Microsoft removed free access to Hotmail accounts form Outlook and Outlook express.

In a message posted on the web site Microsoft explain that this move has come because of the increasing amount of unsolicited junk e-mail or spam sent from MSN Hotmail Sympatico Mail accounts through Outlook and Outlook Express.

Microsoft Explanation

To protect our users from the increasing amount of unsolicited junk e-mail or spam sent from MSN Hotmail Sympatico Mail accounts through Outlook and Outlook Express, we have reluctantly had to restrict the new use of Outlook and Outlook Express to subscribers.

By making this feature part of a subscription, (which requires a user to provide billing information), we can more effectively manage and put a stop to abuse of this functionality, and help protect you and others from unsolicited mail.
If you purchase a subscription service such as MSN Hotmail Plus or MSN Premium, you get access to your account from Outlook or Outlook Express, along with many other added features.

This move to block access from outlook has come as a surprise, since recently one of Hotmail’s biggest competitor, GMail, started giving free POP3 access to its users.

We all know search engines like Google and Yahoo that are searching the web. But for developers who wants to find a piece of code that can they can use as an example, or even just use it in their own project can be a taunting task.

A new search engine has debut recently, just for this task.

Koders is a search engine for source code. It enables developers to easily search and browse source code in thousands of projects hosted at hundreds of open source repositories.

Koders allows developers who are looking for a piece of code to enter keywords, choose programming language, license and search for the code.

Let’s say I want to write a piece of software in Java that needs to merge two files. I type the words “merge files“, select Java as a language and hit the search button. Half a second later I get the search results that contain a source file called “MergeFiles.java“, which I can use as a reference of just copy the source and use it in my own project (as long as I follow its license).

Koder is still in a beta phase and currently searches 125,112,016 lines of code.

A vulnerability has been reported in Skype, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user’s system.

The vulnerability is caused due to a boundary error within the handling of command line arguments. This can be exploited to cause a stack-based buffer overflow by e.g. tricking a user into visiting a malicious web site, which passes an overly long string (more than 4096 bytes) to the “callto:” URI handler.

Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code.

The vulnerability affects versions 1.0.*.95 through 1.0.*.98.

Solution:
Update to version 1.0.0.100.

Online search engine leader Google Inc. is setting out make better sense of all the scholarly work stored on the Web.

The company’s new service, unveiled late Wednesday at http://scholar.google.com, draws upon newly developed algorithms to list the academic research that appears to be most relevant to a search request. Mountain View-based Google doesn’t plan to charge for the service nor use the feature to deliver text-based ads — the primary source of its profits.

“Google has benefited a lot from scholarly research, so this is one way we are giving back to the scholarly community,” said Anurag Acharya, a Google engineer who helped develop the new search tools.

Although Google already had been indexing the reams of academic research online, the company hadn’t been able to separate the scholarly content from commercial Web sites.

By focusing on the citations contained in academic papers, Google also engineered its new system to provide a list of potentially helpful material available at libraries and other offline sources.

Source: AP

Microsoft Corp. warned Asian governments on Thursday they could face patent lawsuits for using the Linux operating system instead of its Windows software.

The growing popularity of Linux — an open-code software that is freely available on the Internet and easily modified by users — is a threat to the global dominance of Microsoft’s Windows.

Linux violates more than 228 patents, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said at the company’s Asian Government Leaders Forum in Singapore. He did not provide any details on the alleged violations, which the Linux community disputes.

“Someday, for all countries that are entering the WTO (World Trade Organization), somebody will come and look for money owing to the rights for that intellectual property,” he added.

Software developer SCO Group Inc., which claims that Linux is based on its Unix software, is suing companies including IBM .

Source: Reuters