Microsoft has made the Sender ID framework specification for email authentication available to users at no cost and with the guarantee that it will never take legal action against them. The Sender ID specification will now be available to anybody wanting to use it under Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise.

desktopsites Inc., a provider of access serverware for small and mid-size businesses, announced the release of the latest version of Konect. Built entirely on the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1, this new version of Konect takes full advantage of web services, an enhanced security model and simplified integration possibilities with the full portfolio of Microsoft’s .NET solutions.

Hackers are trying harder to make their networks of hijacked computers go unnoticed. Cybercrooks are moving to new Web-based techniques to control the machines they have commandeered, popularly referred to as "zombies." Before, they used to send orders via Internet chat services, but with that method, they ran the risk of inadvertently revealing the location of the zombies and themselves.

The data center has grown from the glass house to the greenhouse. Read up on the latest about the changing role of the data center in the enterprise in this eWEEK Special Report.

Veteran malware researcher Joe Stewart was fairly sure he’d seen it all until he started poking at the SpamThru Trojan–a piece of malware designed to send spam from an infected computer. The Trojan, which uses peer-to-peer technology to send commands to hijacked computers, has been fitted with its own anti-virus scanner–a level of complexity and sophistication that rivals some commercial software.

What are the biggest concerns among CIOs for the data center in 2006? The Gartner Group in its 2006 survey of IT executives gives the following four as the top of the list.

Microsoft released the first beta of its AJAX tool, ASP.Net AJAX, formerly known as Atlas, making it available under three download options. The first option is the ASP.Net AJAX v1.0 "Core" download, which contains the features that will be supported by Microsoft Product Support and includes support for the core AJAX type system, networking stack, component model, extender base classes and the server-side functionality to integrate within ASP.Net, said Scott Guthrie, a general manager in the Microsoft Developer Division, in a blog post on Oct. 20.

Your rules are not stored in your .PST file. If you want to move your rules from one install to another, you’ll need to back them up. This article will show you how.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Less than 24 hours after the launch of Internet Explorer 7, security researchers began poking holes in the new browser. Danish security company Secunia reported Thursday that IE7 contains an information disclosure vulnerability, the same one it reported in IE6 in April. The vulnerability affects the final version of IE7 running on Windows XP with Service Pack 2.

Microsoft has blocked the attack vector used to slip unsigned drivers past new security policies being implemented in Windows Vista, according to Joanna Rutkowska, the stealth malware researcher who created the exploit. Rutkowska, who demonstrated the exploit at the Black Hat conference in August, said she tested the attack against Windows Vista RC2 x64 and found that the exploit doesn’t work anymore.