Microsoft

Barnes & Noble received a boost in its patent infringement case against Microsoft after staff attorneys at the US International Trade Commission recommended that ITC Judge Theodore Essex find that the book company had not infringed on three Microsoft patents, reports Bloomberg.

Microsoft brought the case against Barnes & Noble in March of last year, claiming that the NOOK and NOOK Color tablets infringed on five patents. In the run up to the eventual hearings, Redmond dropped two of the patents from the case, with three remaining.

Essex discarded Barnes & Noble's affirmative defense in which the company alleged that Microsoft's attempt to assert patents against Android was a breach of antitrust law, leaving subsequent discussion to revolve around the validity and applicability of Microsoft's patents. The ITC lawyers, acting as an independent third party and giving their own assessment of the evidence presented, argue that there is no infringement case to answer.

After Essex has reviewed the relevant evidence presented by Microsoft, Barnes & Noble, and the ITC's own lawyers, he is expected to release his findings on April 27th. This initial determination will then be reviewed by an ITC panel, which will make the final decision on the case's outcome.

The software giant is downplaying the significance of the ITC lawyers' position. In a statement, a company representative said, "This was a preliminary argument by the Office of Unfair Import Investigations ('OUII') staff attorney, which was filed before the presentation of the evidence at the hearing has occurred. The OUII staff may change its position after the hearing. Additionally, the administrative law judge will hear the evidence and arguments at the hearing and will come to his own conclusion."

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Microsoft has published the specification for C++ AMP (Accelerated Massive Parallelism), its new system for heterogeneous parallel processing in C++. When Microsoft first announced C++ AMP in June last year, it said that it wanted to make the AMP specification open to all.

AMP has been developed by Microsoft with input from AMD and NVIDIA. Microsoft's implementation allows AMP programs to use both the main CPU and Direct3D video cards (via the company's DirectCompute API), though the specification should also permit OpenGL/OpenCL-based implementations.

Microsoft's new version of Internet Explorer has barred browser plugins in the Metro environment. But Microsoft has revealed a method that plugin-dependent websites can use to leap over Metro's walls and reach the green fields of the conventional Windows desktop, where Flash is still allowed to roam free.

The relevance of proprietary browser plugins is declining as standards-based Web technologies mature. Native Web technologies don't yet supply complete functional equivalence with the capabilities of plugins, but the open Web has the advantage of greater ubiquity.

It may be 2012, but apparently someone hasn't got the message. Internet Explorer's share of the desktop browser market grew in January, and most of that growth was due to Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer 6 only runs on one supported operating system, Windows XP, and that too gained market share last month.

A botnet capable of delivering almost four billion spam messages per day has been confirmed resurrected—more than four months after Microsoft celebrated its untimely demise.

Researchers with Kaspersky Lab reported on Tuesday that Kelihos, a peer-to-peer botnet that also goes by the name Hlux, continues to spew spam in a variety of languages. A new version of the underlying malware appeared as early as September 28, 2011, a day after Microsoft took credit for disrupting the rogue network by commandeering the infected computers and obtaining a court order seizing the Internet addresses used to help control them.

Microsoft may have scored an early victory in its legal tussle with Barnes & Noble. The two companies are engaged in parallel battles, one via the Department of Justice, another via United States International Trade Commission. In March 2011, Microsoft accused Barnes & Noble of patent infringement with its NOOK and NOOK Color products; in retaliation, Barnes & Noble made a broad complaint claiming that Microsoft is being an abusive monopoly and that the patents are in any case irrelevant. That antitrust complaint looks likely to be rejected by the ITC, a decision that favors Microsoft.

The document dismissing the antitrust complaint is under seal; however, its title, "Initial Determination Granting Microsoft's Motion for Summary Determination of Respondents' First Affirmative Defense of Patent Misuse," is public, with intellectual property analyst Florian Mueller certain that this means rejection of the claim. Mueller has been commissioned by Microsoft to conduct a study on the worldwide use of FRAND patents.

Microsoft has welcomed the ITC's decision. "Today's action by the ITC makes clear that Barnes & Noble's patent misuse defense was meritless," said deputy general counsel David Howard. Redmond remains open to offering licenses to the bookseller, adding it to the growing list of Android-using companies that pay a fee to Microsoft, with Howard adding, "We remain as open as ever to extending a license to Barnes & Noble, and invite them to join the many other major device makers in paying for the Microsoft-developed intellectual property they use in their devices."

Barnes & Noble's antitrust complaint was made as an affirmative defense against Microsoft's action. Dismissal of this defense has looked likely since June, when ITC staff pointed out that patent law in general creates no obligation to offer licenses or make those licenses freely available. The Department of Justice may arrive at a different conclusion to the ITC.

The ITC action is still on-going, and with the antitrust defense dismissed will focus on the validity and applicability of the patents in question. Earlier this month, Microsoft removed one patent from the suit entirely, and also dropped several of the claims relating to the four remaining patents. In dropping the claims, Microsoft stipulated that the action was "not an admission as to the merits of any claim," but rather was meant to "simplify the Investigation, streamline the hearing, and converse the Parties' and Commission's resources in consideration of the amount of time allotted for the hearing."

The ITC trial will start on Monday, February 6th.

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Major e-mail providers, including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! are teaming up with PayPal, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more, to implement a new system for authenticating e-mail senders to try to prevent the sending of fradulent spam and phishing messages.

The protocol that powers e-mail, SMTP, dates back to a more trusting era; a time when the only people who sent you e-mails were people you wanted to send you e-mails. SMTP servers are willing to accept pretty much any e-mail destined for a mailbox they know about (which is, admittedly, an improvement on how things used to be, when they'd accept e-mails even for mailboxes they didn't know about), a fact which spammers and phishers exploit daily.

Microsoft has announced that the Technical Preview Program for the software suite codenamed "Office 15" has started. This represents the first time that the company will start to receive customer feedback on the software from a select group of NDA-covered testers.

Redmond is describing Office 15 as the Office team's "most ambitious undertaking yet." In addition to the standard desktop software, Microsoft will be simultaneously updating server software, including SharePoint, Lync, and Exchange, the Office 365 cloud service, and mobile clients.

Office 15 is likely to be the first version of Office to ever ship with a touch-friendly user interface, and could well sport a Metro-style UI.

The Technical Preview is a private test; those keen to try out Microsoft's latest and greatest will have to wait for the public beta, due in summer.

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