Corporate users will increasingly combine traditional enterprise software with online capabilities to create composite applications, Bill Gates said Monday. In the keynote address at Convergence, the Microsoft chairman and chief software architect also shared his vision of a world of work in which "smart" tables will function as ad hoc screens for mobile devices.

A new telecommunications reform bill in the U.S. Congress would kill the Internet because it does not protect users against decisions by broadband providers to discriminate against some types of Internet traffic, consumer advocacy groups said. The draft bill, released late Monday by the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, would gut so-called Net neutrality rules prohibiting large broadband providers from blocking or slowing access to Web content and services from competitors, the advocates said. The House committee included net neutrality provisions in earlier drafts.

After four years at the helm of Microsoft’s security group, Mike Nash is taking a break. This June he will go on sabbatical after handing over responsibilities to his replacement, Ben Fathi. Nash led Microsoft’s Security Technology Unit during a period in which the security of Microsoft’s products was increasingly scrutinized following a number of worldwide worm attacks, including Slammer and MyDoom.

A Texas lawyer has lost a patent lawsuit over antipiracy technology embedded in Microsoft’s product activation program. The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has affirmed a district court’s decision, which said that Microsoft did not infringe on Kenneth Nash’s patent for detecting pirated software by assigning each program a unique ID and verifying it over the Internet.

Chairman Bill Gates said Monday that the line continues to blur between Office-like tools and programs that house businesses’ more formalized, or structured, data. Gates said that much of the work in Microsoft’s Business Solutions unit consists of helping workers more easily traverse the boundary with other software, as well as connect to Internet-based data. "We’re taking the best elements of the online world, where we are seeing mashups," he said. Mashups are hybrid software that combine content from more than source, such as real-time traffic reports and a map, and present them in a Web site.

Microsoft is for the first time encouraging people to give public feedback on Internet Explorer, with the creation of a bug database for the next version of its browser, the IE 7 beta. The company admitted that customers have often asked why it doesn’t have a public bug database, something that is standard practice for open-source projects such as Mozilla’s Firefox browser. The bug database is accessible from the Microsoft Connect site and can be accessed by anyone that has a Microsoft Passport account.

Microsoft has joined a committee that has a key role in the ratification of the OpenDocument format as an international standard. Microsoft asked to join the INCITS/V1 Technical Committee on March 15. This committee is responsible for reconciling the votes that are cast by the International Organization for Standardization over the acceptance of the OpenDocument format.

Belkin Routers now ship with ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite, offering greater protection from hackers, data thieves, and cyber-criminals. With identity theft running rampant and malicious attacks on the rise, this all-in-one Internet security solution blocks these and other emerging Internet threats, while helping to protect your privacy and guard your identity. The Routers are currently shipping in the US with the ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite, and they will be available in Europe and Australia in Summer 2006.

We get a lot of contact printing questions. In this OutlookPower Answer Team article, we answer a few of them.

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eEye Digital Security released a temporary fix for Internet Explorer to combat attacks that exploit a recently disclosed security hole in the browser. The unofficial fix blocks access to the vulnerable component in the Microsoft Web browser, preventing malicious Web sites from taking advantage of the vulnerability, said Steve Manzuik, security product manager at eEye in Aliso Viejo, Calif. Microsoft does not have a fix for the flaw available yet.