Microsoft is preparing to release privacy guidelines based on its own internal practices in hopes of getting companies to adopt more cohesive standards for safeguarding people’s personal information. Microsoft will issue the hefty document Thursday, urging commonsense practices such as clearly telling customers why a company collects personally identifiable information like e-mail addresses or phone numbers.

Hewlett-Packard has appointed a new chief ethics and compliance officer in the wake of the controversy surrounding its investigation into news leaks over the past two years. Jon Hoak, former senior vice president and general counsel for NCR, is replacing Kevin Hunsaker, one of five people charged in California last week with four felonies in connection with the internal probe.

Microsoft later this month plans to release a converter that will let Word users open documents saved in the OpenDocument format. The plug-in for Word, set for release Oct. 23, is the first installment of Microsoft’s plan to add support for the OpenDocument, or ODF, standard, which has gained interest from government customers.

eWEEK spoke to a range of IT professionals about what they considered the bare-bones computer tasks that every employee should be able to perform–aspects of daily work they’d consider almost inexcusable to request frequent help with. Almost, they said, insisting that they didn’t mind helping workers, as long as the workers would try to help themselves first.

For the second time this year, a major management reshuffle at Microsoft has sent ripples through the software maker’s security unit. Just seven months after tapping Ben Fathi to head up the newly formed STU (security technology unit), the Redmond, Wash. company announced that Fathi would move over to manage a Windows Core System development team. The STU, which handled all aspects of security development, response and outreach, has been scrapped in favor of an expanded Trustworthy Computing team under the leadership of Redmond veteran Scott Charney.

Microsoft has restructured its Windows Core Operating System Division into five teams in a move designed to better focus on PC hardware and provide a richer set of customer solutions. The software giant is also making changes on the security front by bringing its security, Trustworthy Computing and Engineering Excellence teams together in one group, known as the Trustworthy Computing Team.

Like a hurricane on the horizon (which, fortunately, we’ve managed to avoid this season), Internet Explorer 7 is getting closer and closer. In fact, if reports are to be believed, IE7 is about the make landfall in the next few days — and it’s coming to your PC whether you want it or not. In this important article, we show you how to prevent it from automatically installing.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Forget about teaching computer users how to be safe online. Users are often called the weakest link in computer security. They can’t select secure passwords, and they write down passwords and give them out to strangers in exchange for treats. They use old or outdated security software, can’t spell the word "phishing," and click on all links that arrive in e-mail or instant messages, and all that appear on the Web. That’s the reality, Stefan Gorling, a doctoral student at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, said in a talk at the Virus Bulletin conference. The solution, many technologists say, is to educate the user about online threats. But that doesn’t work and is the wrong approach, Gorling said.

A computer security expert is predicting that hackers will crack the controversial PatchGuard kernel anti-tampering technology coming in Windows Vista within one year of its release. Alexander Czarnowski, chief executive of Avet, in Warsaw, Poland, said he believes it’s inevitable that the technology will be broken once the final version of Windows Vista is released to manufacturing.

Microsoft said it had made changes to its new operating system Vista after what it called "constructive dialogue" with the European Commission and South Korea over regulatory concerns. "Microsoft agreed to make a number of changes to Windows Vista in response to guidance the company received from the European Commission," the company cited its general counsel Brad Smith as saying. He confirmed that the software maker had also incorporated changes to Vista in South Korea to comply with its legal obligations there.