Microsoft Planning Office 15

With Office 2010 in public beta now, it seems that the majority of work on it is done, still, it’s a little surprising to hear that Microsoft is moving on to Office 15 already.

Of course, the whole thing isn’t entirely unexpected, we had received word very shortly after the release of Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 7, that the company was already moving on, with staff working away on Windows 8. The big difference is, for now at least, that the word that we could expect to see Windows 8 around 2012 prompted speculation that the manner in which MS releases OS updates would be changing to something a little more incremental… it seems less likely that that’s the case for Office.

Advertisements

Microsoft not to Blame for Black Screen of Death

Microsoft has taken the time to outline the fact that it doesn’t believe that the “black screen of death” plaguing some Windows users is to do with its latest round of security updates, as had originally been guessed.

Instead, the official word from Microsoft is that the black-screen issue certainly exists but isn’t necessarily related to its security updates. Instead, it says that it has found reports that recent reports indicating that the black-screen issue is a result of changes made to the registry to be inaccurate and that none of its security updates behave in the manner described by the initial reports.

Slippery Flash Exploit Hits Gmail, YouTube, Flikr

Word has emerged of a new vulnerability in Adobe’s Flash that seems as though it may well be entirely unpatchable, leaving web users in a fairly untenable position securitywise.

While Flash has long been criticised as something of a security risk, a large portion of that risk normally tends to be associated with the manner in which users are expected to keep a Flash player up to date in their own browsers. In that respect, if in no other, the emergence of a Flash exploit that could well prove to be entirely unpatchable is very worrying indeed. Moreover, the list of potentially exploitable sites includes names as big as Gmail, Flikr and YouTube.

Mozilla Considered Patching Internet Explorer

There was a time when Mozilla considered patching Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer in an attempt to speed up the way the browser handles JavaScript, but eventually decided not to do so.

With Google coming under some withering fire from Microsoft about its “Chrome Frame,” which effectively allows users to run Google’s Chrome web browser inside Microsoft’s internet explorer, Mozilla has admitted that it had considered something note entirely dissimilar. According to an interview with The Register, Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler said that,

“We said, ‘What if there was a way we could speed up JavaScript in IE to bring it into the 21st century? Could we put our JavaScript engine in there?’”

Microsoft to Roll Out Mandatory Messenger Updates

Microsoft has announced that it intends to roll out mandatory updates to its Windows Live Messenger, formerly MSN Messenger, service. These updates will begin as optional patches but graduate to obligatory downloads as time goes on.

Basically, according to Microsoft’s Windows Live Blog post, the latest version of Windows Live messenger has been available to users on version 8.1 or 8.5 as an optional update since August 25th. The same update will be made available optionally to users on version 14.0 in early October. Once those updates are made available, you may as well update, as they’ll be made mandatory shortly afterwards.

Mozilla Patches Six More Holes in Firefox

Less than a week after the update from Firefox 3.5 to 3.5.1, Firefox has now been bumped along to the slowly lengthening version number of 3.5.12 with a new update that plugs six holes in its security. Five of these flaws were deemed “critical” while one was simply ranked as “high”.

What’s particularly unusual about this update is that on Monday news came out of a vulnerability in Firefox 3.5.1 that users were worried might be used to execute malicious code. Mozilla quickly fired back a response to say that the exploit was nothing to worry about, yet here we are with an update so soon afterwards with fully five critical vulnerabilities patched.