Microsoft Corp. today filed a development agreement (DA) with the City of Redmond outlining its plans to make one of the largest corporate campuses in the world even larger through a major expansion of its Redmond headquarters. In the plan, Microsoft also commits up to $30 million (U.S.) in local transportation and infrastructure.

The DA indicates Microsoft’s intent to add about 2 million square feet of new site and infrastructure renovations to its existing 8-million-square-foot campus over the next 10 to 20 years. The additional development is expected to ultimately house between 10,000 and 12,000 workers.

While Microsoft continues to grow globally, the company remains strongly committed to its roots. Microsoft expects to hire 6,000 to 7,000 new employees worldwide this fiscal year, and 3,000 of those are expected in the Puget Sound region alone.

Security outfit Secunia has news of further exploits for Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer. Three new problems have come to light, all of them critical, and all of them having potential to do serious damage to Internet Explorer users.

The first problem relates to IE not checking items that are dragged and dropped from the Internet zone to the local zone; IE fails to check for images or media embedded in HTML code. A website could place HTML code on a users system, which could subsequently execute code in the local zone. The second issue relates to IE’s HTML help control; a specially crafted help (.hhk) file can execute potentially malicious code and could also execute local programs; this vulnerability can also by-pass the “Local Computer” zone lock down security feature in SP2. Finally, a bug in the way IE handles the “Related Topics” command in an embedded HTML Help control can be exploited to allow the execution of malicious code. For a more detailed explanation of the problems, see Secunia’s advisory.

Source: Neowin