WinInsider

The U.S. government has reached a settlement with Microsoft over complaints that the company's Passport authentication service poses a threat to consumers' privacy and security. As part of the settlement, Microsoft agreed to implement a comprehensive information security program for Passport and similar services, the Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday. The proposed consent order prohibits any misrepresentation of information practices in connection with Passport. It requires the software maker to operate and maintain a comprehensive information security program.

Slated for an end-of-year release, Microsoft Windows .NET Server is nearly finished. This release candidate shows off a new focus on ease of administration and plenty of improvements for better performance and security, plus, of course, support for .NET. We tested the new Enterprise version, upgrading a system running Windows 2000 Server. Because our server was a primary domain controller, we first upgraded our Active Directory schema with the included ADPrep utility. The setup wizard looks and feels very much like Windows XP, and the upgrade, which took about 45 minutes, was effortless.

The interface in the final versions of Windows .NET Server-Standard and Enterprise-resembles that of XP and uses the Classic theme. There's an XP-like taskbar to navigate to programs. As with XP, users must activate their copy of the OS within 14 days.

Version 1.5 was released on August 8. Microsoft Portrait supports .NET Messenger Service, Session Initiation Protocol and Internet Locator Service on PCs, Pocket PCs and Handheld PCs.

Microsoft Portrait is a research prototype for mobile video conferencing. It supports .NET Messenger Service, Session Initiation Protocol and Internet Locator Service on PCs, Pocket PCs and Handheld PCs. It runs on local area networks, dialup networks and even wireless networks with bandwidths as low as 9.6 kilobits/second. Microsoft Portrait delivers portrait-like video if users are in low bandwidths and displays full-color video if users are in broadband. In low bandwidths, portrait video possesses clearer shape, smoother motion, shorter latency and much cheaper computational cost than do conventional video technologies. Microsoft Portrait provides basic presence notification, chat/voice/video functions almost anytime, anywhere, on any device.

Microsoft has issued its second service pack for the .NET Framework, which the company recommends all users download and install. The .NET Framework Service Pack 2 (SP2) release focuses on security issues and other problems found since the release of SP1; this release also includes all of the fixes from .NET Framework SP1.

As described the Microsoft, the .NET Framework is a programming model that enables developers to build Web-based applications, smart client applications, and XML Web services applications which expose their functionality programmatically over a network using standard protocols such as SOAP and HTTP. The company says the SP2 release is aimed at several customer groups, including developers who are creating .NET-based application and services, owners of Visual Studio .NET, administrators who wish to deploy the update throughout an organization or development team, and end users who might want to take advantage of .NET applications and services.

Microsoft Corp. is poised to provide new tools to join multiple implementations of Active Directory, but the company still strongly recommends against the practice because it can create unnecessary and problematic complexity. The mixed message has network executives scratching their heads as they try to reconcile the need to build directories that recognize organizational security boundaries with this cautionary advice from Microsoft. The confusion is coming to the forefront as Microsoft is introducing a feature with Windows.Net Server - due for release by year-end - that supports complex deployments of Active Directory.

Last week, Microsoft announced some long-awaited, much-anticipated details about its new Microsoft Customer Relationship Management application. Microsoft Customer Relationship Management is built on Microsoft .Net technology. Microsoft has been demonstrating the product for some time, and the demos are dazzling. Making effective use of Web services and tightly integrated to Microsoft Outlook, the application allows users to access information with a browser or to create e-mails using MSCRM information.

It is also an amazing demonstration of the .Net Smart Tag technology that allows users to seamlessly incorporate structured and unstructured information, or information from multiple systems, easily into a single document. The demonstration makes the creation of Requests For Quotes, dunning letters, purchase orders, and other common business documents look simple, and underscores just how much of a kluge existing methods really are.

The recent revelations of distress at AOL Time Warner only underscore the frustrating truth still defining this enigma: Since its blockbuster merger two years ago, this combined company continues to be one heck of a property--but one severely burdened by the absence of any clearly articulated future. How's that for a contradiction in terms? But the contradiction sums up a lot about AOL these days.

Dozens of "experts" are now busy sifting through AOL's garbage trying to uncover additional damning evidence to explain why one of Wall Street's former darlings has fallen from grace. Many are gleefully pointing fingers of blame at the various departed or diminished leaders they once deified. They are wasting their time and soon, no doubt, ours with shrill histrionics, belittling and bemoaning facts that can't be changed.

Banias, Intel's energy-efficient processor designed primarily for notebooks, will debut at three speeds when it arrives next year. Banias, which is due in the first quarter of 2003, will come out at 1.4GHz, 1.5GHz and 1.6GHz, according to sources close to the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company. The chip will initially be targeted at "thin and light" notebooks and eventually be incorporated into all types of notebooks, into blade servers and likely even into small desktops. A 1.3GHz version may also come out.

Like Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon and other competing chips, Banias' performance will actually be better than its numbers might indicate because it will complete more work per clock cycle than the Pentium 4, according to Intel and other sources.

"It will have higher performance and consume less power than today's Intel mobile processors," said an Intel spokeswoman who declined to comment on the chip speeds. Notebooks using the chip will consume roughly 25 percent less energy, company executives have said, thus increasing battery life. Whole subsections of the chip will shut down when not in use to conserve battery power. Banias notebooks will also come with integrated 802.11 wireless connectivity.

Security hole in the XDR (External Data Representation) Library provided to a number of vendors by Sun Microsystems could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on an affected system or cause a denial of service, according to an advisory released Tuesday by the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC). The flaw also affects the widely used Kerberos authentication software that allows users to securely log on to remote systems.

The vulnerability exists in XDR libraries derived from SunRPC (remote procedure call) used in products from Sun, as well as from Apple Computer Inc., IBM Corp. and a number of Linux and Unix distributions, CERT/CC said. These products include those that use the Sun network service library (libnsl), the BSD-derived XDR/RPC routines (libc) and the GNU C library with sunrpc (glibc), CERT/CC said.

Microsoft has welcomed the noise surrounding the announcement of its Palladium initiative -- a planned security-oriented overhaul of how hardware and software interact with each other. But will the Palladium PC of the future truly protect data and give the user control? While some analysts seem skeptical about Microsoft's ability to wed the Windows operating system to its Palladium security and privacy initiative -- part of which is based on a new security chip capable of cryptography and other defense measures -- they said the company is one of the only technology players capable of pulling it off.