She is a latecomer to the information superhighway, but 75-year-old Sigbritt Lothberg is now cruising the Internet with a dizzying speed. Lothberg’s 40 gigabits-per-second fiber-optic connection in Karlstad is believed to be the fastest residential uplink in the world, Karlstad city officials said.

In less than 2 seconds, Lothberg can download a full-length movie on her home computer–many thousand times faster than most residential connections, said Hafsteinn Jonsson, head of the Karlstad city network unit. Jonsson and Lothberg’s son, Peter, worked together to install the connection.

The speed is reached using a new modulation technique that allows the sending of data between two routers placed up to 1,240 miles apart, without any transponders in between, Jonsson said.

Microsoft is working on a variety of innovative photo projects, ranging from experiments with its 3-D maps offering to massive panoramic photos that users can zoom into for details. Developers who work in the company’s research arm showed off the technologies during the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit in Redmond, Wash.

HD View is one photo project that definitely has the "wow" factor. The technology allows users to combine hundreds of photos to create one massive picture that users can zoom in on to see clear details. In one example, a panoramic photo of the city of Seattle includes 800 images, each 8 megapixels in size, stitched together to create a 3.6 billion-pixel image.

Microsoft has confirmed plans to release the latest betas of its Remote Desktop Connection client for Macs and its file format converters. The new (beta) software packages will be released during the week of July 30, the company confirmed through its Mac Business Unit MacMojo blog.

The file format converters will include "significant" improvements in the software’s ability to convert Word files and will introduce PowerPoint support for the first time. These converters are required following the introduction of Office 2007 for Windows. The suite uses a new file format that is not compatible with current versions of Office for the Mac. The conversion software turns Microsoft’s new format .docx files into .rtf files, readable on a Mac.

Every organization has the need to collect, organize, and share information. In Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange Server uses the Public Folders feature to share common-interest information among project teams and user groups. In this helpful article, Kathy Evans-Davis gives you an overview of how Public Folders work, and also how you can manage permissions for an active team.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Peter Moore, the head of Microsoft’s gaming business, is leaving to join game maker Electronic Arts. For the past four years Moore has been the public face of Microsoft’s Xbox and PC gaming business, and oversaw the launch of the Xbox 360.

He will join Electronic Arts as the head of its sports games division which makes some of its most popular titles. He will be replaced by Don Mattrick, a former EA senior executive who has worked as a consultant at Microsoft.

As CIOs have changed gears in the last few years from managing enterprise technology to driving business growth within their companies, the shift has also trickled down to what is demanded of the IT professionals within their organizations. Technology workers whose strengths lie in core areas of information and technology have become the most sought-after group and hold the most-difficult-to-fill positions. These difficulties are exacerbated by changing demands from the IT workers themselves, whose desires for work-life balance and growth opportunities within their jobs are more pronounced than before.

In the absence of these qualities in a job, they’re more willing than ever to leave, evidenced by an ever-increasing rate of IT employee-initiated turnover, according to Gartner’s 2007 IT Market Compensation Study released July 17.

Microsoft’s revenue for the fiscal year to end June 2007 topped the $50 billion mark on the back of solid performances from its core operations and the release of Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. The software maker reported July 19 that revenue for the full fiscal year was $51.12 billion, 15 percent higher than it was the previous year.

Diluted earnings came in at $1.42 a share for the year, while Microsoft returned over the year some $31 billion in cash, or 175 percent of operating cash flow, to shareholders through share buybacks and dividends.

Security vendors warn image spammers are increasingly using PDF files to bypass spam filters. Researchers at BorderWare Technologies, based in Toronto, reported that on any given day more than 30 image spam campaigns are being run, with more than half of those being PDF-based.

The findings come as a number of vendors have reported that the amount of image spam has declined in favor of PDF spam. A Commtouch report for the second quarter of the year found that image spam had dropped to less than 15 percent of all spam, compared with 30 percent in the first quarter of 2007.

Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access is the corporate Web mail solution of choice for the overwhelming majority of companies today and most of these companies secure their OWA environment with a Microsoft Internet Security & Acceleration firewall server. A new white paper released by Messageware highlights often overlooked security risks for organizations running OWA with ISA Server. In addition, it offers effective solutions for securing OWA against those risks.

Topping the list of vulnerabilities are users logging in using shared computers, such as at conference kiosks, at home, internet cafes, client sites or university computer labs and leaving an active session, either by navigating away from the page or closing the browser window without first logging off. When a user logs into OWA it creates a cookie that can act as a continuous bridge into OWA user accounts and potentially, one’s network or servers. ISA Server 2000 & 2004 contain an auto logoff feature, but there are still scenarios where unauthorized users can access active sessions. In addition, the newly released 2006 version does not have the auto logoff feature, resulting in users being able to navigate away from active OWA sessions without any warning.

Internet users and company officials in China blamed a series of disruptions to cross-border email traffic on adjustments to the country’s vast Internet surveillance system. IT company executives offered varying explanations for the email disruptions, but agreed they were not a result of standard technical problems.

China is in the midst of a highly publicized campaign to rein in "unhealthy content" in its rapidly growing Internet, whose rapid spread of information regarding incidents of government corruption and rural unrest not reported in conventional media has alarmed China’s stability-obsessed leaders.