Gotham City Impostors Release Date Delayed

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and DC Entertainment have recently confirmed that the launch of Gotham City Impostors has been changed to February 2012. As a reminder, this video game was originally due for release on January 10, 2012. Gotham City Impostors will be available in the Xbox LIVE Marketplace for the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, PlayStation Network and Windows PC. Stay tuned for more updates. [source]

Microsoft Flight – UK Hawai’i Trailer

Here is a new trailer of Microsoft Flight. It is a new free-to-play flight simulator from Microsoft Studios that replaces the discontinued Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise. The Microsoft Flight features an improved weather engine, new aircrafts and new gameplay elements. Watch the trailer after the jump.

[source]

Epic Games and Microsoft have confirmed that they will release Gears of War "Triple Pack" bundle on February 15, 2011. Priced at only $30, the pack consists of the first Gears of War, Gears of War 2, and Gears of War 2: All Fronts Pack. The All Fronts Pack contains much of the DLC for Gears of War 2, including 19 multiplayer maps, and the single player DLC called "Road to Ruin".

Verizon Wireless has decided to re-released the Microsoft Kin ONE and Kin TWO handsets. The Kin ONE retails for $119.99 or $19.99 with a 2-year contract while the larger, more powerful Kin Two is priced at $219.99 or $49.99 with a 2-year contract. The Kin Two is also subject to Verizon’s “buy one, get up to 3 select phones free” promotion, again with a 2-year activation per phone.

Samsung is offering you their latest 14-inch notebook called the X430-11. This ultra-slim machine is pre-configured with Microsoft Signature, giving you free phone support for 90 days along with carefully chosen productivity software that will have you up and running in minutes. On top of that, it also comes with a 14-inch 1366 x 768 LED-backlit display, a 1.2GHz Intel Core i3-330UM processor, a 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 310M graphics card, a 4GB DDR3 RAM, a 640GB hard drive, a 0.3-megapixel webcam, a DVD SuperMulti burner, a multi-in-one card reader, WiFi, Bluetooth, an HDMI port, two built-in speakers, a 6-cell battery and runs on Windows 7 Home Premium OS. The Samsung X430-11 can be yours for $1,099. -source-

Plurk, a Taiwan based micro-blogging site claims that Microsoft China has stolen its codes, design and user interface. Based on the screenshots provided by Plurk (see below), theft is probably the right word to use.






If this proves to be true, it would be an irony, since Microsoft has been fighting hard against software piracy.

A Microsoft spokeswoman commented:

"Of course, it should be noted that Plurk itself isn’t an especially original service, borrowing heavily from a concept pioneered by Twitter, right down to the 140-character limit on messages that Plurk users can publish.
Dave Thompson, a New Zealand-based spokesman for Plurk, concedes in a phone interview that Plurk was “inspired by Twitter” but says the site has a more “whimsical” feel with features that aren’t currently available on the rival service — like a method of organizing user messages along a horizontal timeline."

There is a difference between learning from others and blatant copying. From what it seems, Microsoft doesn’t even bother to make it appear like it is not doing the latter. This doesn’t reflect very well on Microsoft, does it?

Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it is fixing a bug in Bing that previously allowed spammers to bypass spam filters and distribute malicious links.

Researchers at Webroot Software discovered a spam campaign earlier this week that used the search engine's own redirection mechanism and a link-shrinking technique to send people to spam web pages, according to a post on the Webroot threat blog.

The problem stems from how Bing formats links in RSS feeds. The redirect from Bing to the spam site is not obfuscated, which has allowed scammers to append anything to the end of the Bing redirect URL and thus trick spam filters, said Andrew Brandt, a threat researcher at Webroot.

Microsoft is indeed including real-time search results from Facebook and Twitter in its Bing search engine thanks to two partnerships, search head Qi Lu and senior vice-president Yusuf Mehdi announced at the Web 2.0 Summit on Wednesday.

The Twitter partnership, which will bring all real-time public tweets to Bing, went live in beta on Wednesday at Bing.com/twitter. The Facebook deal, which will access all information shared publicly on the social network, will arrive "at a later date", Mehdi said. It is all part of Bing's strategy to harness "the emerging hot area of real-time information", he added.

