WinInsider

A computing project has abandoned its effort to crack the main security code for Microsoft's Xbox video game console. An update on the home page for The Neo Project says the group is no longer working on the Xbox "due to legal reasons." Project founder Mike Curry said in an e-mail interview that he couldn't elaborate. "We cannot comment on anything that has happened in the last 24 hours; we can only say that we can no longer participate in the Xbox challenge," he said.

Microsoft Corp. posted a downloadable Feature Pack 1 for ISA Server 2000 on Tuesday that pushes Microsoft's enterprise software firewall further up the security food chain into the role of application-layer filtering. Feature Pack 1 for Internet Security & Acceleration Server 2000 provides additional security features for Exchange and IIS servers and adds new wizards to make common scenarios easier to lock down.

"Hackers are bypassing traditional firewalls," said Zachary Gutt, technical product manager for ISA Server. "Today Port 80 is being used for many, many things other than Web browsing," Gutt said, listing Outlook Web Access and Web services as two such common, legitimate uses for the port. "ISA is really optimized for application-layer filtering."

Microsoft said on Tuesday demand for the online add-on to its game console system remained strong, with more than 250,000 "Xbox Live" kits sold in about two months. Xbox Live is an online gaming service launched in November, a key component in Microsoft's $2 billion strategy to make its video game console the center of a networked home entertainment system. In November, Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said some 150,000 of the $50 kits had sold after one week.

Microsoft announced Tuesday its first-ever licensing fees for use of its media delivery software on non-Windows technology, a move designed to expand its reach in the market for digital media players.

In the process, the company is positioning itself to capture a growing market in consumer electronics that is migrating to new digital media standards like MPEG-4, a standard for compressing large digital files into a smaller format that can be more easily transmitted over networks.

For use of the its video compression technology on non-Windows operating systems, Microsoft will charge 10 cents per decoder, 20 cents per encoder, or 25 cents for both. In comparison, MPEG-LA--a consortium of companies holding patents attached to MPEG-4--charges 25 cents per encoder and decoder, or 50 cents for both.

With another disappointing holiday season behind it, PC maker Gateway announced this week that it will perform a second major corporate restructuring in as many years and continue its attempts to return the company to profitability. Gateway co-founder Ted Waitt, who reassumed the CEO title again when the company began floundering two years ago, had originally scheduled this past holiday season as the turnaround point for the PC maker. And though sales did improve somewhat when compared with the previous year, net income nosedived yet again.

Microsoft will release updated versions of its Windows Media Player and Windows Movie Maker software over the next two days as part of an announcement that includes revised licensing terms for its Windows Media Audio 9 (WMA 9) and Windows Media Video 9 (WMV 9) technologies.

Windows Media Player 9 Series, which will be available for download on Jan. 7 from 12:00 p.m. PST, includes a Smart Jukebox feature that lets users manage a collection of up to 10,000 songs and speeds access to the audio and video library compared with previous versions of the software. It also can automatically create playlists and can update information about songs, including correct track, artist and album names, according to a Microsoft statement.

Microsoft has published a 20-page white paper that details how the company secured its portion of eWeek's OpenHack 4 test. The paper describes how encryption keys were stored securely, Internet Information Services configuration and hardening, what keys were modified in the Windows 2000 registry for additional security, and how the Microsoft SQL Server database machine was hardened. It also describes how the IP Security policies on the Microsoft servers were configured to allow remote management using a VPN.

Microsoft's Instant Messenger service went down early Monday, affecting up to 75 million people worldwide who sign on to the service to chat with friends and co-workers. The Redmond, Wash.-based software maker lost much of its power for six hours to the .Net Messenger Service, the backend component that runs all of its IM clients including Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger. Bob Visse, MSN's director of marketing, said that the source of the problem was as yet undetected, but the outage was "fairly widespread." "It's a worldwide outage, and most customers are affected," he said. "We're investigating it, but we do not know what the issue is."

Transmeta released six new processors for embedded systems such as point-of-sale terminals and industrial automation devices Monday, focusing on an energy-efficient design that alleviates the need for a cooling fan within the device.

Three different clock speeds will be available for the new Crusoe Special Embedded processors: 667MHz, 800MHz, and 933MHz, with standard-power and low-power models available at each speed, said Tom Lee, director of embedded business development for Transmeta. Transmeta's other processors for notebook computers and Tablet PCs are also known as Crusoes.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Microsoft Monday filed their opposition to an attempt by trade groups to intervene in the government's antitrust case against the software juggernaut, claiming that the groups fall short of the minimum requirements for intervention. The filings, submitted in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, come in response to a motion issued by the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) last month, seeking to intervene in the historic case. The settlement of the antitrust case reached by Microsoft, the DOJ, and nine of the suing states was approved in November by U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.