Facebook takes over display ads from Microsoft

Microsoft said last Friday that it has lost the remainder of Facebook's display advertising business as the social network will now handle all of the graphical ads on its site.
"We made the mutual decision that Facebook would take over responsibility for selling display advertisements on its own site," Bing general manager Jon Tinter said in a blog posting. "We have been working together on advertising for a long time, creating the best experience for (Facebook) users and advertisers. Given the kinds of advertisements that make sense within a product as unique as Facebook, it just made more sense for them to take the lead on this part of their advertising strategy."
The deal represents a scaling back of a 2007 pact in which Microsoft invested US$240 million in Facebook and became "the exclusive third-party advertising platform partner for Facebook", serving up display ads, in addition to search results. Microsoft had already lost some of the international display ad business in recent months.
However, Microsoft also said that it is expanding its search advertising partnership with Facebook, with Bing serving up more detailed search results and being used for Web search internationally, in addition to the U.S.
"We have deepened our joint work together on web search to provide even more compelling experiences to Facebook users with Bing," Tinter said. "As part of this expanded cooperation in search, our two companies will soon provide Facebook users with a more complete search experience by providing full access to great Bing features beyond a set of links, including richer answers combined with tools that help customers make faster, smarter decisions."

READ MORE - Facebook takes over display ads from Microsoft

Authors Guild: We don't want to be like RIAA

The Authors Guild agreed to a controversial settlement with Google because it feared repeating the mistakes that the music industry has made in dealing with digital works, it said last Friday.
Google and the Authors Guild have struggled to get final approval of a settlement granting Google the right to continue a 6-year book-scanning project than has digitized 12 million titles. Objections to that settlement from authors and academics have been heated, and despite revisions, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) continued to object in principle to the settlement last Thursday, saying "the (revised agreement) purports to grant legal rights that are difficult to square with the core principle of the Copyright Act that copyright owners generally control whether and how to exploit their works during the term of copyright."
With that in mind, many have wondered why the Authors Guild chose to settle the case rather than fight it out in court and clear up the issue of whether or not Google's decision to scan out-of-print yet copyright-protected books really is allowed under fair-use laws. The reason is simple, the Guild said in a blog post last Friday: legal victories haven't stopped copyright infringement in other forms of digital media.
"Copyright victories tend to be Pyrrhic in the digital age," the Guild wrote. If the Guild had prevailed in its suit against Google, it said it believed that copyright infringement would have just moved elsewhere, just as court victories won by the RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America) over Napster led to the rise of services like Kazaa and others.
And if it had lost, the Guild said it couldn't have guaranteed copyright protection for in-print books, which under the settlement Google is not allowed to scan without an agreement with the rights holder. "Nothing gets illegal file-sharing going quite so much as millions of unsecured digital works floating around the Internet," the Guild wrote.
At least musicians can go on tour and sell concert tickets to performances of their works; that's not exactly an option for authors, the Guild wrote. "For most authors, markets created by copyright are all we've got."
It's hard to determine what Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York will decide later this month when the parties come together for a hearing on whether or not to approve the settlement. The statements by the DOJ make it clear that the U.S. government believes Google and the plaintiffs are overstepping their bounds in creating an agreement that awards unique rights to Google.
But the Authors Guild doesn't think there was any other way to ensure that authors receive compensation for their work and avoid the "Napsterization" of the book publishing industry.
"Protecting authors' interests has always been our top priority: in this case a timely harnessing of Google was the best way to do it."

READ MORE - Authors Guild: We don't want to be like RIAA

Oracle releases out-of-band patch for server hole

Oracle has released a patch for a server flaw that can be exploited over a network without the use of a username or password.
The patch addresses a vulnerability in the Node Manager component of Oracle WebLogic Server, and affects the latest versions of the software, Oracle said in an advisory on Thursday.
It is highly unusual for Oracle to release an out-of-band patch for a critical flaw, as the company usually prefers to release critical patch updates every three months.
Read more of "Oracle releases out-of-band patch for server hole" at ZDNet UK.

READ MORE - Oracle releases out-of-band patch for server hole

Microsoft to Fix 17 year Old Bug

 Microsoft is due to release a patch in its Feb Security update for 17 yr old computer bug which was associated with DOS Operating System. The software glitch was originally detected in Windows 3.1 and then it got carried over to the subsequent windows version. The bug was discovered by a Google Security Researcher and the old bug invloves with a utility that allows newer versions of Windows to run programs that date from the DOS era. He was able to exploit the same utility in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well as Windows Vista and Windows 7.

The software giant is also going to release patches for five other critical windows bugs that allow hackers to steal the identity of the Windows PC and run their own programs in it. The fix also includes patches for Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2004 for Apple Macintosh machines. This is not a big security update for Microsoft in the recent times. In October last year, they released patches for 34 loopholes and eight of them are serious in nature.
There was an important security update from Microsoft in Jan this year regarding a security loophole in Explorer which was thought to be used by cybercriminals for the recent attack on Google.  The security researchers also reported a problem this week. The attackers are  able to see the files at the user's PC by using theInternet Explorer. Microsoft already made a security news about the problem and is expected to fix it in the future version.

READ MORE - Microsoft to Fix 17 year Old Bug