This week, we have a judge who's directing the White House to look in many of the wrong places. We have a White House CIO who claims that asset management is a new invention, so it's tough to keep track of those pesky hard drives.

We also have a White House who can't account for any email messages at all during the months of the initial Iraq invasion. And we have a Congress who's decided we don't need any real form of email records management for another four years.

As I've been stating for nearly a year now, White House email is broken. Last week, with the Mexican theft of White House BlackBerrys, one of my more farfetched predictions came true in a very troubling way.

Sadly, neither elected nor appointed officials in Washington are making the situation any better. In fact, it's getting worse. I've reached the conclusion that it's time to call for a Special Prosecutor. We now have official White House statements that federal laws are being broken, and I don't see any way for this to be resolved without escalation.

Tap here and read all the sad details. ]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039053.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039053.html a patch for a critical vulnerability affecting users of its Yahoo Assistant browser add-on. According to an alert from a researcher at Nevis Labs, the vulnerability "allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable installations."

Yahoo Assistant is marketed to Chinese users as a security product featuring tools to repair Internet Explorer settings, provide antivirus protection and block pop-up advertising.

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]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039050.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039050.html a new version of its Microsoft Download Center Web site using Silverlight technology, a browser plug-in and development runtime for adding multimedia and high-definition video to Web-based applications.

A visit to the Microsoft Download Center on Tuesday opened a page inviting users to test the new site, which Microsoft said is being enhanced by Silverlight.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039027.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039027.html Pivot4U, an add-in for Microsoft Excel that enhances it with a new feature--editable pivot tables. With Pivot4U Add-in, any pivot table, using an Excel sheet as source data, will grow into a powerful tool for planning, calculations or form of data entry. All the power of calculations and planning "FROM ABOVE-DOWNWARD" will become readily accessible without complex and costly software.

A pivot table is a data summarization tool that, among other functions, can automatically sort, count, and total the data stored in one table or spreadsheet and create a second table displaying the summarized data. Pivot4U Add-in 1.2 requires Microsoft Office 2007 and .NET Framework 2.0. The product is available immediately as a free evaluation version from www.excel4u.net. The evaluation version can be tried for 14 days before making the purchase of $79.99 (US).

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039026.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039026.html
Windows XP SP3 is now available through Windows Update and also on the Microsoft Download Center. Microsoft had expected to release the software on April 29; however, it discovered it conflicted with an application called Microsoft Dynamics RMS. The problem also affected Windows Vista SP1. Dynamics RMS is a retail-chain-management software for small and midsized businesses.

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]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039028.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039028.html Yahoo and CEO Jerry Yang are facing lawsuits from angry stockholders. Yang says he was open to Microsoft's advances, but "they choose to walk away." Reportedly, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer refused to meet Yang's price of $37 a share. Meantime, Yahoo's CEO choose to focus on a questionable deal with Google.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039029.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039029.html what is Microsoft's next move? Many are assuming Microsoft is waiting for Yahoo's stock to tank in order to sweep in and make another pass at Yahoo. Others are counting on Microsoft buying another Web 2.0 powerhouse in Yahoo's stead--a MySpace, FaceBook or an AOL.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039030.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039030.html Jerry Yang & Co. never received written confirmation of Microsoft's $33 raised bid. This is an echo of comments made by Yahoo sources over the weekend (including those to the Wall Street Journal and CNBC).

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]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039031.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039031.html Microsoft withdrew its offer for Yahoo on Saturday as negotiations fell through on price, even after the software giant raised its bid by about $5 billion to $47.5 billion.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said his company increased its offer to $33 per share, from the $31 per share cash-and-stock bid that it initially made on January 31. But Yahoo was looking for $37 a share, Ballmer said.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039032.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039032.html and lucid at 6am Florida time.

