Linux distributor Xandros is licensing messaging protocols from Microsoft as part of an expansion of the partnership the two companies forged in June.

Xandros, which offers desktop and server versions of Linux, is acquiring the specification and licenses for Exchange ActiveSync and Outlook-Exchange Transport Protocol so its Scalix Mail Servers can better interoperate with Microsoft clients that now primarily interact with Microsoft’s Exchange Server messaging infrastructure.

Microsoft and Xandros first announced a pact to make their products more interoperable in June during Microsoft’s annual TechEd conference. Microsoft also agreed not to sue Xandros users for patent-infringement. Microsoft claimed earlier this year that Linux violates more than 230 patents it holds.

A new vulnerability in Yahoo’s instant messenger program can potentially cause unwanted code to run on a PC, according to security researchers.

Details of the vulnerability were first posted on a Chinese-language security forum and was later confirmed with Yahoo security officials, wrote Wei Wang, a researcher with McAfee’s Avert lab in Beijing, on a company blog. So far, no exploit code has been published, wrote Karthik Raman, also of McAfee.

The many multifaceted interactions between corporate users, BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, Microsoft Exchange servers, networks and other infrastructure can lead to system downtime and can negatively effect worker productivity, as well as cause a major migraine for IT departments, according to a recent vendor-commissioned study.

Zenprise, which offers solutions to proactively troubleshoot problems in BES and Exchange environments, contracted Osterman Research to conduct the study. Respondents include 76 IT decision makers in North American companies running BlackBerry Enterprise Servers for Microsoft Exchange with at least 500 employees.

Microsoft is working with AMD to fix a bug in an ATI driver that ships preinstalled on millions of laptops and which leaves the Vista kernel open to arbitrary memory writes by malicious driver authors. It’s not just ATI–virtualization security researcher Joanna Rutkowska said during her presentation at Black Hat earlier in August that ATI, which is owned by AMD, and Nvidia are just two examples of particularly badly written drivers, and that there could be tens of thousands of vulnerable drivers out there.

The bug in the ATI driver is that it allows arbitrary memory writes. Malicious driver authors can use that flaw to load unsigned drivers via the standard loading mechanism.

MacOffice Professional is changing the face of Office suites on OS X. For years, Mac users have had to live with second-class office suites: no support for current document formats, no database support and no native Intel support. Web technologies have been poorly supported at best and VBA (Visual Basic For Applications) macros were completely incompatible with Mac office versions. MacOffice Professional changes all of this, bringing professional yet easy-to-use word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, relational database, equation editing, charting and drawing to all users of Mac OS X 10.3 or later.

Microsoft recently completed an extensive consumer survey that revealed nearly one out of every five online U.S. adults (17 percent) has been a victim of at least one Internet scam, and 81 percent of those admitted they did something that led to the crime, such as opening an email message that appeared to be from a legitimate person or company. According to Microsoft experts, some of the biggest threats facing consumers online this year are fraud-related attacks that criminals use to trick consumers, who think they are dealing with a trusted source, into revealing personal information. Despite the growth of online crime, the survey found that more than half of online U.S. adults age 18 and over (58 percent) admitted they had little to no knowledge of current online threats and scams.

We started this investigation asking the same question Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Henry Waxman asked: where have all the emails gone? However, after five months of very in-depth research, we’ve come to the conclusion that the missing email messages are the least of our concerns. In this critical article, we provide our analysis of the priorities that need to be considered. We look at the root causes for the problems with White House email and lay the groundwork for what will be our final recommendations.

Read this OutlookPower article.

ZATZ Senior Editor James Booth has taken an interest in sailing, in particular, long-term, self-sustaining voyages on the open ocean. With the millions of ZATZ publication readers worldwide, there must be a few sailing experts among our readership. James is asking them to contact him at jbooth@zatz.com, that he may pick their collective brains regarding sailing and IT technology.

Microsoft has opened up the second beta for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 to more than a million Microsoft Developer Network and TechNet subscribers under a new technology preview program.

More than 150,000 technical adoption customers have been testing the first private beta of the service pack, but this second beta is feature-complete and contains new technologies not found in that first beta, Ray Mohrman, the group product manager of Microsoft’s Unified Communications Group, told eWEEK.

Google Pack, Google’s software download package, has added Sun’s office suite, StarOffice 8, to its offerings. StarOffice, which Sun normally sells for $70, is free through Google Pack. StarOffice is Sun’s answer to Microsoft Office. In 2000, Sun released StarOffice’s source code, which is the underpinning of OpenOffice.org, a Sun-sponsored open-source project.

StarOffice 8 lets users create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. It supports most Microsoft Office formats, except for the new formats in Office 2007. It can also export documents as PDFs. The Google Pack version of StarOffice integrates a Google Search toolbar in all of the StarOffice applications.