Microsoft plans to forgo its regular monthly patch release next Tuesday, after having taken the more unusual step of issuing a dozen updates in last month’s release. System administrators may appreciate the reprieve, after facing a broad swath of updates last month, eight of which were rated "critical," the company’s highest severity rating. Critical updates included fixes for vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Office XP, Internet Explorer 6 and MSN Messenger.

Click fraud is a reality of the pay-for-performance search industry, an estimated $4 billion to $5 billion market this year. Search has turned online advertising into a cash cow for businesses such as Google and Yahoo because of its efficiency at bringing customers and products together at the point of interest. But where there’s profit, there’s often pilfering. Fraudsters take advantage of the fact that marketers must pay a fee to the search engine with each click of a sponsored link.

A new proposal in Congress would offer a new tax break to companies and individuals if they recycle old computers or monitors. Companies would receive a tax credit of $8 per piece of hardware, as long as they recycled at least 5,000 screens or computers a year. Individuals would receive $15 tax credits.

Microsoft is aiming to have its first cluster version of Windows ready in time for a supercomputing conference this fall. Software Architect Marvin Theimer said on Thursday the company hopes to have a beta by this summer, with the final version of Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition ready by the SC2005 supercomputing conference in November. The company has not announced final pricing for the operating system, but Theimer said the additional computers, or nodes, of a cluster will be priced at a discount.

An email security scanning company has accidentally deleted thousands of its customers’ emails. GFI, a Microsoft "gold certified partner", is offering free upgrades to all its customers after it trashed their emails by sending out incorrect update information. When the GFI MailSecurity update mechanism tried to install BitDefender updates on customer networks, the service started to delete all emails by default. BitDefender and GFI then rolled back the updates.

Microsoft has extended its antipiracy olive branch to China, offering users of bootleg copies of Windows a 50 percent discount on a legitimate version if they come clean on how they got their pirated copy. To qualify for this offer, users with unlicensed copies of Windows installed on their machines need to complete an online form in which they disclose how they obtained the bogus software.

MSN Music has teamed up with MediaBay to sell radio classics on its Web site. More than 1,400 radio programs in different genres–classic dramas, mysteries, detective stories, comedies, westerns, science fiction and adventure stories–from the 1930s to the 1960s will be available in the United States.

You Software introduced You Perform: Save Attachments, a new add-in for Microsoft Outlook that helps users and IT professionals cut through email overload by automatically filing attachments in user defined folders as soon as they arrive in an inbox. You Perform: Save Attachments can be fine tuned to meet a wide variety of workflows and use patterns. For simplicity, all attachments can be saved automatically to a single user assigned folder. For more advanced control, You Perform: Save Attachments can be configured to only save attachments when a set of user-defined criteria is met.

Netscape has released a public test version of a Web browser that includes anti-fraud technology, with hopes of challenging Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser dominance. The company, a division of media giant Time Warner’s America Online subsidiary, said Thursday that the browser, dubbed Netscape 8, will better protect people from growing online fraud threats such as phishing.

The W32/Kelvir-A worm is spreading, leveraging MSN and Windows Messenger clients to distribute malicious messages, according to a warning issued by instant messenger software provider IMlogic. The worm is intended to convince users to download a fictitious update to prevent infection from W32.Bropia.C, and will encourage users to download a file named patch.exe. Once executed, this worm will send messages via MSN and Windows Messenger to all of an infected user’s contacts.