Microsoft pledged on Wednesday that all of its future operating systems, including Windows Vista, will abide by self-imposed rules aimed at bolstering choice and competition. The voluntary principles will come into play after major parts of a U.S. government decree related to the landmark U.S. antitrust case against the software maker expire next year, said Brad Smith, general counsel at Microsoft. They focus on the freedoms that users, manufacturers and developers can expect in Windows Vista and its successors.

Many people see Web journals, or blogs, as alternatives to the mainstream media, but most Americans who run them do so as a hobby rather than a vocation, according to a report released on Wednesday. About 77 percent of blog authors, or bloggers, said they post to express themselves creatively rather to get noticed or paid, according to the report, released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The report also found that 37 percent of bloggers cited their life and experiences as their primary topics, while politics and government came in second at 11 percent.

After two difficult financial quarters, Intel ramatically revamped its upper management, CNET News.com has learned. Sales and marketing in particular has been shaken up, sources familiar with the changes said. The two previous co-general managers, Anand Chandrasekher and Eric Kim, have been moved to lead different divisions, while Sean Maloney is the sole new leader. Intel declined to comment for this story. However, employees were told Wednesday and a news announcement is expected Thursday.

A new report from Symantec security researchers contends that Microsoft’s much-awaited Vista operating system could harbor a range of vulnerabilities that will make it less secure than previous iterations of Windows. According to research published July 18 by Symantec, a number of Vista’s software components, specifically a handful of protocols related to its redesigned networking technologies, could become security loopholes if Microsoft does not fix the problems or ensure that the product is configured appropriately to hide the glitches when it is shipped.

Microsoft’s announcement that it has formed a strategic partnership with Nortel Networks to jointly develop and sell Internet-based telephony and communications services is a clear indication the software powerhouse plans to go toe-to-toe with Cisco Systems, the leader in corporate communications. The 900-pound gorillas of their respective markets, Cisco and Microsoft are increasingly crossing paths as they venture into new sectors such as Internet Protocol communications.

A worm is targeting MySpace users, compromising their "About me" pages and infecting visitors to them, Symantec has warned. When a logged-in MySpace user goes to another member’s "About me" page affected by the ACTS.Spaceflash worm, they are quietly redirected to a URL that holds a malicious Macromedia Flash file, the security company said in an advisory on Spaceflash Tuesday. That file, in turn, will replace the visitor’s own "About me" page with one that is compromised.

Microsoft said it has bought Winternals Software, a small maker of Windows utility programs, in a deal that the software maker hopes will add key technical talent to its operating system development team. Terms of the deal to acquire the Austin, Texas-based company were not announced. Among the software that Winternals offers is a set of freely downloadable tools known as Sysinternals. As part of the deal, the software maker is naming Winternals co-founder Mark Russinovich as a technical fellow.

There can be enormous advantages for a company to build a product for Linux while also partnering with Microsoft, but there are also huge development challenges associated with working on two such different platforms. Oregon-based PolyServe is a company that did just that with its commercial Matrix Server clustering technology, which powers its Database Utility and File Serving Utility solutions. Michael Callahan, the chief technology officer at PolyServe, told eWEEK in an interview at the annual Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference that the company, which was started in 2000, had decided to develop Matrix Server for the Linux platform. This is the last in a series of articles that examines Microsoft’s strategy of gaining market share and driving new solutions to market through its partner base.

In spite of the vague public wording around its Windows Vista and Office 2007 release plans, Microsoft is continuing to tell its hardware and software partners that its goal is to release the two products simultaneously in January. In March, Microsoft announced publicly that it would not meet internal deadlines that would allow it to launch Vista and Office 2007 before the end of 2006, as the company had been planning. Then, in late June, Microsoft officials acknowledged that the company’s internal Office 2007 release dates had slipped and instead of delivering the product to businesses in October, it would commit to doing so by the end of calendar 2006.

After years of hoping to crush Linux, Microsoft is trying to show it can get along with its open-source rival. The software maker is announcing a partnership Monday night that will make sure its next virtualization technology can run versions of Linux that have been adapted for a different, open-source virtualization foundation called Xen. It is linking up with commercial software maker XenSource to offer joint development and support for the two technologies, which take a similar approach.