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Microsoft may borrow for the first time in its history to fund a portion of its $44.6 billion cash and stock offer for Yahoo Inc, its chief financial officer said on Monday.

Microsoft announced through the Windows Vista blog that it has released Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista to manufacturing. Users will not be able to download SP1 until mid-March, as the company is trying to make it available about the time that new systems with SP1 will be available in stores. This is the same time frame in which it will be available through the Microsoft Download Center for direct download. The software will be available initially in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese; other languages will follow in April.

The US-CERT is urging Web surfers to immediately disable ActiveX controls from Internet Explorer to protect against a swath of publicly reported–and unpatched–software vulnerabilities.

The US-CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) recommendation follows the release of exploit code for multiple zero-day flaws in image uploaders used by Facebook and MySpace and bugs in the ActiveX control that ships with the Yahoo Music Jukebox software.

The exploits, posted to the Milw0rm.com Web site, provides a roadmap for full remote code execution attacks on Windows computers.

According to Kaspersky’s Senior Virus Analyst Alexander Gostev, January’s report shows that for the second month in a row, representatives of the new Trojan-Downloader family Diehard have been creating a considerable stir in mail traffic. Gostev notes, "The unknown authors are using exactly the same approach which made families such as Warezov and Zhelatin so successful two years ago–conducting a multitude of very short lived mass-mailings. However, in contrast to Warezov, we’re not yet seeing ten new variants of Diehard every day."

Other malicious programs made up 6.83% of all malicious code in mail traffic, indicating that there is still a significant number of other worm and Trojan families in circulation. On the side of virus threats, Gostev reports that a wave of Bagle Trojan-Downloaders have suddenly burst into the Top Twenty. He says, "They may not rank very high at the moment–tenth, fifteenth and sixteenth places–but this type of activity threatens to pose an ever-greater risk to PC users."

Lucid8 announced that it will be demonstrating its new DigiScope version 2.0 at LegalTech in New York, February 5-7 in Booth 3400 at the The Hilton New York Hotel. DigiScope is a powerful, flexible, cost efficient and easy to use eDiscovery and Recovery solution that enables legal, compliance, human resource and IT administration professionals to accomplish email related discovery and recovery tasks that meet their needs. DigiScope provides parties tasked with discovery actions the ability to search, find and export evidence stored in Exchange store backups, PST files and live Exchange servers. Further, DigiScope provides Exchange Administrators the ability to quickly and easily restore deleted or corrupted mailboxes, folders or individual message items to the live Exchange server from store backups.

Microsoft has hit the final milestone in the long and rocky road to Windows Server 2008, announcing Feb. 4 that it has released to manufacturing the final code for that product.

The software maker will also issue customer advice and guidance about upgrading, as well as consolidated information on the upgrade tools it will offer to help with this.

The release to manufacturing marks the end of almost five years that it has taken Microsoft to get Windows Server 2008 out the door, following the release of Windows Server 2003 in April 2003. Microsoft made the updated Windows Server 2003 Release 2 available in December 2005.

Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008, which recently hit the RTM (release to manufacturing) milestone, demonstrates that Microsoft is capable of producing a lean, mean server machine–and doing it, no less, atop the same code base that backs the company’s oft-maligned Windows Vista client operating system.

The new Windows Server boasts a set of networking enhancements that dramatically boost file serving performance, and the product can be deployed in a new, stripped-down Server Core configuration, which significantly reduces the attack surface of systems hosting certain Windows Server roles.

Microsoft made waves when it announced it was offering $44.6 billion for Yahoo. A tempting offer if ever there was one, especially since it is much higher than Yahoo is valued at. But there are also some very good reasons why Yahoo should just say no.

Google fired back on Sunday at Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid to acquire Yahoo, accusing Microsoft of seeking to extend its computer software monopoly deeper into the Internet realm.

David Drummond, a Google senior vice president and its chief legal officer, said in a blog post that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo could undermine the open competition that has fueled more than a decade of Web innovation.