Microsoft has agreed to buy software firm Danger Inc, maker of T-Mobile’s SideKick Web phone. The gadget, also known as the Hiptop, has been popularised by a number of American celebrities, including socialite Paris Hilton.

Danger was co-founded in 1999 by Andy Rubin, Joe Britt and Matt Hershenson. Mr Rubin has moved on to a new job running Google’s mobile venture. Microsoft did not disclose the purchase price as it made the announcement.

The 2008 IT Salary Report from research firm Computer Economics projects that despite an economic downturn, U.S. IT workers as a whole will receive a median pay raise of about 3.7 percent in 2008. Read on to see the areas in which a tight supply of skills will cause salaries to rise.

Google is coming up with new ways to bundle its Postini security software-as-a-service assets, as the company began offering email filtering, encryption and archiving software in three levels of protection for enterprises.

Google, which has applied the Postini assets to Gmail since it bought the company for $625 million to better compete with Microsoft and IBM in the collaboration software market, is now breaking out three products for Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and Novell GroupWise. Specifically, Google is now selling Google Message Filtering, geared to help companies quash spam, viruses and other email threats, for $3 per user per year.

Microsoft, which in October officially announced its intent to support model-driven development in a broad strategy known as "Oslo," is beginning work on a new declarative programming language, a supporting editing tool and other components of the initiative, according to sources close to the company.

Microsoft announced Oslo as part of an amorphous vision for simplifying application development, design, management and deployment. Company officials said Oslo will represent a core set of technology investments that will encompass both a services infrastructure–spanning server, client and the Internet "cloud"–and an executable modeling platform that will include a general-purpose modeling language, tools and repository.

Among Microsoft’s 70,000-plus employees, there are many influential people. Twenty-five is too small a number to capture the best of the best among a large group of creative people. But Microsoft corporate culture also is very staid and insular, with a top-heavy power structure. Therefore, this list focuses more on operational influencers, although there are some thought leaders included.

Move over, Microsoft Singularity. There’s another microkernel, .Net-based operating system in town. And this one’s available under an open-source license.

Cosmos: An open-source C# microkernel OS is bornKnown as Cosmos, the new, independently developed operating system is the brain child of former Microsoft Developer and Platform Evangelism team member Chad "Kudzu" Hower. Unlike Singularity–version one of which Microsoft released last year (and only to university researchers and academics)–Cosmos is available to anyone, Hower said. The developers released Milestone 1 of Cosmos at the very end of January.

Two efforts to deliver an implementation of the Ruby language on the .Net platform have merged into one. Or have they? Rather than continue to chase the same goal, Wayne Kelly, a lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology and the lead on the Ruby.Net project, said he is refocusing his efforts on Microsoft’s IronRuby implementation. The Queensland University of Technology is based in Brisbane, Australia.

However, some supporters of the Ruby.Net project are considering keeping it going as a "stepping stone" while IronRuby is being developed. Kelly, who presented the progress of the Ruby.Net project Jan. 29 at the Lang.Net conference on Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus, announced Feb. 4 that he now plans to support the IronRuby effort.

Microsoft is making a tweak to the way it will enable Windows Vista users to upgrade to higher-end versions of Windows via its "Windows Anytime Upgrade" program. Windows Anytime Upgrade is a Vista marketing program via which Microsoft has allowed customers to move from lower-cost, less feature-rich versions of Vista to higher-end versions.

Starting February 20, Microsoft is planning to end distribution of digital product keys, company officials said on February 7. Instead, customers will need to obtain a Windows Anytime Upgrade kit, consisting of a Windows DVD and product keys, either directly from Microsoft, via snail-mail, or in person via a Microsoft retailer. Anytime Upgraders still can order the upgrade kit online, but the key will be sent by snail-mail.

Apple’s OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Linux operating systems are to be pitted against each other in an ethical hacking contest in Vancouver next month. Run by the organizers of the CanSecWest Vancouver 2008 security conference, the competition is a repeat of the "PWN to Own" contest at CanSecWest in 2007, when security researchers competed to win a MacBook Pro and $10,000. The prize was shared between security researchers Dino Dai Zovi and Shane Macauley for their successful use of a zero-day QuickTime vulnerability, which they used to compromise the MacBook. The vulnerability was subsequently found to also affect Windows platforms.

Microsoft issued advance notice of 12 security bulletins ahead of its February batch of patches with seven critical flaws affecting Vista, Internet Explorer and Office.

The most notable patch will likely cover that Excel zero day vulnerability that surfaced last month. Since Microsoft confirmed the Excel vulnerability and issued an advisory on Jan. 16 it’s a safe bet that its patches on Feb. 12 will cover it.

In its advance notification posting, Microsoft said the seven critical bulletins all cover remote code executions vulnerabilities. These bulletins affect Windows XP and Vista, Office, Internet Explorer and Visual Basic.