If you know our fearless leader, you know he's definitely not a 6am kinda guy, so the only way this is going to fly is stay up and do the show before going to bed. In any case, if you happen to be up at 4am and located pretty much anywhere on the western side of the US (50,000 watts reaches a long distance at night), you can tune in. You can also listen via their Web feed, should you be in a different part of the world. David promises to do his best to keep you awake throughout the full hour.

And, if you're mature and sleeping, like all good people should be at that hour, we'll post the download link sometime in the next day or so when it makes it online.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039013.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039013.html suing Microsoft for alleged patent infringement in its RoundTable conferencing product.

In a filing this week with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, FullView asks the court to require Microsoft to stop selling RoundTable and to award FullView triple damages.

FullView's patent, which builds on other patent applications dating back to 1995, covers a camera system that combines the fields of view of several cameras to form a continuous 360-degree view.

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]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039004.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039004.html Microsoft and Yahoo have intensified talks in a last-minute effort to reach a friendly agreement on a buyout of Yahoo, a source familiar with the matter said on Friday.

Yahoo shares rose 7 percent on news of the accelerated talks. Investors had feared Microsoft might walk away from its unsolicited bid, now worth about $42.2 billion, or launch a hostile takeover battle. The software maker had set a deadline for Yahoo that passed last Saturday.

Microsoft has since increased its offer by several dollars per share, though the talks could yet fall apart, the New York Times's DealBook blog reported, citing a person involved in the discussions. Microsoft declined to comment.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039003.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00039003.html
The technology, called memristor, could allow computers to make decisions by understanding past patterns of data it has collected, similar to human brains collecting and understanding a series of events.

For example, a memristor circuit could be capable of telling a microwave the heating time for different food types based on the information it has collected over time, said Stanley Williams, senior fellow at HP.[Can you say Skynet?]

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038990.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038990.html adding malicious circuits to its processor. Because these circuits interfere with the computer at a deeper level than a virus, they effectively operate "below the radar" of AV software.

To evaluate the risk from such hardware, King's team designed their own malicious circuits. They used a processor called a field programmable gate array (FPGA), whose logic circuits can be rearranged, to create a replica of an existing open source processor called Leon3, which contains around 1.7 million circuits. They then added about 1000 malicious circuits not present in Leon3.

The team found that the circuits allowed them to bypass security controls on Leon3 in a similar way to how a virus hands control of a computer to a hacker, but without requiring a flaw in a software application. When they hooked the FPGA up to another computer, they were able to steal passwords stored in its memory and install malicious software that would allow the operating system it was running to be remotely controlled.

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]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038991.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038991.html Microsoft scored a key hire from its competitor.

Mark Hamburg, who had been chief architect of Adobe Photoshop and who launched the Adobe effort that became Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, resigned from Adobe after 17 years and is joining Microsoft.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038992.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038992.html has been sentenced to 21 months in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion and falsifying email headers.

Thirty-five-year-old Edward "Eddie" Davidson of Louisville was also ordered to pay nearly $715,000 to the Internal Revenue Service. He was sentenced Monday and ordered to report to prison authorities in May.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038974.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038974.html consider raising the software maker's $41.9 billion bid for Yahoo instead of pursuing a threatened hostile takeover attempt, according to a published report.

A decision could emerge after the meeting, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.

Microsoft also is weighing withdrawing its bid--a move likely to cause a precipitous drop in Yahoo's stock, which has been bolstered by the 3-month-old takeover bid.

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]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038973.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038973.html
Now company officials are looking to continue expanding those capabilities to include virtualized and non-Microsoft environments.

At its Microsoft Management Summit April 29 in Las Vegas, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, also will outline the company's new use of open-source technologies and industry standards.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038972.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038972.html smooth over some of its harder edges without shutting it off completely.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038971.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038971.html blaminga "compatibility issue" between the software and a retail-chain-management application.

