Jun
21
Image via Wikipedia
Are you an Outlook user? Have you received a message telling you that your account needs to be reconfigured, and requesting that you enter your username and password?
Here’s an email message that we have seen sent out to internet users:
Jun
9
Original post on Sophos. Author – Chester Wisniewski
We are seeing the criminals behind fake anti-virus continuing to customize their social engineering attacks to be more believable to users and presumably more successful.
Last week I wrote about fake Firefox malware warnings leading users to rogue security software. This week they’ve started to imitate Microsoft Update.
The page is nearly an exact replica of the real Microsoft Update page with one major exception… It only comes up when surfing from Firefox on Windows. The real Microsoft Update requires Internet Explorer.
The same site was also hosting the traditional Windows XP explorer scanner we have seen for years, as well as a new Windows 7 scanner.
Similar to spam messages that have corrected their grammar and use correct imagery and CSS, the attackers selling fake anti-virus are getting more professional.
They use high quality graphics and are using information from our UserAgent strings that are sent by the browser to customize your malware experience.
Just like visiting your bank you should only trust security alerts in your browser if you initiated a check with Microsoft, Adobe, Sophos or any other vendor for updates to their software.
May
24
Social Search a feature provided by Google combines regular search results with publicly available data of friends- friends would generally mean Google contacts, Google talk and other networks from Google account. 
This feature was recently subjected to lot of controversy when Facebook a stiff competitor used a PR firm to release negative stories about Social Search to the press. Facebook claims that Google has been using Facebook data to run its service without Facebook’s permission.
Google has chosen to remain quiet on this issue and has mentioned only about Twitter in its blog post. Social Search shall be available in 19 more languages from next week, with more languages on the way. Google may probably not be allowed to enter facebook users communication as Facebook’s internal search engine Bing , from Microsoft, is the rival to Google search engine.
While the web is growing fast as a tool to search information about anything, Google will definitely grab its share from other companies. As Google is the search engine powerhouse and as people trust Google’s results this is definitely a smart move from Google’s perspective.
Source :- http://www.clickindia.com
May
23
Image via CrunchBase
Facebook has partnered with Microsoft to fight child pornography online.
The social network will implement Microsoft’s PhotoDNA technology, designed to identify and remove images that exploit or endanger children.
Developed for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, PhotoDNA creates a “blueprint” of an inappropriate or offensive image and can search through billions of other images to locate photos with similarly inappropriate features.
Microsoft currently uses PhotoDNA in Bing, Skydrive and Hotmail.
Bill Harmon, associate general counsel at the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, announced the partnership in a blog post. Writes Harmon,
Facebook’s bold step forward to become the first online service provider to join Microsoft in partnership with NCMEC on the PhotoDNA program sends a strong message: We will not tolerate the use of our services to victimize children in this way when we have the technology to do something about it. We hope that Facebook’s adoption of PhotoDNA serves as a springboard for other online service providers to take advantage of the opportunity available through NCMEC’s PhotoDNA program and, in fact, we know that others are exploring the possibility right now.
Facebook and Microsoft will hold a public event on Friday May 20 at 3 p.m. to discuss this effort. You can tune in via Facebook’s DC Live: Protecting Kids Online page.
Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com
May
20
Image via CrunchBase
Most people think about search as a simple series of actions: type in a phrase, cross your fingers it brings up what you need, and then click around a page of blue links till you get what you were looking for.
But Stefan Weitz, director of Microsoft‘s search engine Bing, says that we should expect more out of our search experience. He criticizes “traditional” search engines — namely, web giant Google, Bing’s main competitor — for failing to keep up with the changing needs of users by sticking with the the search model they’ve always used, which is based on an algorithm measuring the strength of backlinks.
“When Google launched, they wanted to organize the world’s information, that was their mantra — it still is,” Weitz said in an interview. “It was a great vision that assumed really the web of yore, which is a web of documents, literally pages and the connections. Google’s whole mission was to leverage those connections and say, ‘Okay, I can see that the connection between these two pages is almost as important as the page content itself in defining what these things are about’ — it was a brilliant, brilliant model.”
