Microsoft profits in the three months to the end of December fall slightly as lower computer sales hit its core Windows business.

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Microsoft profits down slightly

Microsoft, long ridiculed as the tech industry dullard, has surprised critics with its Windows Phone software. But will consumers be tempted enough to try it?

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Microsoft, Defying Image, Has a Design Gem in Windows Phone

Microsoft, long ridiculed as the tech industry dullard, has surprised critics with its Windows Phone software. But will consumers be tempted enough to try it?

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Microsoft, Defying Image, Has a Design Gem in Windows Phone

Microsoft to start automatically updating Windows users to the newest versions of its Internet Explorer browser.

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‘Silent’ updates for IE browser

SALT LAKE CITY — Microsoft’s Bill Gates took the witness stand Monday in a $1 billion antitrust lawsuit accusing the software maker of duping a competitor prior to its rollout of Windows 95. Gates, wearing a gray suit and a yellow tie, was the first witness to testify as Microsoft lawyers presented their case in the trial that’s been ongoing in federal court in Salt Lake City for about a month. Read full article > >

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Bill Gates testifies in $1 billion antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in Utah

Last week, at a large developers’ event, Microsoft formally introduced its next operating system to the world, and it’s nothing like the Windows you’re used to. It’s clear the company has watched and learned as Apple stormed into the marketplace with the iPhone and iPad. Microsoft’s new Windows 8 looks and feels like it’s built from the ground up to do away with the noisy, dated interfaces of the desktop computer, replacing them with a touch-friendly experience that’s focused on a new way of computing. Read full article > >

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Microsoft breaks with PC world, reinvents itself with Windows 8

Last week, at a large developers’ event, Microsoft formally introduced its next operating system to the world, and it’s nothing like the Windows you’re used to. It’s clear the company has watched and learned as Apple stormed into the marketplace with the iPhone and iPad. Microsoft’s new Windows 8 looks and feels like it’s built from the ground up to do away with the noisy, dated interfaces of the desktop computer, replacing them with a touch-friendly experience that’s focused on a new way of computing. Read full article > >

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Microsoft breaks with PC world, reinvents itself with Windows 8

The Ledge, a series of glass boxes that extend off the 103rd floor of the Willis Tower in Chicago, gives visitors a unique perspective on the world.

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Hanging 104 Floors Above Chicago, There’s No Time for Vertigo

There is lots more in the hopper — budget deals, an elegy to past guest bloggers, Chinese crackdown, reader mail, and so on. But just to change the pace, a little tech tip: If you are using Gmail, and you’re not using CloudMagic , you are shortening your effective lifespan, plus sapping the economy, by wasting your precious time. Gmail itself is of course magic in countless ways. But its search-your-own archives function, while effective, is not elegant or lightning-quick. It retrieves results in relatively small batches, usually 20 at a time — I assume as a way to buy extra processing time as it goes back through your older archived mail. Its Boolean search features are OK; if you’re looking for old mail it can be slow ( man , are we spoiled!); and when it brings up results, it puts them in your normal mail window, so you don’t see the message you might have been working on. Yes, there are ways around this last point — and again, I stipulate that the world’s got bigger problems than this. But still. CloudMagic, which is free and works with Firefox and Chrome on Windows, Mac, and Linux, allows you to retrieve Gmail messages almost instantly, and to view them in a side window next to your main Gmail inbox. It does this in a way that uses up a modest amount of disk space. It essentially mirrors your Gmail files, contacts, and documents onto your own computer, via IMAP , and then indexes them for retrieval right on your machine. For a gauge of the necessary space: I have about 10GB of stuff in several Gmail accounts, and the CloudMagic support files on my computer for all of them occupy about 2.6GB. These days, if you have to worry about 2.6GB on the disk, you’ve got other computing problems. The advantage of the local store is speed. When you start typing the word or name you’re looking for, matches come up immediately, as if you were working with Google’s online instant search. The index can cover several Gmail accounts and bring results from them all at once, which I find a big convenience, and it also extends to Google Docs and contacts, all from the same search box. More info here , and demo video here . If it has bugs or problems, I haven’t run into them. The program — which actually installs as a browser extension — comes from the Webyog company, with offices in Bangalore and Santa Clara. Speaking of being spoiled, I have one small item for for the CloudMagic programmers’ to-do list: even though its material is stored off-line, you have to be online and connected to “real” Gmail for the searches to work, for reasons explained here . But I’m not spoiled enough to be other than grateful for this application. Check it out.

