Free Republic

Dozens of anti-Israel Microsoft employees, many wearing face masks and keffiyes, swarmed the company’s headquarters in Washington state to protest the Big Tech giant’s ties to Israel’s military. The protesters set up tents in a “liberated zone” on the Redmond campus, renaming it the “Martyred Palestinian Children’s Plaza” — and toted signs that urged co-workers to “Join the worker intifada: no labor for genocide.” Other placards said “stop starving Gaza.” A group calling itself “No Azure For Apartheid” organized Tuesday’s sit-in after The Guardian reported that an Israeli military intelligence agency was using Microsoft’s Azure software to amass recordings of...

Microsoft's Bing technology has called Iowa for Hillary Clinton, a result that has not gone unnoticed amongst Bernie Sanders supporters given that an app created by Microsoft will help tally the vote during tonight's caucus. Using, "data from polls, prediction markets, and anonymized and aggregated search-engine queries to predict its results," Microsoft forecasts that Hillary will win three out of the first four Democratic primaries, taking Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada, with Sanders taking New Hampshire. Although the technology isn't perfect, Microsoft correctly predicted the outcome of the 2015 Academy Awards, the 'No' vote for Scottish independence, and the...

Microsoft on Wednesday launched the first major update to Internet Explorer in five years, and posted the new browser for Windows XP to a download site. IE 7, which has was announced in February 2005 by chairman Bill Gates, has been touted by the company as a significant update in the areas of security and usability. The interface has been streamlined and tabs have been added to compete with rivals such as Mozilla's Firefox and Opera's flagship browser. On the security front, IE 7 adds anti-phishing defenses as well as additional features to control ActiveX controls, which historically have been...

Exploits against the unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer are increasing and attackers are gathering momentum, researchers said Thursday. They warned that the problem would become worse if cyber criminals attack via e-mail next. "It might come to nothing, but it feels like a storm's coming," said Roger Thompson, the chief technology officer at Exploit Prevention Labs. "The potential is there. Call it a storm watch, not a storm warning." At least two different exploits have appeared this week, said Thompson, one linked to the Russian-made hacker exploit kit called WebAttacker, the other posted early Thursday on the xSec gray-hat...

Microsoft senior vice president Bob Muglia opened up TechEd 2006 in Boston Sunday evening by proclaiming that Windows Vista was the most secure operating system in the industry. But a bold statement can only go so far, and much of this week's conference has been spent reinforcing that point....

I've had what started out as a minor problem with my computer escalate way out of control. Two nights ago I got impatient waiting for all the junk on my computer to load after an installation reboot. I hit the reboot program before I should have, it clashed with a just loading Zone Alarm, corrupted a Zone Alarm dll, and all heck broke loose.The corrupted file looped and brought my system to a standstill. I finally got it turned off (unless I highlight it or do anything to it at all), but I can't delete it (inpage error), I can't...

Nearly a decade ago, just a few months after Microsoft shipped Windows 95, I asked Bill Gates if it was a conscious decision in the development of that product to give Windows more of a Mac look and feel. Of course I knew he'd say it wasn't, but I couldn't resist asking. "There was no goal even to compete with Macintosh," Gates proclaimed. "We don't even think of Macintosh as a competitor." That was a crock, so I pressed the issue a little. I asked him how he accounted for the widespread perception that Windows 95 looked a lot like...