If Republican Fred Thompson enters the presidential race next month as expected, the actor and former senator will be aiming to add another title to a crowded resume–blogger-in-chief.

Thompson has been contributing frequently to conservative Web sites as he gears up for a 2008 presidential bid, posting thoughts on topics ranging from the French election to the Middle East and the immigration debate.

While the Internet and blogs are a basic cornerstone of any modern campaign communications strategy, Thompson has been notably enthusiastic about expressing his thoughts online.

iHost Networks announced the release of the Vista version of its Instant Publisher. The new Publisher is featured in the latest release of Web Easy Professional from Avanquest, announced last week.

Web Easy Professional 7 is Web design software that automatically generates HTML code and does not require any programming or technical skills of their users. The Instant Publisher allows users to upload their Web sites onto the Internet from Web Easy in only a few clicks. The hosting is provided by iEasySite also includes shopping cart software in all their Business plans which allows customers to integrate online stores with their Web sites. Existing customers of iEasySite will enjoy a seamless upgrade to the new technology.

Mandriva has followed the lead of other Linux distributors, such as Canonical and Red Hat, in publicly spurning Microsoft’s advances for a patent protection deal.

Last fall, Microsoft and Novell signed an agreement in which Microsoft agreed not to sue Novell for patent infringement. This agreement has since been followed by similar deals with Linux firms Xandros and Linspire.

The Windows maker claims that open-source applications infringe hundreds of its patents, but it has so far failed to specify which patents are involved.

Quantum, specialist in backup, recovery and archive, announced the DXi7500 enterprise disk backup and replication system, designed to anchor a comprehensive strategy for linking backup, restore and disaster recovery protection across the distributed enterprise. With the addition of the DXi7500, Quantum’s DXi-Series becomes the first disk-based backup family to extend the benefits of data de-duplication, remote replication and disk-to-tape creation across a product line that covers distributed sites, midrange environments, and primary data centers.

With a scalable capacity of up to 240 TB, performance of up to 8 TB/hour, a high-availability architecture, and a unique policy-based data de-duplication approach, the DXi7500 provides disk backup capabilities to match the needs of the most demanding enterprise data centers. And because it leverages the same integrated software layer foundation first introduced in Quantum’s DXi3500 and DXi5500 disk backup appliances, the DXi7500 can also serve as a secure core repository for centralizing backup and disaster recovery from multiple distributed sites.

A Microsoft security executive released data Thursday showing that, six months after shipping Windows Vista, his company has left more publicly disclosed Vista bugs unpatched than it did with Windows XP.

In total, Microsoft has patched 12 out of 27 disclosed Vista vulnerabilities in the six months after it first shipped last November. During XP’s first six months, Microsoft’s security team patched 36 out of 39 known bugs.

Microsoft patched 23 high-severity XP bugs during its first six months, compared with only one high-severity Vista flaw.

The U.S. Department of Defense took an estimated 1,500 computers offline Wednesday after a security breach within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. "Elements of the OSD unclassified email system were taken offline yesterday afternoon, due to a detected penetration," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said, according to the transcript of a Thursday press conference. "A variety of precautionary measures are being taken. We expect the system to be online again very soon."

Department of Defense officials had little more to say about the attack, Thursday, and would not confirm the number of systems that had been taken offline.

Wooed by compelling application ecosystems, performance and cost, several large enterprise Linux customers have begun slowly migrating back to Windows Server, eWEEK reporting has found.

The migrations come after a quarter in which Windows Server revenue grew faster than Linux revenue–the first time that has happened since research company IDC started tracking Linux server spending in 1998.

A recent court filing submitted by the Justice Department, state attorneys general and Microsoft revealed that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 will be available later this year as a beta. Will that mean final delivery in 2007 or 2008?

Early indications are that Vista SP1 will be released some time in 2008, based on information I’ve obtained from my sources. However, Microsoft could dedicate more resources to SP1 development in order to make the Vista search changes sooner because of a court oversight. That said, Vista search changes could just as easily slow down the SP1 development.

We have a problem. Ok, maybe not you personally, but we, the users of Outlook, collectively have a problem. That problem is how to maintain access to our Outlook data when we’re mobile. Outlook Mobile Service (OMS) is one possible solution to that problem. It’s an inexpensive, low-bandwidth way to get access to crucial Outlook data on virtually any mobile phone that can send and receive text (SMS) messages.

Read this OutlookPower article.

We’re still digging through a couple of hundred pages of congressional testimony released earlier this week, so we’re postponing our next installment of our White House email controversy series until next week. Stay tuned next week for more bizarre happenings in the world of government email happenings. Ih the meantime, we’ve got a great in-depth article on using Outlook on low-bandwidth mobile devices.