With Carbon Grove, Microsoft is introducing the first Internet Explorer Beta 1 and IE7 "tree-hugging" exclusive website. The Redmond company, and specifically the Internet Explorer team, have sponsored the project built by the Jackson Fish Market, a web design company that was also involved in building Tafiti, bundling Live Search and Silverlight. The Jackson Fish Market built Carbon Grove using asp.net and Silverlight 2.0, putting together what they referred to as a carbon reduction reminder service.

"Climate change is a problem that affects everyone on our planet. As is often the case with problems of this magnitude, it’s hard to feel like one person can make a difference. In reality however, every little bit helps. Carbon Grove can help you make your small contribution to fixing things and hopefully also help you show others that you care," stated Miel Van Opstal, Enthusiast Evangelist Microsoft.

The Carbon Grove website is not only an initiative designed to lower the carbon footprint by enabling end users to plant virtual trees, but also to spread seeds from Microsoft. In this context, the website delivers an unique approach to environmental initiatives, one that leverages Silverlight and is accessible exclusively through Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 (at Beta 1 stage).

Visitors coming to the website via Firefox 3.0 or Opera 9.5, for example, receive the following message from The Carbon Grove Arborists: "We’re so sorry, but Carbon Grove is currently only available for Internet Explorer 7 or 8. We’re sorry for any inconvenience. We still would love for you to plant a tree in Carbon Grove. Internet Explorer 7 is a lovely browser. You may even already have it on your PC, or you can download it here."

Essentially, Carbon Grove is meant as a way for users to deliver their own positive impact on climate change. The website features a questionnaire, and guidelines for reducing the carbon footprint and contributing to the environment. At the same time, visitors that will sign up will have the opportunity to plant their own tree out of 9 different species and follow its growth. It can take up to 26 weeks for the tree to reach full size, by which time the end users need to take care of a list of commitments to lower the carbon footprint.

"The Internet Explorer team at Microsoft helped to launch this site. They were eager to create a special experience for their IE users as well as show one small piece of their commitment to the environment. Not only is Internet Explorer the exclusive way to take advantage of Carbon Grove, but Microsoft’s Silverlight technology has made browsing the three forests a breeze," Van Opstal added.

Source: news.softpedia.com

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Starting with April 23, 2008, Microsoft's e-government platform has been made available to customers around the world. The Citizen Service Platform, announced initially at the start of 2008, is designed to streamline the interaction between citizens and governmental organizations by enabling the delivery of traditional services over the Internet. In Microsoft's perspective, CSP will streamline scenarios involving the interaction between governments and citizens, by simplifying the process and delivering a reduction in the associated costs.

"The need for a platform like the CSP is clearly demonstrated by the response we’ve received from our partners. A common framework to build from allows partners to tailor their solutions to specific government needs and, after working with governments for the past several years on early versions of the CSP, it’s exciting to watch this community effort really start to pay dividends to both citizens and the governments that serve them," revealed Ralph Young, vice president for the Worldwide Public Sector at Microsoft.

The Citizen Service Platform act as an application framework, and it is even distributed with free templates set up to enable customer deployments of solutions created to address specific government issues. In this manner, the platform can be adapted to various markets around the world, with Microsoft placing a great deal of focus on client-side configuration and customization capabilities. The Redmond company is offering a total of eight free templates for download with the CSP. E-Councilor, Web TV template, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 templates, Local government communications template, Role-based My Site, Agenda Management template, Electronic form templates and the Microsoft Dynamics CRM templates for municipal governments are all the items available.

"E-government initiatives can be difficult to implement as resistance is generally high due to legacy and integration issues," said A. Kaare Nørgaard, CEO of Resultmaker A/S, the CSP partner on the implementation of Denmark’s sickness reimbursement program. "However, now the system is appreciated as the best example of e-government in practice, which simply demonstrates how installing a platform where parts already exist is half the battle, as is often the case with the CSP."

Source: news.softpedia.com

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Windows is without a doubt the most attacked platform worldwide, an inherent detail associated with its ubiquity. Because it is able to centralize data from such a vast pool of end users, Microsoft is capable of putting together perhaps the most comprehensive perspective over the threat environment involving everything from software vulnerabilities, to exploits, malicious code and potentially unwanted software. Infosecurity Europe 2008 was the stage where the Redmond company made available volume four of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report, using data gathered via the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool from in excess of 450 million Windows computers worldwide.

"The SIR provides us with a chance to share with our customers and industry partners what we’re seeing in the threat landscape so we can all help ensure users are better protected and work toward a more trusted Internet," explained Vinny Gullotto, general manager of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center. "This latest volume supports our position that today’s threats continue to be motivated by monetary gain, and it also gives us a solid view of vulnerability and exploit trends."

Microsoft found that in the second half of the past year, the volume of vulnerability disclosures dropped by approximately 5%. However, despite this aspect, the company revealed that 32.2% of public security vulnerabilities were targeted in the wild via publicly available exploit code.

"The trends observed in the second half of 2007 are consistent with the observed shift of malware away from an amateur phenomenon to a tool used by professional criminals and criminal organizations to generate revenue," Microsoft noted in the report.

The Redmond company added that the same tendency that affects the evolution of malicious code, also impacted spam. With over 90% of the emails sent between July and December 2007 being spam, there is an increased focus on malware spreading and phishing attempts.

