Microsoft News Tracker

Grant Gross at Infoworld:

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Microsoft filed formal paperwork Wednesday to extend part of an antitrust judgment against the company for at least two years.

The extension of U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s November 2002 antitrust settlement would give Microsoft more time to complete work on technical documentation for licensees of its communications protocols. The DOJ and Microsoft filed a joint request Wednesday for Kollar-Kotelly to approve the extension, which the DOJ proposed in May.

We mentioned it in May and this is basically a formality since it had already been approved by Judge Kollar-Kotelly, but it’s that pesky documentation again that also tripped Microsoft up with the European Union. The plaintiffs can also ask for an additional three year extension if they believe Microsoft still hasn’t gotten it right.

Clint Boulton at internetnews.com:

Intel is no longer the sole star of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 show.

Microsoft Corp. today trotted out the second beta of Windows Server Virtual Server 2005 service pack 1 (SP1), a version that supports virtualization features on AMD and Intel processors.

Beta one of the product supported Intel virtualization from the get-go; R2 SP1 debuts support for AMD, a clear indication that customers don’t want to virtualize solely on Intel-based machines.

You can download the beta here and there’s a list of other features. Beta 2 arrived a little early, but the final release is still scheduled for 1Q 2007.

As promised earlier this month, the beta of Microsoft’s hobbyist game development tooling, XNA Game Studio Express, shipped yesterday as Chris Paladino reveals at the Gamescore blog:

The XNA Game Studio Express beta is ready to go! Get out there and start your game programming career!
…
More info, assets, help, and everything you need can be found over at the XNA Homepage.

This intial release is targeted at PC (i.e. Windows XP) games only, but the final version which also supports Xbox 360 is due near the end of the year.

From the AP:

Video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. on Thursday said it has signed a deal with video game advertiser Massive Inc. to incorporate ads into its games.

Under the agreement, Massive, a Microsoft Corp. subsidiary, will include in its advertising network a portfolio of Electronic Arts games developed for the Xbox 360 and PCs. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Another success for Massive which Microsoft acquired in May, particularly considering Electronic Arts’ importance in the game publishing business.

Update: Electronic Arts also did a separate deal with IGA Worldwide for advertising in other games in its stable.

Tool Generates Fake Searches for Privacy:

A new tool seeks to make your searches more private by hiding them in plain sight. TrackMeNot periodically sends fake, innocuous queries to search engines, making it harder for someone to glean your actual search habits by reviewing the companies’ logs that contain your queries.

The AOL release of barely veiled user search data is the proximate cause, but think about this a minute - each user of this program is going to be generating a lot of fake searches.

The tool, developed by two researchers at New York University, sends random searches, such as “boston clock” and “croissant,” to the four largest search engines — Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s MSN and AOL. A fake search is made every 12 seconds under default configurations; the tool can generate millions of unique queries from its list, and users can add their own.

A whole lot of fake searches! Aside from the added traffic on the engines, if the searches are evenly distributed, I guess we can expect Google’s share to drop and MSN’s to rise. Then there’s what it does to keyword popularity and search ad pricing. The only saving grace is that there aren’t likely to be that many folks who want to have their browser chugging away in the background generating 300 searches an hour. