BOSTON/SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft Corp has issued one of its biggest security fixes, including a repair to its widely used Excel spreadsheet for flaws that could allow hackers to take control of a user's PC.

Adobe Systems Inc separately said that it would issue an update to its Flash Player on Thursday to address a vulnerability in the current version that hackers were exploiting to secretly gain remote access to computers.

Adobe's security engineers spent the weekend investigating the vulnerability, to figure out how to address the problem, then incorporated the fix into the latest update for the company's Flash software, said Brad Arkin, senior director of product security and privacy for Adobe.

Meanwhile, Microsoft released 10 patches to address 34 flaws it identified across its Office, Windows, Internet Explorer and other products.

It said three of the patches were high priority and should be deployed immediately to protect users from criminal attacks. The patches — which update software to write over glitches — are designed to protect users from hackers.

Fourteen of the vulnerabilities identified were in Microsoft Excel, eight were related to the Windows operating system and Internet Explorer. The total of 34 matched a record set in October 2009.

The flaws in Excel allowed hackers to create tainted spreadsheets that infect a user's PC once they are opened, allowing a hacker to remotely take control of that machine, according to Joris Evers, a spokesman for security software maker McAfee Inc.

Patching PCs can be a time-consuming process for corporate users, which need to test the patches before they deploy them to make sure they do not cause machines to crash because of compatibility issues with existing software.

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While it is pretty much the standard email client, Microsoft Outlook has long had problems rendering HTML correctly in emails. And the latest version, Outlook 2010, due sometime in the next several months, doesn’t look like it’s going to be any better — and it actually may be worse. And a lot of users aren’t happy about it at all.

A group of people apparently felt strongly enough to create a site called Outlook’s broken — Let’s fix it. The site is simple, it’s a constantly updating stream of users tweeting out their desire for Microsoft to fix this problem with Outlook. Right now, it’s just about 6,000 tweets, but it’s growing about a tweet every second (even at this hour of the night here in the U.S.). When a new tweet comes in, that user’s icon appears on the screen next to hundreds of other icons that had previously tweeted about it. And as the stream updates, random tweets about fixing Outlook are flashed on the screen.

Here’s the text from the site:

    Microsoft have confirmed they plan on using the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.

    This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more. Want proof? Here’s the same email in Outlook 2000 & 2010.

    Outlook 2010 is still in beta and Microsoft wants your feedback. It’s time to rally together and encourage Microsoft to embrace web standards before it’s too late.

    Let’s use Twitter to send a clear message to Microsoft.

    Join 5,927 others asking Microsoft to improve standards support and make sure you include fixoutlook.org in your tweet. We’ll pull together every tweet that includes the link here to give Microsoft a unified message from the community.

Again, to have your voice heard in this cause, simply include the http://fixoutlook.org/ URL somewhere in your tweet. Here’s the comparison image of what HTML rendering looks like in Outlook 2000 versus what it will look like in Outlook 2010.

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Market research firm The NDP Group has issued a report that says Web users who are active on social networking site Twitter are more engaged with music and, more importantly, tend to be more likely to purchase music online.

The firm bases these conclusions on less than 4,000 completed surveys for its quarterly music-acquisition study.

First, the engagement: according to the report, one-third of surveyed Twitter users listened to music on a social networking site, 41% listened to online radio (compared to 22% among all Web users) and 39% watched a music video online (versus 25% among all Web users) during the first quarter. Twitter users are also said to be twice to visit services like MySpace Music and Pandora than average Web users.

Music buyers’ awareness of Twitter was 67% in the first quarter, compared with 52% of general Web users; 12% of music buyers said they used Twitter in the past three months, versus 8% overall. Some 33% of Twitter users purchased a CD recently, compared with 23% of Web users.

Twitter users also seem to be more keen on purchasing music online, according to NDP: 34% bought a digital download, compared with 16% of general Web users. Apparently, they buy more on average too, 77% more so than users who are not on Twitter (yet).

Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD, commented:

    “[This] study shows that there are segments of consumers who are more actively integrating Twitter as a key tool for communicating and networking. Based on their music-purchasing history, active Twitter users are simply worth more to record labels and music retailers than those who are not using Twitter.”

We recently wrote about artist duo TRV$DJAM offering a download of their new mixtape free of charge in exchange of a tweet, and how Twitter helped Universal Motown Republic put one of its new artists, Asher Roth, on the map. You can find a lot of music-related applications tied to Twitter in this post.

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Acquiring Yahoo, one employee at a time: Microsoft has recruited Kevin Timmons, former lead of Yahoo’s data center team, to head up its Data Center Services organization. Timmons was once director of Operations at GeoCities and worked his way up to VP of Operations at Yahoo, where he led the build-out of the company’s data centers and infrastructure.

This move comes shortly after Microsoft data center exec Michael Manos left Redmond to fill a new position at Digital Realty Trust, and only two months after the company hired another Yahoo executive – Dayne Sampson – for a key position at Microsoft Global Foundation Services (which Data Center Services is a part of). 

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Microsoft will relaunch Windows Live Search under a new brand sometime early next year, says a source within the company. What we don’t know is what that new brand will be, although a few names have been thrown around. According to our source, a “final” decision has been made, but very few people inside of Microsoft are aware of it, and it could change.

Now LiveSide is saying there’s evidence the new search brand will be Kumo, which means “cloud” or “spider” in Japanese.

Why would Microsoft go through yet another rebranding effort? Live.com has a lot of different services under its umbrella (some server software, some client software) in addition to search. It’s also a burgeoning social network.

Over time, we’ve heard, Live.com will become a pure social network and personal productivity portal. You’ll go there to access email, calendar, photos, activity streams, etc. But search belongs somewhere else, and it definitely needs a fresh start.

Microsoft won’t comment on the name change, or even if there is a name change. But our sources caution us that nothing has been finalized, and the fate of Yahoo could swing this one way or another as well. So Kumo may very well be the name Microsoft is planning to use, but that decision may change.

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