Back when the CAN-SPAM act was passed, there were those who complained about various provisions in it. There have been prosecutions under it, but for the most part it’s been a great legal irrelevancy. This sort of situation is the best we can hope for from Senate bill 2661, The Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act of 2008.

The bill is sponsored by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and co-sponsored by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and that Internet expert Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. The APCPA would make certain new rules about the use of domain names and whois records. It would be specifically illegal to register a domain name used in a commercial endeavor with false or misleading identification information.

As part of a host of announcements at its MIX conference, Microsoft will announce the release of a beta of Expression Studio 2.

Expression Studio is Microsoft’s designer tools suite, which consists of Microsoft Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media and Expression Encoder. Expression Studio is designed to work seamlessly with Microsoft’s Visual Studio, enabling designers and developers to collaborate on the creation of better user experiences.

Microsoft has begun signing up testers for SQL Server Data Services (SSDS), a forthcoming service that will allow customers and developers to host their data in a Microsoft-hosted database.

Microsoft officials were reticent to compare SQL Server Data Services to offerings from any competitors. But Gartner Vice President David Smith said the new Microsoft service was comparable to a service like Amazon’s SimpleDB.

SimpleDB, which Amazon released into public beta in December 2007, is a complement and adjunct to the company’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and Simple Data Storage Service (S3). It allows customers to store, modify and query data hosted in the cloud.

The Forbes list of richest people is out and the big news is that Bill Gates is no longer the richest man. He’s not even No. 2 anymore because of Wall Street’s displeasure with Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo.

In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com is abandoning its effort to outshine Internet search leader Google and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives. As part of the new direction outlined Tuesday, Ask will lay off about 40 employees, or 8 percent of its work force.

With the shift, the Oakland-based company will return to its roots by concentrating on finding answers to basic questions about recipes, hobbies, children’s homework, entertainment and health.

Microsoft’s chief operating officer has dismissed concerns that an update to its flagship Windows Vista operating system is incompatible with a number of applications.

Speaking at the CeBit trade show in Hannover, Germany, Microsoft’s third-in-command, Kevin Turner, told ZDNet UK that the software giant is not concerned by the problems that Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) has encountered with some third-party programs.

Want to see what a non-Windows-based operating system developed by Microsoft looks like? If you are willing and able to sign a non-commercial, academic Shared Source license, look no further. Microsoft on March 4 made the few-hundred-thousand lines of source code for Singularity Version 1 available for download from its CodePlex site. Microsoft made the announcement at its Microsoft Research TechFest 2008 event in Redmond, Wash.

Singularity is an operating system and set of related tools and libraries that is developed completely in managed code. Singularity is not based on Windows; it was written from scratch as a proof-of-concept.

Yahoo and media conglomerate Time Warner have stepped up talks to create an alternative to Microsoft’s offer to take over the Web company, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday citing people familiar with the matter.

The paper reported that the talks center on a deal that would fold Time Warner’s AOL Internet unit into Yahoo, according to the people, who still consider a Yahoo purchase by Microsoft as the most likely outcome.

If you think you work harder than your boss, you’re in the vast majority, and according to some economic theory you’re probably right.

According to a new poll from Monster.com, 77 percent of U.S. workers feel they toil longer and harder than those who sign their paychecks. Though Monster itself admits that their polling process isn’t the most scientific, the sentiment is sure to ring true with working stiffs.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer came to CeBIT and played a decidedly green card to appeal to the sensibilities of the European community.

As part of an overall effort to reduce the amount of power consumed by systems running products developed by Microsoft, the company said it is making available a set of Data Center Best Practices to customers that is derived from knowledge gained from running its own data centers. That guide will include advice on how to select sites, space optimization planning and advice on how to prioritize power distribution within the data center.

As part of an effort to practice what it preaches, Ballmer revealed that Microsoft is building new data centers in Dublin, Ireland and Quincy, Wash., for both environmental and economic reasons.