Microsoft had said last week that it completed development on Windows XP, Service Pack 3 (SP3), and that it would be available via its software-update services on Tuesday. However, incompatibilities discovered in the past several days between an application called Microsoft Dynamics RMS and both Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 will force the company to hold off on releasing the software. Dynamics RMS is a retail-chain-management software for small and mid-sized businesses.

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]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038950.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038950.html
Weeks after allowing Google Apps users to view and edit word processing documents offline, the company has added the capability to view its spreadsheets and presentations offline.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038951.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038951.html a real and prevailing sentiment among many in the Microsoft ranks.

These aren't folks who are saying Microsoft should walk away from Yahoo so that Yahoo's stock price will tank and Microsoft can swoop in and buy them later. They are folks who are opposed to a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo at any price. And while it's tough to take over successfully a company where many of the employees don't want to work for you, it's potentially far worse to alienate your own employees by spending billions to buy technology and people with whom your rank and file have no interest in working.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038952.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038952.html a possible death sentence for the Reiser4 file system.

ReiserFS (File System) is incorporated in the Linux kernel and is used in many top Linux distributions, although EXT3 has succeeded it a the leading file system. The Reiser4 open source project, the successor to ReiserFS also conceived by Hans Reiser, continues to be developed and supported by a group of open source programmers. In an e-mail interview over the weekend, Edward Shishkin, a top developer of Reiser4, said work continues on the file system but the fate of the open source project long term is uncertain.

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]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038953.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038953.html David Gewirtz

Our ongoing story about the security of White House email took a strange turn on Friday, proving some of the national security concerns I've been discussing to be true in a particularly tangible and unfortunate way.

On Friday, the Associated Press reported that Rafael Quintero Curiel, lead press advance person for the Mexican delegation, was caught stealing BlackBerry devices belonging to White House staffers who were attending meetings between U.S. President George W. Bush and Canadian and Mexican leaders in New Orleans last week. Unfortunately, Quintero Curiel was caught after the devices had been in his possession for some time.

One story, originating with Fox News, had the count of missing BlackBerrys at six or seven, but when I spoke to Mark Stevenson of the Associated Press, on site in Mexico City, he told me the final count was, in fact, two devices.

On Friday, we issued a breaking news press release on this topic, which covered the early news and what I saw as the national security concerns that weren't initially getting covered. This Special Report expands on that press release and is a detailed analysis of the issue.

What makes this topic so troubling, of course, is the serious national security breach that may have occurred. But there's more to the story, including issues of the relationship between the United States and Mexico, and even how racial stereotyping may have contributed to spinning this story in a way that may be obscuring the true magnitude of the possible damage to our national security.

To read the complete Special Report, tap here. ]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038920.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038920.html the novelty of his methods will wear off, he predicted.

"At some point the word 'blogging' will be anachronistic," Schwartz said at the Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco. "I communicate."

And he predicted, in effect, that the rest of the executive world will catch up. "Historically, communication took place by being a celebrity CEO who met with heads of state, and got the local media to cover it," he said in an on-stage interview with O'Reily Media chief Tim O'Reilly. "You got the message out in an inefficient and environmentally irresponsible way. Then the Internet came round and gave you a way to reach the entire planet."

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038934.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038934.html one Web page being infected every five seconds, according to a new report from security vendor Sophos.

Sophos said in its Security Threat Report that an average of over 15,000 Web pages were compromised daily between January and March.

In contrast, the daily average for the entire 2007 was about 6,000, or one infected Web page every 14 seconds.

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]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038935.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038935.html even after the June 30 cutoff date set by Microsoft.

What will happen is that Dell will leverage on the "downgrade" license inherent in Vista Business and Vista Ultimate to pre-install Windows XP Professional on a selection of Dell desktop PCs and laptops. This will save users the hassle of having to do it themselves, says a Dell spokesperson. This service will be offered on some Latitude, OptiPlex and Precision systems for free. Some Vostro and XPS systems will also get this offer--for a small fee.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038936.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038936.html
Concerned over contradictory White House statements about the government's controversial email archiving efforts, a U.S. district judge April 24 ordered the Bush administration to collect and preserve all emails in .pst files for individuals employed at the White House between March 2003 and October 2005. Millions of White House email are missing from the period.

