Delhi HC quashes charges against Microsoft India

The Delhi High Court Monday quashed charges of hosting objectionable content against Microsoft India and set aside a trial court order for initiating criminal proceedings against the company.

Justice Suresh Kait accepted the company's plea that Microsoft was not providing a platform to people to interact with each other and post or publish their views, but one engaged in developments and sale of software and computing solutions.

The company's counsel told the court that no defamatory material was posted on its websites.

The move came as Microsoft India approached the high court, challenging the trial court's order initiating criminal proceedings against it for hosting "obscene and derogatory content".

The high court also gave the complainant Vinay Rai liberty to file a fresh complaint if any credible piece of evidence was found against the company.

Rai had approached the trial court to remove objectionable content from 21 websites, including Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Yahoo and YouTube. Among these, 12 websites are of companies based abroad.

Metropolitan Magistrate Sudesh Kumar had summoned the companies to face trial for allegedly committing offences punishable under the Indian Penal Code sections 292 (sale of obscene books and material) and 293 (sale of obscene objects to young person).

The trial court observed that the material submitted by the complainant contained obscene pictures and derogatory articles pertaining to Hindu deities, Prophet Mohammad and Jesus Christ.

Online theft of IDs at Microsoft India store

Hackers, calling themselves the Evil Shadow Team and reportedly based in China struck at www.microsoftstore.co.in on Sunday night, stealing login IDs and passwords of people who had used the site for shopping.

According to reports, the IDs and passwords were stored in plain text files without any encryption.

Evil Shadow later posted a message on the Microsoft website, saying the "unsafe system will be baptized".

A Microsoft spokesperson said they were investigating a "limited compromise" of the company's online store in India. "Customers have already been sent guidance on the issue and suggested immediate actions. We are diligently working to remedy the issue," the spokesperson said.

In its email to customers, Microsoft reportedly claimed that databases storing credit card details and payment information were not affected during the security breach. At the same time, the company is said to have acknowledged that the exposed account details may include non-financial information, including e-mail addresses, passwords, order details and shipping addresses.

Last year, hacker groups like Lulzsec had carried out several high-profile break-ins, putting the focus on security measures companies put in place. Sony allegedly suffered several security breaches and hackers stole user IDs and passwords of customers.

Lulzsec had said that with its actions it was trying to draw attention to the poor security methods used at websites, even by multinational firms.

Evil Shadow Team, a group of hackers reportedly based in China, struck Microsoft's online store in India, stealing customers' login IDs and passwords. Microsoft said it was a 'limited compromise'

Microsoft announces automatic upgrades for IE

Microsoft Thursday announced that it will automatically upgrade the Internet Explorer (IE) to the latest version to give Windows customers more protection against malicious software.

According to the company's blog post, starting from Australia and Brazil next January, users of Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 will get the IE updates if they have turned on automatic updating via Windows Update.

Microsoft said the industry has been moving toward automatic updates as a norm since the biggest online threat these days is social engineering malware typically targeting outdated software like web browsers, reported Xinhua.

Automatic upgrades, also called silent updates for displaying no messages or windows during the progress, has been deployed by Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox. It can ensure users have the newest versions of the browser, and therefore is seen as a big improvement to Internet security.

According to the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report released in October, 99 percent of all attacks during the first half of 2011 came from unpatched but known vulnerabilities, and 90 percent of infections were attributed to vulnerability exploitation that had a security update available from the software vendor for more than a year.

In the latest research data from web analytics company StatCounter, Microsoft's IE has a strong lead with 40.63 percent of global browser market share, followed by 25.7 percent of Chrome and 25.23 percent of Firefox.

Microsoft files patent on monitoring employee behaviour

Microsoft has filed a patent for covering a computer system that can monitor the behaviour of employees while also assigning positive or negative scores to each action.

The patent filing, discovered by GeekWire, could include flagging someone who repeatedly cuts off colleagues during conversations, or raising the alarm over a supervisor who repeatedly bugs underlings during their lunch break, a website reported.

Such scoring would presumably rely upon subjective criteria set by the employer regarding what counts as “good” or “bad” work habits.

The range of possible monitored behaviours includes word phrases, body gestures, and mannerisms “such as wearing dark glasses in a video conference” or “wearing unacceptable clothing to a business meeting”.

In addition to what the existing examples of employee monitoring software can do like tracking websites visited, capturing keystrokes or screenshots on a worker’s computer, Microsoft’s idea would take workplace surveillance another step forward by creating software capable of analysing those human behaviours.

The Microsoft patent idea doesn’t automatically grant power to the boss or the HR department, it also envisions how workers might benefit from such monitoring software by getting feedback about their behaviour directly, so that they could use it as a self-improvement tool.