Next week’s partner conference once again raises questions about who Microsoft really develops its products for. Hint: It’s not enterprises.

If Microsoft truly developed products for its business customers, which pay for Chairman Bill Gates to be the world’s second richest person, priorities would be more in line with customers’ needs. Priorities are askew.

Google can’t use the Gmail name in Germany because doing so would infringe on someone else’s trademark, a German court has ruled.

Google regrets the decision by the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court but said the ruling will not affect its ability to offer the Web-based mail service in Germany, Google Senior Legal Counsel Arnd Haller said in a statement.

As in the U.K., where it likewise doesn’t own the Gmail trademark, Google provides the service under the name "Google Mail" in Germany.

The notorious Mpack hacker toolkit is installing malware that carries out its chores–including spewing spam–from within the Windows kernel, making it extremely difficult for security software to detect it, Symantec said Thursday.

The Trojan horse that Symantec has dubbed "Srizbi" is being dropped onto some PCs by the multi-exploit Mpack, a ready-to-use attack application that until recently has been selling for around $1,000. Responsibility for a large-scale attack launched from thousands of hijacked Web sites last month was pinned on Mpack, as was a follow-up campaign waged from compromised Internet porn sites.

A newly identified malicious program not only messes up its victims’ computers, it taunts them too.

The program, called the BotVoice.A Trojan was first spotted by security vendor Panda Software last week. It is a Trojan horse program, which the victim must download first. But once installed, it gets nasty. The Trojan soon sets to work trying to delete everything from the victim’s hard drive, while at the same time endlessly repeating an audible message, apparently designed to taunt the victim.

"You have been infected; I repeat, you have been infected and your system files have been deleted. Sorry. Have a nice day and bye bye," the Trojan says.

It does this by using a text-reading program that is part of the Windows operating system, Panda said. Users of Windows 2003, XP, 2000, NT, ME, 98, and 95 are all at risk.

Unlike a virus, BotVoice.A does not jump from computer to computer on its own, but spreads via p-to-p (peer-to-peer) networks or storage devices such as CD-ROMs or USB memory drives.

Microsoft cleared the air July 5 on its obligations to GNU General Public License Version 3 support, declaring it will not provide support or updates for GPLv3 under the deal it penned in November with Novell to administer certificates for the Linux distribution.

Microsoft also said July 5 that its agreement with Novell, as well as those with Linux rivals Xandros and Linspire, were unaffected by the release June 29 of GPLv3 by the Free Software Foundation.

Even though patent talks between Microsoft and Red Hat broke down last year before Microsoft went on to sign a technical collaboration and patent indemnity deal with Novell, Red Hat is still willing to work with the Redmond software maker on the interoperability front.

But the Linux vendor wants to limit those talks to pure interoperability between Windows and Red Hat Linux, with the goal of solving real customer problems, Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s executive vice president of engineering, told eWEEK.

Fidelity National Information Services, an electronic payment processor, said on Tuesday a database administrator stole and sold customer data, exposing as many as 2.3 million bank and credit card records, and that the worker has been fired.

The employee, who worked at the company’s Certegy Check Services unit, sold the information to a data broker, which in turn sold some of it to a "limited number" of direct marketers.

These activities led to customers receiving marketing solicitations, though there is no evidence of fraud, Fidelity said. The stolen data include names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, and bank account and card information.

The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a "ticking time bomb," the chief executive of the UK National Archives has warned. Natalie Ceeney said society faced the possibility of "losing years of critical knowledge" because modern PCs could not always open old file formats.

She was speaking at the launch of a partnership with Microsoft to ensure the Archives could read old formats. Microsoft’s UK head Gordon Frazer warned of a looming "digital dark age".

Could that PDF file attachment be malicious? Maybe. More and more PDF files are coming in as attachments on unsolicited junk mail and spam. PDF is the portable document format created by Adobe a zillion years ago. And it has become the defacto standard for moving virtual versions of documents around the Web. PDF files offer a locked or nearly locked version of the original and are traditionally safe to use.

Usually dubious attachments come in as DOC formats or other more open standards. And over the years there has been controversy about how vulnerable PDFs are.

Microsoft’s Windows platform is losing traction as a target for application developers in North America but still is the dominant platform, according to Evans Data survey results released Tuesday.

A survey this spring of more than 400 developers and IT managers in North America found that the number of developers targeting Windows for their applications declined 12 percent from a year ago. Just 64.8 percent targeted the platform as opposed to 74 percent in 2006.