Microsoft has changed how it reacts to government calls to censor blogs. Recently the software giant faced criticism for removing the blog of Chinese journalist Zhao Jing for writing about sensitive topics. Now Microsoft says blogs or journals blocked inside one nation would remain readable outside that country. The news comes as many hi-tech firms face criticism for their willingness to comply with local laws that limit what people can find and say online.

Microsoft late Feb. 7 issued two separate advisories with pre-patch workarounds for a privilege escalation vulnerability in Windows and a new code execution hole in older versions of the Internet Explorer browser. The IE flaw could allow an attacker to use a rigged WMF (Windows Metafile) image to take complete control of an affected Windows machine, but Microsoft says the issue only affects IE 5.0 on Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 and IE 5.5 on Windows Millennium. The Redmond, Wash., company made it clear that the WMF issue is different from the vulnerability addressed the MS06-001 bulletin released earlier this year to thwart a series of zero-day attacks.

While Microsoft has not yet jumped full-fledged onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon, the company is clearly taking a good look and kicking the tires. John deVadoss, director, architecture strategy at Microsoft, said that although Microsoft has not effectively adopted Web 2.0 as a primary focus, "there is something fundamentally happening… and if Web 2.0 is one end, then SOA is the other." deVadoss said Microsoft sees Web 2.0 and SOA as two edges of the same issue, with Web 2.0 supporting consumers and SOA supporting enterprises.

Net Applications, a provider of Web-based applications that measure, monitor and market Web sites for Small to Medium Enterprises, announced its monthly Web site browser usage statistics for January 2006. In a striking turn of events, January 2006 browser usage market share numbers reported by HitsLink showed IE halting, at least temporarily, its gradual slide during 2005. As a matter of fact, IE regained some of its lost share, going from 85.05% in December 2005 to 85.31% in January 2006. Amazingly, the small gain came at the expense of each of the other major browsers. Even Firefox and Apple Safari had small dips in their usage percentage.

Microsoft’s security response team is investigating reports of a remotely exploitable buffer overflow in HTML Help Workshop, the standard help system for the Windows platform. The software vendor’s investigation follows the public release of a proof-of-concept exploit for the flaw, which is caused by a boundary error within the handling of a ".hhp" file. Security alerts aggregator Secunia, based in Copenhagen, Denmark, rated the issue as "moderately critical" and warned that a successful attack could cause harmful code to be executed when a malicious .hhp file is opened.

America Online’s plan to start charging businesses to send commercial email messages is creating an uproar among some marketers, a newspaper reported Monday. Some marketers argue AOL’s plan to implement a certified email system, which could charge advertisers $2 to $3 per 1,000 messages, is a form of email taxation. Last October, AOL and Yahoo! both agreed to deploy a certified email system designed by technology firm Goodmail Systems. AOL is testing the program and plans to implement it within the next month or two.

2X has released 2X LoadBalancer for Windows Terminal Services & Citrix Metaframe: a tool to load balance RDP/ICA sessions between Terminal Servers and provide fault tolerance. Only one gateway machine needs to be exposed to the Internet, and in addition this connection can be established via SSL–thereby drastically increasing the security of Terminal Servers.

uCertify, providers of IT certification exam preparation tools, announced that its present Holiday Discount Offer will end on February 15, 2006. The company currently offers up to 70% discount on the entire range of its Practice Tests and Collections for the certification exams of Microsoft, CompTIA, Oracle, Sun and other leading IT vendors. This is the last chance to order the Practice Tests and Collections and save money, because the prices will go up after 15th of February 2006.

What AOL and Yahoo are now doing is selling your inbox to the highest bidders. Those that are willing to pay to gain access to your inbox are suddenly "trusted" while those who don’t pay the tax aren’t. To read all about this new surge in digital racketeering, read this very important article.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Opera Software on Tuesday plans to release a second preview version of Opera 9, the next version of its namesake Web browser. For the first time, the new version will include support for so-called widgets, Opera representative Thomas Ford said. Widgets are essentially small browser windows that display information taken from the Internet on a user’s desktop. The notion is similar in concept to the widget idea that Apple Computer uses in the Dashboard feature of Mac OS X.