But what worked ten years ago doesn’t work as well anymore, Weitz said, noting that the amount of information available online today, and the range of activities people seek to do there, have made the simple search that currently exists less effective.
“Search itself hasn’t changed fundamentally in the past 12 years,” he said. “Traditional search is failing. The standard notion of search … looking at the texts in the page, the backlinks, all that stuff doesn’t work
anymore.”
Yet for all the flaws Weitz might find with Google, Bing offers a similar set of features, such as searches keyed to news, images, and maps, as well as the ability to calculate sums, define words, and check the weather. Moreover, Google has maintained its dominance in the search market. It claims 65 percent market share to Bing’s 14 percent — a dominant position that has attracted scrutiny from government regulators, who are investigating whether Google’s search dominance is anti-competitive. Microsoft, itself convicted of antitrust abuses, has supported regulators’ investigation of Google in Europe, and Weitz added that in his estimation, the government probe into Google’s activities is understandable, given Google’s power in the area.
“I think whenever you have a player who has, depending on who you’re looking at, two-thirds of the market, it’s natural for regulators to look into this,” he said. “In Germany they have 98 percent share. It’s natural for folks to just look into what’s going on there. This is a place that controls so many people’s livelihoods, you want to make sure its a level playing field.”
Google has started to include social results in its search in an attempt to make searches more relevant to users. Its new +1 feature lets users “like” results in search and see when friends and other users have “liked” that result as well. But Weitz said he didn’t think the feature was particularly useful.
“+1 today is only on search results,” he said. “I don’t really like search results very often. I like the sites, but I don’t like the result itself. I don’t know how helpful it is, frankly, to like the results.”
Bing is attempting to get a leg up on Google with its own take on social search results. The company recently unveiled a feature that pulls information from Facebook to show what sites, articles and other content Facebook friends have “liked.”
Bing’s approach to social data is to focus on delivering what it believes will characterize search in the future: An engine that anticipates a user’s needs and helps make decisions, finding the most relevant information without the user having to put in an undue amount of effort. But whether it will be able to distinguish itself from Google’s efforts to go social remains to be seen.
“Our mission is literally to deliver knowledge by understanding intent. What that implies is that we understand the web as this digital representation of the real world,” Weitz said. “We’ve now mapped almost every single square inch of the planet, we know where buildings are, we know who the people are, we know what tasks people are accomplishing — we are literally creating a semantic model, or a model, for everything in the world.”
Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com
May
10
Image via CrunchBase
After rumors that first Facebook and then Microsoft were in talks to acquire Skype, the latter announced that it has acquired the VoIP giant for $8.5 billion in cash.
Skype will be integrated into Microsoft devices and systems such as Xbox and Kinect, Xbox Live, the Windows Phone, Lync and Outlook, Microsoft said in a statement. The company has pledged to continue supporting and developing Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms as well.
The deal, which was spearheaded by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer with assistance from Charles Songhurst, the company’s head of corporate corporate strategy, was completed Monday evening, AllThingsD reported earlier.
The acquisition is an expensive one for Microsoft. Not only is it the largest price Microsoft has paid for a company in decades, Skype is not yet profitable. Despite revenues totaling $860 million last year and operating profits of $264 million, the company lost $6.9 million overall, according to documents filed with the SEC. And the company carries $686 million in debt.
Much of the company’s appeal rests in its largest user base of 663 million, 145 of which use Skype monthly (Update: Microsoft says Skype has 170 million regular users), and 8.8 million of which are paying customers.
There is one clear set of winners here: Skype’s investors. A group including Silver Lake, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board purchased the company from eBay for $2.75 billion in September 2009.
In August, Skype filed for an IPO but put plans on hold after Tony Bates joined the company as CEO in October. Bates will take on the title of president of the Microsoft Skype Division and report directly to Ballmer.
Source -: http://mashable.com
