A 27-year-old man described as one of the world’s most prolific spammers was arrested Wednesday, and federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk email.

Robert Alan Soloway is accused of using networks of compromised "zombie" computers to send out millions upon millions of spam emails.

2X announced the release of its popular application publishing solution, 2X ApplicationServer v.5 Small Business Edition. The new release targets entrepreneurs running small businesses, providing them with safe and seamless access to applications and data from any location without stressing their IT budget.

The new 2X ApplicationServer 5 for small businesses delivers CITRIX like functionality without user or connection limitation for single Windows Terminal Servers.

DYS Analytics, whose products and services manage today’s top messaging platforms, announced that effective immediately, it has changed its name to Permessa Corporation. The new name–with origins in Italian meaning "permitted"–better reflects the company’s focus of the past several years beyond analytics, to delivering comprehensive management and control of corporate email, IM and collaboration applications. As email and IM traffic volumes skyrocket and unified communications takes hold, Permessa’s solutions allow IT staffs to better understand, control, demonstrate compliance, and administer enterprise messaging platforms such as IBM Lotus Notes Domino, IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Exchange.

In addition to revealing its new name, Permessa also announced a new release of its flagship CONTROL! family of products–solutions that provide a fast, easy view of the health of email, IM and collaboration applications. With the new look and feel of CONTROL!, IT can move quickly from spotting issues to taking action–with greater drill-down capabilities and more in-depth tracking of user trends.

Yoggie Security Systems announced the launch of a groundbreaking new concept in personal security appliances for laptops and PCs: for the first time users can access 13 security applications on a miniature computer contained in a USB stick. Uniquely, the Yoggie Pico, a full and robust Linux based computer, offloads all security applications onto the USB stick allowing Internet traffic to be screened before it executes on the laptop or PC and only once it has been cleansed is it allowed to enter the computer.

Microsoft has taken the wraps off "Surface," a coffee-table shaped computer that responds to touch and to special bar codes attached to everyday objects.

The machines are set to arrive in November in T-Mobile USA stores and properties owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide and Harrah’s Entertainment.

Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a shiny black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it.

IT staff routinely snoop on users, riffling through their emails and personal files, a newly released survey has found.

One IT administrator laughingly said: "Why does it surprise you that so many of us snoop around your files, wouldn’t you, if you had secret access to anything you can get your hands on?"

Few ordinary users realize that one in three of their IT work colleagues are snooping through company systems, peeking at confidential information such as your private files, wage data, personal emails, and HR background, using admin privileges.

These are the findings of a survey released by digital vaulting specialist Cyber-Ark Software, which carried out the research at last month’s Infosecurity Exhibition as part of its annual survey into "Trust, Security and Passwords."

Microsoft plans to reach out and work more closely with IBM and Cisco Systems on the interoperability front, as this is what its customers have told the software maker they want.

Specifically, these moves follow feedback from members of Microsoft’s Interoperability Executive Customer Council, which was established in June 2006 to solicit input from enterprise-level customers about exactly what they wanted from Microsoft.

Recosoft Corporation, the developer of cross platform Macintosh and Windows file format conversion solutions and PDF conversion and recovery tools, is shipping PDF2Office Professional v4.0 for Windows.

PDF2Office Professional v4.0 integrates completely with the latest Office 2007 product family using the ribbon interface and is fully compliant with Windows Vista. PDF2Office Professional v4.0 utilizes a client-server computing model delivering optimal performance to convert PDF documents on modern multi-core systems. In addition PDF2Office Professional v4.0 includes over 400+ new features and enhancements including the capability to convert PDF documents to HTML formats.

With the introduction of the new Office 2008 productivity suite for Mac OS X, planned for late 2007, companies that rely on Visual Basic for Applications scripts and macros on Macintosh and Windows clients will lose transparent cross-platform compatibility.

This will happen because Microsoft is abandoning VBA script and macro support with the introduction of the new productivity suite.

In addition, the recently released Office 2007 for Windows introduced a new default file format, the OOXML (Office Open XML) .docx format, which is not compatible with Office 2003 on Windows and Office 2004 on Mac OS X. OOXML will be the default file format for Office 2008 also.

Messageware, provider of enterprise productivity and security solutions for Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access, announced a free solution for a prevalent and annoying problem that is being experienced by Outlook Web Access users.

Many companies who have Microsoft Exchange with the update Q911829 installed and are using Outlook Web Access have been experiencing a problem addressing messages. In some environments, when the spacebar is pressed after addressing a message the address dialog box re-appears and in some cases, while typing the message body, entering a space suddenly activates the addressing dialog box.

Upon hearing about this problem from Exchange administrators who were concerned about the productivity of their users, Messageware researched the problem, found the cause, and has released a free fix. This patch is now available to companies and Exchange administrators who are running any version of Exchange or OWA.