No financial terms were disclosed for either deal; in a talk later in the day at the Web 2.0 Summit, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said "no money changed hands" in its deal with Microsoft.

Update
After blocking Microsoft's WPF plugin for Firefox due to what it believed was a security vulnerability, Mozilla has removed the block. The blocklist has been updated, but will take some time to propagate to clients, which will then be able to continue using the WPF plugin.

Original story
Mozilla has temporarily disabled Microsoft's WPF plugin for Firefox in order to protect users from a security vulnerability that was recently uncovered in the component. The vulnerability can be exploited when users visit malicious Web pages that contain specially crafted XAML content.

Microsoft issued an Internet Explorer patch to fix the vulnerability through its Windows Update mechanism on Tuesday. The IE patch is said to fully resolve the vulnerability for Firefox users in addition to users of Microsoft's own browser. Mozilla is concerned, however, that not all users have performed the Windows update yet. In order to protect users who are not yet patched, Mozilla has added Microsoft's plugin to its add-on blocklist, causing it to be automatically disabled by the browser. more detail: linux.com/....firefox

The IE Cumulative Security Update for October 2009 is now available via Windows Update or Microsoft Update.  This update addresses three privately reported vulnerabilities and one publicly disclosed vulnerability. The security update addresses these vulnerabilities by modifying the way that Internet Explorer processes data stream headers, validates arguments, and handles objects in memory. For detailed information on the contents of this update, please see the following documentation:

• Microsoft Security Bulletin MS09-054
• Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 974455

This security update is rated Critical for all supported releases of Internet Explorer: Internet Explorer 5.01, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8.

As a reminder, IE security updates are cumulative and contain all previously released updates for each version of Internet Explorer.

It’s well understood that the typical computer users today spend much of their time in their web browser, making it the most important software on their computer. Users expect their browsers to be easy to use, fast, stable and secure.

Over the past few months, users have downloaded thousands of great browser add-ons from www.ieaddons.com and other web sites. Users want to use browser add-ons to enhance their browsing experience, not hinder it or make it more confusing.

MSDM have published a full list of guidelines to help add-on developers create quality add-ons. MSDN team created these guidelines to respond to demand from the developer community and to help share the thinking of the IE team, gathered from years of providing support to users and developers. MSDN team strongly recommend that developers follow these guidelines when developing add-ons for IE users. MSDN team occasionally come across add-ons that violate these guidelines so egregiously that MSDN team treat them as malware; on the other hand, MSDN team frequently see really helpful and creative add-ons that put the “user in control” and enhance the browsing experience. Here are the core aspects of our guidelines:

Do not limit the user’s ability to access Internet Explorer features.
Users require access to the entire set of Internet Explorer features, including but not limited to: the address bar, search box and new tab page to navigate and search the Internet easily and safely. Users expect these features to be available to them at all times and our support data shows that users are confused and unhappy when these features are obscured or changed. Please don’t write add-ons that hide, obscure or limit access to Internet Explorer features.

Do not limit the user’s ability to control Internet Explorer settings
It’s important that users be able to control their browsing experience. MSDN team provided many configuration options for IE users to help them set up their browser exactly how they want it and protect themselves from potentially harmful malware.

To support this guideline, add-on software should not remove or limit the user’s ability to view and modify IE settings.

Only use supported APIs
Add-ons should only use supported Internet Explorer and Windows application programming interfaces (APIs), detailed on MSDN web. Using an unsupported method of extending Internet Explorer or relying on implementation details in a specific version of IE may cause browser stability problems when Internet Explorer is updated. Also, when two add-ons try to use the same unsupported method of extending Internet Explorer they might crash the browser – our APIs are specifically designed to prevent this kind of problem.

Microsoft is committed to working with all add-on software developers to ensure that our mutual customers – you, the user – have a great experience when using Internet Explorer with add-ons. If you are developing or maintaining an Internet Explorer add-on, please review our guidelines and ensure that your add-ons deliver a good long-term experience for users.