Bloggers are being asked to show their support for freedom of expression by Amnesty International. The human rights group also wants Weblog writers to highlight the plight of fellow bloggers jailed for what they wrote in their online journals. The organization said fundamental rights such as free speech faced graver threats than ever before. The campaign coincides with the start of a week-long UN-organized conference that will debate the future of the Net.

Microsoft is making its antipiracy check mandatory for Office. The company introduced Office Genuine Advantage in April as a voluntary way for people to ensure that they only used licensed and legal copies of the productivity software. But as of Friday, Office Online templates downloaded from within Microsoft Office System 2007 applications will require validation of the Office software in use. And as of January 2007, people will also have to complete the authentication test if they want to use Office Update.

While not all IT disasters are of cataclysmic proportions, every weathered IT professional has an all-too-real eerie tale about a day when everything went wrong. Even 10 and 50 years later, these pros retell their horror stories with a startling sharpness, more haunting than ghost stories.

Although most of us are pretty familiar with Microsoft Office Outlook and Outlook Express, there are still some people out there who are confused by the similar names. With the upcoming release of Office 2007 and Windows Mail, there’s bound to be even more confusion. In this article, we’ll help you get a handle on what’s what.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Although Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team has just shipped version 7 of the browser, it is already working on IE 8–or should that be "IE Next?"–said a platform architect on the team. At the AJAX Experience conference, Chris Wilson, platform architect for the Internet Explorer platform at Microsoft, said, "The team is hard at work on IE 8," then with a smile added, "I think I am supposed to call it IE Next." peaking on the issue at hand for the conference–AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML–Wilson said, "IE 7 does more than just fix very minor features; it makes AJAX fun to develop."

Microsoft officials say they are unhappy that security software maker Authentium has decided to bypass the controversial PatchGuard kernel protection feature in its next-generation Vista operating system, and said that the tactic could lead to eventual problems for users of the company’s software. Responding to Authentium’s move to circumvent PatchGuard in its products, company officials said that the decision to hack the feature could prove unwise for the security vendor as Microsoft will work to close off any flaws that allow unauthorized kernel interaction, making technologies dependent on such access obsolete.

While both Gateway and Hewlett-Packard are going to let customers who buy certain PCs this holiday season upgrade to Windows Vista at no cost, Dell has decided to charge a fee to upgrade from Windows XP Home to Vista Basic. These OEM announcements closely follow that of Microsoft, which finally revealed Oct. 24 its upgrade plans for customers who buy a Windows Vista capable PC this holiday season. Dell spokesman Bob Kaufman told eWEEK that while the company plans to charge $45 plus shipping and handling to move from Windows XP Home to Vista Basic, the upgrade from Windows XP Media Center Edition to Vista Premium and from Windows XP Pro to Vista premium will only incur a shipping and handling fee.

Management support of security policies is the most important element in effectively securing organizations’ infrastructure, according to the third annual Global Information Security Workforce Study, conducted by analyst firm IDC. The list of imperative ingredients for a secure infrastructure also included having users follow security policy, having qualified security staff, and software and hardware solutions. Responses came from more than 4,000 information security professionals in over 100 countries. Technology as an enabler, but not the solution, for implementing a sound security strategy was an ongoing theme in the results.

A day after shipping Firefox 2, Mozilla largely rebutted two claims of security flaws in the latest version of the Web browser. Bug hunters appear to be in a race to uncover new security flaws in both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7, which Microsoft released last week. Word of what appears to be the first publicly disclosed IE 7 vulnerability came Wednesday.

Security experts have found a weakness in Internet Explorer 7 that could help crooks mask phishing scams, the type of attack Microsoft designed the browser to thwart. IE 7, released last week, allows a Web site to display a pop-up that can contain a spoofed Web address, security monitoring company Secunia said Wednesday. An attacker could exploit this weakness to trick people into believing they are on a trusted Web site when in fact they are viewing a malicious page, Secunia said in an alert.