The White House admits emails are missing but insists the emails are on back-up tapes and drives that as yet haven't been located. Federal law requires the preservation of all White House email. The period of time covered by the order includes the start of the Iraq war, the Valerie Plame affair and the White House response to Hurricane Katrina.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038937.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038937.html Yahoo failed to agree to an acquisition deal with Microsoft by Saturday, the deadline Microsoft had set for wrapping up negotiations.

Now Microsoft must decide whether to pursue a hostile takeover via a proxy fight or to drop the bid and seek other acquisition alternatives.

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]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038938.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038938.html
ZATZ Publishing today announces that national security concerns published by David Gewirtz, ZATZ Editor-in-Chief and the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone? have been proven true in a particularly tangible and unfortunate example.

Today, Fox News reported that Rafael Quintero Curiel, lead press advance person for the Mexican Delegation was caught stealing six or seven BlackBerry devices belonging to White House staffers who were attending meetings between U.S. President George W. Bush and Canadian and Mexican leaders in New Orleans this week. Unfortunately, Quintero Curiel was caught after the devices had been in his possession for some time.

That's the equivalent in strategic U.S. government information of about 28,000 printed pages of data, or seven complete sets of all seven Harry Potter novels. And that's per BlackBerry. Given today's incident, that's seven times seven complete sets of all seven Harry Potter novels.

Read the full text.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038900.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038900.html new rules of being the techie gentleman or lady.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038911.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038911.html re-think plans to phase out its Windows XP operating system by June 30 if customers show they want to keep it but so far they have not, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said.

"XP will hit an end-of-life. We have announced one. If customer feedback varies we can always wake up smarter but right now we have a plan for end-of-life for new XP shipments," Ballmer told a news conference on Thursday.

Microsoft has announced that it will stop licensing Windows XP to computer makers and end retail sales by June 30.

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]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038912.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038912.html
"Just last week, we loaded 15 BGUs in the OTB and got an output of 1,300 cycles, which shows our testing program is right on target."

You might have missed it, but half the room was day dreaming and the other half were checking email on their BlackBerrys. What they were not doing: considering whether they should budget for this technology, because you had lost their attention. Can an over-reliance on tech jargon be bad for your career? Some experts say yes.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038913.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038913.html Comcast is throttling more traffic than it has previously admitted, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin told a U.S. Senate panel April 22. Martin also told lawmakers it appears Comcast broadband customers are not free to access all content on the Internet, including the ability to fully use peer-to-peer networks.

Martin's comments come after two FCC hearings on charges that the nation's largest cable provider deliberately throttles P2P applications such as BitTorrent during peak network hours, a practice that Comcast admits to. Comcast says its policy not only falls within the FCC's reasonable network management exception to the FCC's network neutrality rules, but it is also "imperceptible to the customer."

Martin refuted Comcast's claims, telling the Senate Commerce Committee, "It does not appear that this technique [throttling] was used only to occasionally delay traffic at particular nodes suffering from network congestion at that time." According to Martin, the testimony so far presented to the FCC indicates Comcast's efforts at managing P2P traffic "is typically deployed over a wider geographic or system area and would therefore have impacted nodes within a system simultaneously."

Comcast's technology, Martin added, "blocks the uploads of at least a large portion of subscribers in that part of the network, regardless of the actual levels of congestion at that particular time."

Martin also said he had no fix on when Comcast will actually stop using its current approach, although Comcast said it plans to move to a "content-agnostic" platform available for up to 20 percent of Comcast's customers by the end of the year. One of the primary network neutrality complaints against Comcast is that it singles out one program over another.

Read | Permalink]]> http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038891.html http://www.outlookpower.com/newsitems/00038891.html