Now includes Facebook
Facebook has been added to Windows Live, joining other services like Wordpress, Photobucket, Flickr, and Twitter, so everyone in your Windows Live network can see your updates from across the Web via the “What’s New” feed.

Want to know your Mobile Windows Messenger ?
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We’ve heard rumblings of a new PSP sans UMD in the past, and sources have now confirmed the rumor and added a date of announcement: E3, merely a month away.

1Up’s sources claim the new PSP hardware will adopt the moniker “PSP Go!,” and yes, that exclamation mark is correct. They further claim the PSP Go! will boast 8GB or 16GB of internal storage, because the handheld will be doing away with Sony’s UMD format in favor of downloadable games. More details:
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Mozilla Corp. today rushed out a new version of Firefox to fix a flaw it introduced with the 12-patch security update it shipped less than a week ago.

Firefox 3.0.10, which the open-source browser maker called a “security and stability” release, follows Firefox 3.0.9 by just six days, and was necessary because of a new bug that slipped into last week’s update.

Mozilla labeled the new bug a critical security vulnerability. “One of the security fixes in Firefox 3.0.9 introduced a regression that caused some users to experience frequent crashes,” the accompanying advisory said. “In analyzing this crash, we discovered that it was due to memory corruption similar to cases that have been identified as security vulnerabilities in the past.”

The flaw, which cropped up only in the Windows version of Firefox, was detected by Mozilla’s crash reporting system, and by last Wednesday, developers were discussing how to deal with the problem on Bugzilla, the company’s bug tracking system.

“So we fixed [bug] 431260, which wasn’t really a security problem, and we introduced this bug, which probably is,” said Robert O’Callahan, a Mozilla developer who works on Firefox’s rendering engine. “Perhaps we need to be more picky about what we land on branch.”
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It’s the Sunday rumor mill here in Windows Mobile land, and on today’s plate is the Samsung Omnia Pro (cue HTC’s lawyers), brought to us by hdblog.it.

While highly unofficial – and the rendering you see above is of hdblog’s “own creation and does not reflect the real shape” (and putting your blog on the phone’s shell kinda gives that away) – the rumor surrounds an 800×480 AMOLED touchscreen, 5MP camera with stabilizer and flash, and a 624MHz processor. No word on RAM and ROM sizes.
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Microsoft Corp. confirmed Friday that it will make Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) available to the general public on May 5, a date that had leaked last weekend when a company site briefly published details about the upcoming milestone.

In an entry to a company blog, Microsoft spokesman Brandon LeBlanc also announced that the release candidate would be available before then to subscribers to a pair of services targeting developers and IT professionals. “The RC is on track for April 30 for download by MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Broader, public availability will begin on May 5,” LeBlanc said.
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Microsoft is trying to make it easier to sway users of Windows XP onto the latest version of its operating system.

For some time now, the company has been quietly building a “Windows XP mode” that uses virtualization to allow Windows 7 to easily run applications designed for Windows XP. According to sources familiar with the product, the application compatibility mode is built on the Virtual PC technology that Microsoft acquired in 2003, when it scooped up the assets of Connectix.

By adding the compatibility mode, Microsoft is aiming to address one of the key shortcomings of Windows Vista: its compatibility issues with software designed for Windows XP and earlier versions of the operating system.

Details of the Windows XP mode, previously known as Virtual Windows XP, were first published earlier Friday by the Windows SuperSite blog.

The technology has not been part of the beta version of Windows 7 or previously disclosed by Microsoft, but is expected to be released alongside the upcoming release candidate version. Microsoft said on Friday that it will release it to developers next week and publicly starting May 5.

According to the SuperSite report, written by bloggers Paul Thurrott and Rafael Rivera, the XP mode won’t come in the box with Windows 7, but will be made available as a free download for those who buy the professional, enterprise, or “ultimate” versions of Windows 7. The site also has some screenshots of the mode in action.
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Hackers can successfully attack Windows PCs months — even years — after Microsoft Corp. fixes a flaw, a security expert said today, because there’s always a pool of unpatched systems.

According to data that Qualys Inc. culled from scans of more than 80 million machines, between 5% and 20% of all systems are never patched for any vulnerabilities, including those disclosed by Microsoft in its monthly security updates.

Qualys, a provider of on-demand IT security systems, tracked four vulnerability bulletins issued by Microsoft in 2008 and in each case found that a sizable fraction of the PCs it scanned had not been patched, even though in some cases more than a year had passed since Microsoft issued fixes.

The four updates, all labeled “critical” by Microsoft when they were released, included the following:

* MS01-001, a two-patch update in January 2008 that plugged holes in three Windows TCP/IP protocols.
* MS08-007, a single February 2008 patch for Windows’ WebDAV Mini-Redirector, which defines how basic file functions such as Copy, Move, Delete and Create are performed using HTTP.
* MS08-015, a one-fix update in March 2008 for a bug in Outlook, Microsoft’s mail client, that could be exploited by tricking a user into visiting a malicious Web site.
* MS08-021, a two-patch update released in April 2008 for Windows GDI, or graphics device interface, a frequently-fixed core component of the operating system.

Even as late as this year, MS08-021 had not been applied to 20% of the PCs that Qualys scanned. The percentage of machines lacking the MS08-015 update, on the other hand, dipped at times to about 5%.
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