In its latest salvo against unwanted e-mail flooding customer mailboxes, Microsoft has filed lawsuits against eight more spammers. The company claims the spammers deceived customers and attempted to hide the source of the spam. Redmond is now pursuing over 80 lawsuits against spammers around the world. Last March, Microsoft joined forces with AOL, EarthLink and Yahoo! to sue hundreds of spammers under the new CAN-SPAM act.

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Corel has taken WordPerfect back to school. WordPerfect Office 12 Student and Teacher Edition offers the full WordPerfect package to educational and non-profit organizations at a low cost. Keeping in mind the impact technology fees have on institutions with finite resources, Corel has relaxed product licensing requirements.

Launched in April, WordPerfect 12 is not glaringly dissimilar from Microsoft Office. The suite includes all of the components enshrined in customers' expectations of productivity suites: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and contact management.

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TiVo subscribers received an unexpected treat Wednesday as the company announced the Home Media Option -- previously priced at $99 USD -- will become available as part of its standard offering. In addition, users with multiple TiVos will now only have to pay $6.95 USD per month for each recorder beyond the first. TiVo is also looking to deliver music and movies via the Internet, but has set no timetable on such additions.

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Editorial | Microsoft's recent demonstrations of WS-Federation and Liberty Alliance's responses show that their approaches to federated identity are very similar. In fact, as Digital Identity World editor Phil Becker comments: "It's a shame that the demos of WS-Federation being put forth don't really show why the protocol is different from Liberty Alliance in any significant way."

Mr. Becker goes on to explain the primary differentiation between them: "The battle shaping up between the WS-* protocol stack and the Liberty & SAML specifications is one primarily of a use-case driven specification vs. an architectural approach. One gets you out of the blocks fast to solve known problems (which is why you can buy SAML and Liberty-enabled software today.) The other intends to create a framework in which both known and as yet unknown problems can be solved to create a better, more flexible long term solution."

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Microsoft has issued to testers beta copies of Office Live Communications Server
2005. Formerly known by the code-name Vienna, LCS 2005 steps up Redmond's support for real-time communications with federated presence awareness between organizations, advanced user authentification and instant messaging capabilities. Beta testers may download the release via BetaPlace.

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Dear BetaNews Readers,

I would like to take this opportunity to extend a long-awaited welcome to the new BetaNews. We have come a long way since first launching on June 1, 1998, and the new Web site serves as fitting celebration for a sixth birthday.

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The Yukon wave of products has been pushed back and will not crest until next year. Microsoft has confirmed that two critical components on its future product roadmap, Whidbey and Yukon, have slipped into the 2005 timeframe.

The delay of Whidbey and Yukon will likely disrupt Redmond's closely tethered portfolio of products. As a result, Microsoft must now change tact and revise the release schedules of some of its principal product lines; giving credence to rumors that its upcoming Longhorn release of Windows may not meet its early 2006 target release date.

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In an effort to keep its customers secure following the recent Windows source code leaks, Microsoft has turned to the lessons it learned while taking a two month hiatus in early 2002 to clean house and eliminate insecure code from Windows.

While Redmond's Trustworthy Computing initiative -- which sparked the code review -- marked a watershed event in Microsoft's history, the underlying bits of Windows that leaked onto the Web late last week predate this effort, and underwent review by way of the more porous quality control measures that were in practice at the time.

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UPDATED Just two days after portions of the Windows 2000 Service Pack 1 source made its way onto the Internet, the first exploit to take advantage of bugs discovered in the now opened code has appeared on security mailing lists.

The vulnerability lies in Internet Explorer's handling of bitmap images. With a specially created bitmap, a remote user can cause a buffer overflow and execute arbitrary code on a target system. The author of the report, which was seemingly posted with malicious intent, indicates the flaw was uncovered when analyzing the file "imgbmp.cxx" within the Windows source code.

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EXCLUSIVE BetaNews has learned that Thursday's leak of the Windows 2000 source code originated not from Microsoft, but from long-time Redmond partner Mainsoft.

The leaked code includes 30,915 files and was apparently removed from a Linux computer used by Mainsoft for development purposes. Dated July 25, 2000, the source code represents Windows 2000 Service Pack 1.

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UPDATED Microsoft is currently investigating a potential severe security breach that has let loose onto the Internet source code for its Windows 2000 operating system. Portions of the code viewed by BetaNews contain a mix of library files, executables, text documents, scripts, and un-compiled code.

In addition, rumors have begun to circulate claiming that the source code to Windows NT4 has also gone astray.

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Hewlett-Packard has denied claims published in Paul Thurrott's WinInfo newsletter alleging that it intends to extend support of Microsoft's WMA audio format to the iPod portable music player.

HP recently stunned the IT world and announced this month at the at the Consumer Electronics Show its partnership with Apple to license iPod technology for HP branded products.

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In what has come to be almost tradition for BetaNews, we would like to take a moment to give thanks for the support we have received this past year from our software authors, downloaders and avid readers. 2003 was a defining year for BetaNews and we continue to grow by leaps and bounds each day thanks to you.

As 2004 draws near, we have much in store for BetaNews - including the oft-promised complete site overhaul. While we have long planned to launch the new BetaNews, the crucial pieces have finally fallen into place and we look forward to bringing you a vastly improved BetaNews experience.

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Subscribers of America Online may soon be free to choose their own preferred e-mail client, continuing a recent move by the company away from a single integrated client.

AOL is expanding an earlier beta test of a standalone dialer to include the capacity to use rich third party software to check member e-mail. The dialer is expected to ship as part of the forthcoming Tahiti upgrade to the AOL client, which is scheduled to ship early next year.

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America Online confirmed to BetaNews that it plans to launch the next version of its client software, code-named Tahiti, early next year.

Testers are reporting marked progress in the Tahiti beta test, which is currently ongoing.

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