Having received an invitation to join a group of companies working to improve the AJAX development experience, Microsoft is mulling over how it might work with the collaboration of companies known as the OpenAJAX initiative. In an interview with eWEEK on May 11, Brian Goldfarb, lead product manager for Web Platform and Tools at Microsoft, said the software giant is open to having a dialogue with the group of companies pursuing an open-standards approach to AJAX.

Researchers from Microsoft’s anti-malware engineering team are working on an automated way to sort through the thousands of malware families and variants attacking Windows computers. The company unveiled its plans at the EICAR (European Institute for Computer Anti-Virus Research) conference in Hamburg, Germany, proposing the use of distance measure and machine learning technologies to come up with automatic classification of viruses, Trojans, spyware, rootkits and other malicious software programs.

Alternative business models, like that of Linux and open source and Google’s advertising model, pose the greatest competitive challenge to Microsoft, CEO Steve Ballmer said May 11. Addressing an audience of several hundred members at an event jointly hosted here by the Churchill Club and the Commonwealth Club, Ballmer said the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant faces many competitors across the many different parts of its business. But there are two big phenomena going on: the new open-source and advertising business models.

A teenager faces a retrial over charges that he breached British antihacking laws when he sent millions of messages to a former employer. David Lennon, who is now 18 and can therefore be named for the first time, is alleged to have used an email-bombing program called Avalanche to send approximately 5 million messages to his former employer, Domestic & General Group, in early 2004. The flood crashed the company’s email server. The case against him, brought under the Computer Misuse Act, was dismissed in November by District Judge Kenneth Grant at Wimbledon Magistrates Court in London. But on Thursday, judges at the Royal Courts of Justice in London sent the case back to the Magistrates Court, saying Grant "was not right to state there was no case to answer."

President Bush said Thursday the government is "not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans" with a reported program to create a massive database of U.S. phone calls. "The privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities," Bush said in a statement he read to reporters at the White House. "Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda and their known affiliates." Bush’s comments followed a USA Today report Thursday that telecommunications giants AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon have provided the National Security Agency with billions of records of domestic phone calls beginning shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Democratic and Republican politicians on Thursday both promised to enact new federal laws by the end of the year that would restrict some commercial uses of Social Security numbers, which are often implicated in identity fraud cases. In both the House and the Senate, there are at least three pieces of pending legislation that propose different approaches to restricting the use and sale of SSNs. Politicians have expressed astonishment at what they see as a rising identity fraud problem, frequently pointing to a 2003 Federal Trade Commission survey that estimated nearly 10 million consumers are hit by such intrusions each year.

Data thieves may have plundered Social Security numbers and other private information–including health records–belonging to students and faculty at Ohio University following three separate computer intrusions at the school. According to a message posted on the school’s Web site, more than 200,000 people may have been victimized, including past and present students as well as school employees. Administrators also suggested that more thefts may be uncovered as investigators continue to review computer systems campuswide.

ContextPlus, an adware company implicated in a large number of stealth rootkit infections, has stopped distributing its software, citing concerns over the practices of some distribution partners. In a brief note posted on its home page, ContextPlus said it is "no longer able to ensure the highest standards of quality and customer care" and will stop further distribution of the "one-to-one desktop marketing" software. The ContextPlus shutdown comes on the heels of several major lawsuits against adware vendors and a class-action lawsuit that accuses Yahoo of partnering with spyware purveyors to perpetrate syndication fraud against online advertisers.

Google executives downplayed their legendary battle with Microsoft but said they were keeping an eye on their larger rival’s plans for embedding Web search functionality into Vista, its delayed next-generation operating system. Asked during an executive question-and-answer session at Google Press Day about the company’s concerns about Vista, co-founder Sergey Brin said Wednesday that Microsoft had behaved anti-competitively in the past when the Netscape browser was giving Internet Explorer stiff competition in the mid-1990s.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates visited the world’s largest video game expo on Tuesday to sell a new vision of "anywhere" gaming that would link video game consoles, cellphones and computers. Gates introduced a plan called "Live Anywhere" that aims to capitalize on the success of Xbox Live online play to tap into a network of over 150 million users already playing games on computers that run the Windows operating system and more than one billion cell phones ready to play video games.