After months of planning to kill off the Hotmail name, Microsoft has decided to keep the venerable brand, as it works to overhaul its free Web email service. Microsoft said on Thursday that the revamped service, still in beta testing phase, is being renamed "Windows Live Hotmail" rather than the originally planned "Windows Live Mail." In a blog posting, Senior Product Manager Richard Sim said some people had found the name change confusing.

The investors and founders of YouTube received hundreds of millions of dollars in Google shares as a result of the deal between the two companies late last year, according to new documents. The big payout was revealed Wednesday in a regulatory filing Google made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The paperwork offered a more detailed account than previously disclosed of the sale’s beneficiaries.

One of the criticisms most often levied against Microsoft is that the company has gotten too big and too slow to be effective. Officelabs, sources say, is a new kind of incubator that is taking shape inside the Microsoft Business Division (the unit in charge of Microsoft Office, Dynamics ERP and Dynamics CRM). Tipsters say that Microsoft is encouraging the officelabs team to make use of open-source concepts in order to make better use of developers across different divisions within the company.

Trend Micro is warning of a serious security flaw in several of its products that could cause a vulnerable PC to crash or be hijacked. The flaw in its antivirus scan engine could be used to trigger a buffer overflow using a corrupted UPX file, the software maker said in an advisory issued earlier this week. For example, an outsider could send an email with the malicious file to a computer loaded with the affected antivirus software. As a result, the PC could suffer a "blue screen of death" or allow the attacker to remotely execute code and take control of the system, Trend Micro said.

AccuWeather.com announced the launch of two new, free weather gadgets developed for users of the Windows Vista operating system. AccuWeather.com Forecast Gadget for Windows Vista Users and Forecast Radar Gadget for Windows Vista Users give easy access to the most sought after weather information from users’ side bars or desktops.

Online criminals are turning away from threatening companies with massive cyberattacks in favor of encrypting a victim’s data and then demanding money to decrypt it, an antivirus expert has claimed. Eugene Kaspersky, head of antivirus research at Russia’s Kaspersky Labs, told the RSA Conference Tuesday that the use of so-called ransomware Trojans is a key trend for 2007. This malicious software infects a PC, encrypts some data and then displays an alert telling the victim to send money to get the decryption key needed to access their data again. Such malicious software isn’t new. Early examples include Cryzip, discovered in March 2006, and GPCode, discovered in May 2005.

Sun Microsystems is releasing a plug-in for Microsoft Office 2003 that will allow two-way compatibility with the OpenDocument Format, the company announced Wednesday. The StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview plug-in is based on the OpenOffice.org platform. OpenOffice is the free open-source office suite that uses OpenDocument Format, a standard XML-based format adopted by several private companies and government organizations. The format is a direct rival to Microsoft’s Open XML format. Sun’s plug-in will allow people already using Microsoft Office to switch between Word (.doc) documents and OpenOffice Writer (.odt) documents with minimal additional memory added to the file, according to Sun.

IObit has released the new version of Advanced WindowsCare Personal, a powerful and free Windows utility that analyzes and fixes Windows system problems in one click, all the while protecting users from spyware and from threats to the privacy. The latest version can work fully compatible with Windows Vista and provides multi-language support, such as English, Dutch, Danish and etc.

Symantec has uncovered malicious code that could exploit Microsoft’s newest zero-day vulnerability. On Security Response Weblog, Symantec revealed the exploit, which could drop a back-door Trojan onto an infected system. The exploit "may enable an attacker to gain remote access to your computer," wrote Amado Hidalgo in the blog post.

Keeping information secure in this age of laptop-lugging workers is the tech industry’s most formidable challenge, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates says. Instead of passwords, Gates favors "public key certificates"–combinations of digital signatures and other identifying information such as a person’s name, address, Social Security number and other data. He calls it the identity metasystem.