Microsoft

Top German cop uses spyware on daughter, gets hacked in retaliation: What happens when you install a trojan on your daughter's computer to keep track of her online activities? If you're a certain German security official, nothing good.

Intel's dream of x86 CPUs inside smartphones closer to reality: Intel finally has a credible smartphone processor, and has scored two design wins with both Lenovo and Motorola bringing Atom-powered Android phones to market this year.

LG has become the latest in a long line of Android handset vendors to sign a patent licensing agreement with Microsoft. The agreement allows the South Korean conglomerate to use Microsoft patented technology in phones, tablets, and other consumer electronics running both Android and Chrome OS.

This is the eleventh agreement between Microsoft and Android-using OEMs, with other licensees including Samsung, HTC, and Acer. In total, Microsoft says that more than 70 percent of all Android smartphones sold in the US are covered by a similar patent agreement. The only major manufacturer now without a license agreement is Motorola Mobility.

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but the form is likely to be comparable to that of the other license agreements, which all involve payment of a royalty to Microsoft for each handset sold.

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The Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, known for dismantling botnets like Kelihos and Rustock, is testing a new service to distribute threat data in real time to governments and partners.

Microsoft employees revealed their plans at the International Conference on Cyber Security in New York, according to Kaspersky Lab's ThreatPost blog. The service is undergoing beta tests internally on a 70-node cluster running Hadoop on top of Windows Server, and stores data captured from botnet takedowns and other sources, such as the IP addresses of infected systems. Personally identifiable information would be stripped out of any threat feed provided to partners.

"Microsoft collects the data by leveraging its huge Internet infrastructure, including a load-balanced, 80gb/second global network, to swallow botnets whole—pointing botnet infected hosts to addresses that Microsoft controls, capturing their activity and effectively taking them offline," Kaspersky reported.

Ultimately, Microsoft expects to provide three real-time feeds, for free, to governments, Computer Emergency Response Teams, Internet Service Providers and other private companies, which would access them using APIs. "Companies could use the data to look for opportunistic malware infections that often accompany botnet infections, or correlate data on botnet hosts with data on click fraud and other scams," Kaspersky noted.

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In June 2009, a Massachusetts state trooper was gathering evidence in a case that involved a suspect having sex with an underage girl. He hoped to find one crucial piece of evidence—video of the encounter—on a digital device from the suspect's home. But the device wasn't a computer; it was the suspect's game console. The investigator was stumped as to how to sift the device for clues, and he turned to a digital forensics mailing list for help.

I am working on a case where it is believed that the suspect may have recorded himself having sex with a 14 year old girl using an Xbox 360. The Xbox was set up in his bedroom and had a webcam attached to it that was pointed directly at his bed.

The suspect did record two other victims, and those videos were found on his PC in a different room. All of the victims say that they were not aware that they were being recorded and that his PC was not in the room at the time of the incidents.

Does anyone know if it is possible to record video with an Xbox 360? I looked at the hard drive using Explorer360 and was able to locate a large file (460 MB) that was created on the same day as the incident but I am unable to extract any useful data from it.

Don't call it Microsoft's final CES keynote—call it a "pause." That's how Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, tried to spin the news that this would be the last foreseeable CES keynote address delivered by a Microsoft CEO after a 14-year streak. But it wasn't so much a keynote as an infomercial talk show—rather than driving the show himself, Ballmer chose to have American Idol presenter Ryan Seacrest act as the host and interviewer for the evening.

Buried in the hour-long keynote, there were a few nuggets of news. Some of it got spilled earlier in the day at AT&T's Developer Summit at The Palms by Ballmer himself—the arrival of the first 4G LTE Windows phone from Nokia, the Lumina 900, in an exclusive deal with AT&T, though no release date was given. The Lumia 710, a 3G Windows Phone, will be the first Nokia available in the US, available through T-Mobile on January 11. Ballmer also highlighted another Windows phone coming to AT&T. the HTC Titan II, with a 4.7-inch screen and a 16-megapixel camera.

After a musical interlude in which a choir sang "tweets" people had allegedly posted to Twitter in anticipation of the keynote, Ballmer moved onto the XBox and Kinect. He announced a set of content deals for the XBox, including deals with Comcast, the Wall Street Journal, Fox, and IGN to deliver video content directly to XBox Live subscribers. Comcast will bring "the XFinity library" to XBox, Ballmer said, and others will produce original content for the platform. The content deals are part of what Ballmer described as the evolution of the XBox from purely a gaming platform to an "all in one entertainment device for your living room."

The Kinect interface got a good deal of stage time, including a demonstration of voice integration with Bing search for content on the XBox and an interactive learning game from Sesame Street. And Kinect will now be coming officially to Windows, with the commercial release of the Kinect API for Windows coming on February 1. Kinect API code had previously been in beta primarily for research use; now Microsoft is working with over 200 companies to develop software for the Kinect, Ballmer said.

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Microsoft and CES are parting ways after this show ends, at least when it comes to having a high-profile presence. So this will be Microsoft's final keynote address at CES. Expect to see plenty about Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7—and more. We'll be there to report live when the festivities start at 6:30pm PT (GMT-8)/8:30pm CT.

Microsoft has published a new Windows Phone update, build 8107, to resolve a problem where the soft keyboard sometimes disappears, leaving users no way to type anything on the phone. The bug can affect any handset on any carrier, so it should be rolled out to everyone as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, Microsoft isn't willing to say who will actually receive the update, or when.

During the troubled rollout of the NoDo update, the company published a useful guide to tell users how far through the approval and deployment process their particular combination of handset and carrier were, allowing them to have a good idea when each upgrade would be available.