After the 9/11 disaster of 2001, the United States government took steps to protect American citizens and curb terrorism and terrorists in the country. One way was to enact the controversial USA Patriot Act. Like many laws, the Patriot Act has its detractors and supporters. But what exactly is the Patriot Act and, for the purposes of this article, how does it affect records management?

Read this OutlookPower article.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was forced to take cover behind a lectern Monday during an address at Corvinus University of Budapest after a student began shouting and tossing eggs. Ballmer was not hit, but the attack was caught on video by one attendee.

After dodging the eggs, Ballmer shrugs, smiles and quips, "It was a friendly disruption" and the auditorium breaks into laughter. Ballmer then rubs his chin and says, "That broke my train of thought." The attacker, wearing a shirt with "Microsoft = Corruption" written on the back in big block letters, stood at his seat just seconds after Ballmer opened his talk. The verbal assault on the Microsoft chief lasts about 10 seconds.

Customers using Microsoft’s SharePoint enterprise portal can now get deployment help if they subscribe to the Software Assurance program.

SharePoint Deployment Planning Services is modeled after a desktop planning service that the Microsoft Office team offers, said Kathleen Timiney, director, SharePoint Partners at Microsoft. The company has been conducting a pilot of the program but is launching its worldwide availability now.

The groundbreaking move by federal authorities to indict a Missouri mother on charges connected to the suicide of a 13-year-old MySpace user has sent a strong message to the online world: Internet impostors may be prosecuted. "The Internet is a world unto itself. People must know how far they can go before they must stop," FBI official Salvador Hernandez said Thursday as prosecutors unveiled a case that employs laws usually used against hackers to go after the alleged perpetrator of a false-identity hoax.

Lori Drew, 49, of suburban St. Louis, Missouri, was charged with conspiracy and fraudulently gaining access to someone else’s computer. She allegedly helped create a MySpace account in the name of someone who didn’t exist to convince young neighbor Megan Meier she was chatting with a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans. Megan hanged herself at home in October 2006, allegedly after receiving a dozen or more cruel messages, including one stating the world would be better off without her.

Just two weeks after breaking off merger talks, Microsoft and Yahoo have been pulled back to the bargaining table by their fears about what might happen if they don’t work out a deal. For now, Microsoft and Yahoo are still dancing around the edges as they explore possible business arrangements without melding the two companies.

The notion of a half-baked deal didn’t excite investors Monday as they got their first chance to react to Sunday’s news that Microsoft and Yahoo are talking again.

Help is on its way for users affected by the Windows XP Service Pack 3 endless-reboot problem that has plagued some users for the past week-plus. Both Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard are readying patches that should remedy the glitch, which seems to affect primarily users of AMD-based systems.

Microsoft blamed OEMs who improperly placed a Windows XP image created for Intel-based machine on non-Intel-based systems. HP is advising users running XP on AMD-based systems to delay deploying SP3 until the company releases a patch, which sounds like it is due out this week or next at the latest.

The claim that Vista is less secure than Windows 2000 was made last week by security vendor PC Tools, which said that over the past six months Vista had suffered 639 unique threats, whereas Windows 2000 has suffered 586. PC Tools’s research was conducted by collecting data from customers using its ThreatFire behavioral detection software.

However, Microsoft strongly hit back at the claims, blaming users for executing malicious code on their machines. On Tuesday, Technet blogger and Microsoft evangelist Michael Kleef said the number of infections found by PC Tools was an indication of poor user behavior.

The popular online hangout MySpace has won a $230 million judgment over junk messages sent to its members in what is believed to be the largest anti-spam award ever. A federal judge in Los Angeles, California, ruled against a notorious "Spam King," Sanford Wallace, and his partner, Walter Rines, after the two failed to show up at a court hearing, MySpace told The Associated Press.

Wallace earned the monikers "Spam King" and "Spamford" as head of a company that sent as many as 30 million junk emails a day in the 1990s. He left that company, Cyber Promotions, following lawsuits from leading Internet service providers such as Time Warner’s AOL, only to re-emerge in a spyware case that led to a $4 million federal judgment against him in 2006.

With much fanfare, Microsoft released a beta of Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 that offers a number of customer-driven features.

S. Somasegar, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Division, said in a blog that the service pack beta "enables an improved developer experience by adding a number of additional components that cover a range of highly requested customer features. For example, the service pack is the first release for Visual Studio 2008 that delivers full support for SQL Server 2008 and the ADO.Net Entity Framework."

Microsoft’s participation in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative has been fraught with mystery and disinformation from the get-go. But on May 15, Microsoft officials finally gave the OLPC project Redmond’s official blessing.

Up to this point, OLPC Chief Nicholas Negroponte preannounced Microsoft’s every move on the OLPC front. But on May 15, Microsoft and the OLPC announced in tandem that Microsoft is"joining" the OLPC project.

Yet again, exactly what this means is a bit murky. Microsoft has been testing for months now whether it could get XP to run on OLPC XO laptops. Seemingly, according to a new blog entry by James Utzschneider, Manager of Microsoft’s General Manager, Marketing and Communications, Unlimited Potential Group, the tests were successful. But now it sounds like there are going to be more tests.