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Now For Something Completely Different: CloudMagic

Looking at Kevin Poulsen, you’d never think he was once one of America’s most notorious hackers. Hell, you probably wouldn’t even believe what he is now — a fearless and brilliant investigative reporter at Wired.com . He lives on soups from Costco and Mexican Cokes; his desktop background was a photo of his baby daughter. It took me months of working with Poulsen at Wired to place his name, check out his Wikipedia page and recall that he’d been sentenced to 51 months in jail back in the ’90s for hacking. Poulsen brings all of his background to his new book Kingpin , the story of how a hacker named Max Butler briefly became the very epicenter of the lucrative black market in stolen credit card numbers. While Butler’s exploits and the disjointed efforts to catch him make for a cracking (if straightforward) crime story, that’s not what makes Kingpin a milestone in the anthropology of hacking, up there with Steven Levy’s Hackers . Rather, what will make this book endure is Poulsen’s elegant elucidation of how the hacking world evolved from its pimply, ideological beginnings into a global criminal enterprise. He doesn’t belabor the point or even indulge in the sort of nostalgia for the old days you might expect. Rather, it’s a statement of fact: If your information is valuable and easy to get to, it will be stolen. And not by some cyberlibertarian with a love for Burning Man. The mechanics of Butler’s operation make for fascinating reading. Much of the credit card information he acquired did not come from e-commerce, but rather from retail establishments that improperly stored customer data. In fact, an early jackpot came from a computer Butler hacked into that happened to be sitting in a Pizza Schmizza restaurant near Vancouver, Washington, a big town north of Portland, Oregon. His scanning put him inside a Windows machine that, on closer inspection, was in the back office of a Pizza Schmizza restaurant in Vancouver, Washington; he knew the place, it was near his mother’s house. As he looked around the computer, he realized the PC was acting as the back-end system for the point-of-sale terminals at the restaurant — it collected the day’s credit card transactions and sent them in a single batch every night to the credit card processor. Max found that day’s batch stored as a plain text file, with the full magstripe of every customer card recorded inside. This kind of data — the “full magstripe” data — is much more valuable than just your credit card number. Though it’s just three lines of text, it can be fed into a machine like the MSR206 and encoded onto a new credit card. Hand it off to a mule, generally a pretty young women, and the next thing you know, there’s a pile of expensive handbags in the trunk that can be resold for pure profit. Hackers, in the new “carder” operations, are merely the beginning of a sad, lame hustle, less Julian Assange and more pickpocket. You don’t always need to be a fan of a subculture to write about it. Outsiders writing about basketball players or ingenues or furries works just fine. Hacking isn’t like that. First, it’s highly technical. Second, no one will give you access to their adventures if they don’t think you’ll get it. Hackers stick with their own and they tend to be suspicious of the ink-stained wretches who like to caricature them. Poulsen’s bona fides and oft-tested bullshit-o-meter obviously got him amazing access to Butler and his associates, so he could have written all kinds of accounts. But Kingpin isn’t laudatory or moralizing. Instead, it’s the first honest account of what the dark side of hacking is really like now, at once more prosaic and more dangerous than you want to believe.

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What It’s Really Like to Be a Hacker

Two children trapped inside a sinking car banged on the windows and screamed for help, a court hears.

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River plunge children ‘screaming’

Microsoft says that 1 in 10 users who tried to install an update to their Windows Phone system experienced problems.

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Microsoft update failed 1 in 10

Microsoft says that 1 in 10 users who tried to install an update to their Windows Phone system experienced problems.

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Microsoft update failed 1 in 10

Microsoft has withdrawn a software update for its Windows Phone system after it made some Samsung handsets unusable.

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Windows Phone update hit by bug

Probably not the reception they were hoping for: Nokia shares fell as much as 10 percent after the ailing phone maker announced it was partnering with Microsoft to use Windows Phone 7 on its products. Previously, the company had been using its own…

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Nokia, Microsoft Ink Deal