"The data also reveals a 300 percent increase in the number of trojan downloaders and droppers — malicious code used to install files on users’ systems — illustrating that the malware category continues to grow in popularity among attackers. The report also shows a 66.7 percent increase in the number of potentially unwanted software detections — programs that may impact user privacy or security by performing actions the person may not want — between July 1 and Dec. 31, with a total of 129.5 million pieces of potentially unwanted software found on users’ systems," Microsoft stated.

Source: news.softpedia.com

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The VectorLinux team launched a LiveCD version of the DELUXE SOHO edition for their distribution. The VectorLinux SOHO 5.9 Preview LiveCD is offered for free so everyone can try the product – VectorLinux DELUXE SOHO – before buying it. The developers want to make sure that the upcoming DELUXE SOHO edition works on everyone's hardware.

The LiveCD brings you a secure 2.6.22.19 Linux kernel, with X.org 7.3 and the latest version of KDE from the 3.5 branch, KDE 3.5.9. If you need to create and/or edit documents, spreadsheets or presentations, you can do that with the help of OpenOffice 2.3.1.

Seamonkey 1.1.9, Firefox 2.0.0.13 and Opera are the three browsers available in this LiveCD. I think including more than one web browser is a good idea, taking into consideration the fact that users might have different tastes when it comes to this sort of applications.

VectorLinux SOHO 5.9 Preview sports a full range of multimedia programs, such as K3B for CD/DVD burning, Amarok and iPod support. You can use the LiveCD as a stand-alone operating system, without the need to install it on the hard drive. The advantage is that you have a portable full-fledged operating system that you can take wherever you like and do all the basic (maybe more than basic, though) tasks with it.

About VectorLinux:
VectorLinux is a Linux distro based on Slackware, which aims to provide speed, performance, stability and ease of use. It was started by Robert S. Lange and Darrell Stavem in 1998, with its first version launched in June 1999. Two front-ends were created for slapt-get, a package management solution used by VectorLinux. The first one was VL-APT, created by the Vector development team to have a GUI for package management, and the second was gslapt, created by the original developers of slapt-get with the same purpose. Recently, the VL-APT option has become obsolete, because of the changes in the slapt-get packaging format. The developers promoted gslapt as the viable package manager.


Source: news.softpedia.com

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This March, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 got its first taste of Mozilla's Firefox 3.0. The Redmond company made available the first development build of Internet Explorer 8, namely Beta 1 on March 5, 2008. IE8 Beta 1 was announced by Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer General Manager, during his keynote address at MIX08 in Las Vegas. A few days later, Mozilla dropped Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 and announced that it was steaming ahead for Beta 5, planned for early April. In this context, it was bound that IE8 and Firefox 3.0 would clash, they are after all both set on inbound courses against each other.

Net Applications made available the statistics for March 2008 for the browser market, and this is the first time that the install base of Internet Explorer 8 was noted. IE8 managed to grab in a single month 0.02%, despite being in Beta 1 stage and a release aimed exclusively at developers. But by the end of the past month, Firefox 3.0 had no less than 0.28% of the browser market. It is a small victory for the open source browser, generated by the gap between the public builds of Firefox 3.0 and IE8, but at the same time a prefiguration of the market's evolution once both products will be available.

Mozilla is now in the final stages of cooking of Firefox 3.0 Beta 5, and planning to release the browser by the end of June. Microsoft on the other hand is looking to drop IE8 Beta 2 by the summer of 2008, with the final availability date of the browser still unknown.

On the broader browser front however, Firefox has been gaining consistent ground and is eroding the dominance of Internet Explorer 8. Firefox 2.0 has grown all the way to 16.82%, while Mozilla is claiming a total share of 17.83% for the open source browser. Internet Explorer still has the lion's share of the market with a share of 74.80%, out of which IE6 is credited with 28.94%, while IE7 is up to 45.65%.


Source: news.softpedia.com

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Mozilla is moving ahead with the development of Firefox 3.0 toward the official release date planned for June 2008. The last evolution of the browser took it from Beta 4 to Beta 5, and in this manner marked the 13th developer milestone of the product, taking into consideration both the Alpha and the Beta stages. Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 went live on April 2, 2008, and is available for download here; and even though Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer stated that Firefox 3.0 was ready for prime time as of Beta 4, Beta 5 is still labeled as a developer preview designed for "testing purposes only."

According to Mozilla, Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 brings to the table not only new features but also consistent enhancements in terms of performance, memory usage and speed. "Firefox 3 Beta 5 includes more than 750 changes from the previous beta, improving stability and web compatibility, providing platform and user interface enhancements, and resulting in the fastest Firefox ever. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta," Mozilla revealed.

But even with the enhancements introduced in Firefox 3.0 Beta 5, Mozilla does not yet pass the Acid3 web standards test introduced in early March, ahead of Beta 4. Opera has managed to outperform both Firefox 3.0 and Internet Explorer 8 in this area. Microsoft released IE8 Beta 1 at the start of March and is planning to drop the second Beta by the summer of 2008. By that time Mozilla should have wrapped it up with the development of Firefox 3.0.

"New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include improvements to the user interface based on user feedback, including changes to the look and feel on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux. Changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and others, based on feedback from our community. Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security, web compatibility and stability. Continued performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization continues to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider test from Apple, and in the speed of web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office," Mozilla revealed.


Source: news.softpedia.com

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