AOL announced that is has acquired Userplane, provider of community networking software that develops and markets easy-to-use, Web-based chat and instant messaging tools that can be quickly deployed and seamlessly integrated into a variety of Web services. The agreement with AOL was signed on July 28th and closed last week. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

We’ve recently gotten a few letters about how to move your PST file data from one PST file to another. If you’ve been using Outlook for a long time, it’s likely you’ve got an old-format PST file that has a 2GB limit in storage capacity. If you’re running close to that limit, you might want to use the new PST format that became available with Outlook 2003. In this important article, we present a tutorial on combining PST files.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Technology certifications matter. Or maybe they don’t. Pay is up for IT workers, but many haven’t recovered the wages that typified the late ’90s. There aren’t enough computer science majors in the United States, but the jobs held by the ones we do have here could be outsourced. Corporations want M.B.A. technology managers, but there are shortages of specialized technology skills. Meanwhile, the image of the profession is in the dumps. "The old model of IT doesn’t work anymore," said Steve Novak, CIO at Kirkland & Ellis, a Chicago-based law firm. While that model is still being sorted out, Novak, along with other CIOs interviewed by eWEEK, is on the lookout for the holy grail–a designer IT person who can adapt and thrive in changing environments and still remain valuable.

Microsoft has released a first public beta of a new blog-authoring tool, Windows Live Writer, and made it available for download starting on Aug. 13. According to J.J. Allaire, the architect of the tool, Windows Live Writer is the evolution of Onfolio Writer, a tool developed by his former company Onfolio, which Microsoft acquired in March 2006.

Tapping into the mass market appeal of its popular line of Express developer tools, Microsoft is taking its tool set for game developers to a broader set of developers with XNA Game Studio Express, based on the company’s XNA Studio platform. And, like Microsoft’s Visual Studio Express is aiming to democratize application development by putting development tools into the hands of novice and hobbyist programmers, Microsoft officials hope XNA Game Studio Express will democratize game development by delivering the necessary tools to hobbyists, students, independent developers and studios to help them more readily create games for the Xbox 360.

What started as an amusing eBay listing of an Excel vulnerability for sale has developed into an all-out hacker assault on Microsoft Office applications. Security researchers and malicious hackers have zeroed in on the desktop productivity suite, using specialized "fuzzing" tools to find a wide range of critical vulnerabilities in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint file formats. The upsurge in reported Office flaws has put Microsoft on high alert for targeted zero-day attacks that have all the characteristics of characteristics of corporate espionage–highly targeted and using Trojan horse programs to drop keyloggers and data theft malware programs, according to information from anti-virus vendor Symantec.

The first wave of malicious attacks against the MS06-040 vulnerability is underway, using malware that hijacks unpatched Windows machines for use in IRC-controlled botnets. The attacks, which started late Aug. 12, use a variant of a backdoor Trojan that installs itself on a system, modifies security settings, connects to a remote IRC server and starts listening for commands from a remote hacker, according to early warnings from anti-virus vendors.

Helped by low pricing, Microsoft’s Windows Live OneCare landed the No. 2 spot in sales at American stores in its debut month, according to The NPD Group. The antivirus and PC care package nabbed 15.4 percent of security suite sales at retailers such as Best Buy and Amazon.com, according to NPD’s data. The average price was $29.67, well below Microsoft’s list price of $49.95. Online at Amazon.com, OneCare is available for only $19.99.

Microsoft likes to brag that it eats its own dog food. For the past two years, though, the company has been trying to figure out how its secret formula tastes outside its home turf of Redmond. The software maker is known for being the earliest adopter of its own software, often deploying its beta products through large swaths of its operations. However, it realized a couple years back that its own perspective might not be representative. So Microsoft made the decision to take over desktop management duties for a handful of companies.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration is only restricting liquids and gels on all flights originating in the United States, a spokesperson told eWEEK Aug. 10. But that doesn’t mean you can take electronic devices on all flights as carry-on luggage. As a result of the change in the terrorist threat level to Code Red, or Severe, on flights to the United States from the United Kingdom, significant restrictions exist on those flights, including, in some cases, elimination of all electronics of any kind from carry-on luggage. In a statement released early in the morning on Aug. 10, British Airways said it will not allow electronics of any kind in carry-on luggage on its flights. This includes, according to the statement, iPods, laptop computers, cell phones, BlackBerrys, and even electronic car keys and key fobs.