Users are again upping the ante on "piracy". Users who had modified their Xbox 360s, only to find themselves locked out, are working on a "fix" for the ban.

The Server Message Block (SMB) protocol in Win7 wasn’t included in the patches released Tuesday, leading at least one researcher to question if Microsoft’s Secure Development Lifecycle process even exists.

Microsoft Office Live’s new on-line customer support community will be the subject of an hour-long webinar on November 17. The webinar is expected to be a case study of this on-line customer support operational model.

Bing is expected to begin using the Wolfram Alpha web service to return answers to queries instead of returning web links.

People who hacked their Xbox 360 consoles to play pirated games are now finding themselves locked out of the service. Microsoft says playing pirated discs violates the "terms of use" on the system and voids the warranty.

Patch Tuesday did not address a vulnerability in Win7 and Server 2008 R2 which can crash the kernel. Microsoft says it’s investigating the bug.

Sonasoft Inc. has announced SonaRAMBO, an integrated replication, archiving, migration and backup suite aimed at small and medium sized businesses.

The Bing search engine has a cash-back promotion to entice users and merchants. But, there seems to be a problem in the code, making it easy to exploit. So far, Microsoft’s response has been to try and silence the user who discovered the potential problem.

MessageSolution, Inc. has released MessageSolution Enterprise Archive 6.0 which will be available in multiple editions, including an on-site software edition, a Software as a Service (SaaS), and an OEM Multi-Tenancy SaaS edition for Exchange and email server hosting and data centers.

Microsoft has shown some reluctance to support low-end netbooks. The Windows 7 Starter version of the OS lacks many features common in the "full" version of Win7 or even in WinXP and an "upgrade" to the OS will cost you an extra $80.