods, virus writers have written an exploit to a patch that Microsoft issued this week, hoping to take advantage of IT shops that are slow on the draw. The usual trick has been zero-day exploits, where they wait until Microsoft issues its monthly patches and then drop the viral […]

SQL Server 2005 has been a consistent winner for Microsoft, showing double-digit percentage revenue growth for the last few quarters. This week, Microsoft gave its quiet success story a bit of a boost. At its Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Community Summit, Microsoft  announced a new community technology preview (read: beta) of Service Pack […]

STANFORD, Calif. –- The annual TechNet conference may have been about technology, but this year’s show was thinking green, and not necessarily money green, either. TechNet is a bipartisan political action group of senior executives formed in 1997 by tech firms in the Silicon Valley. This year’s discussion had political tinges and more than a […]

Time Warner appointed NBC executive Randy Falco as the new chairman and CEO of AOL, bringing a long-time television executive in to run the struggling online service. Falco is currently president and chief operating officer of the NBC Universal Television Group. He replaces Jonathan Miller, who is leaving the company after four years at the […]

STANFORD, Calif. — Even though Bill Gates has left day to day responsibilities at Microsoft, the company he co-founded with Paul Allen in 1975, he remains excited about technology. The chairman of Microsoft  spoke before an audience of potential future employees (computer science students) here on the campus of Stanford University. He was the third […]

While they battle it out in the marketplace with multiple cores as the weapons of choice, Intel and AMD are also fighting in court with legal motions hurled back and forth. In the latest round of this antitrust skirmish, Intel filed a reply to AMD’s motion to compel Intel to produce documents containing what it […]

If it’s the second Tuesday of the month, it’s patch day for Microsoft . The company released six fixes today, covering a variety of bugs in Windows and Office that range from important to critical. Five of the six are considered critical, the most severe ranking Microsoft uses for its bug listings. All of them […]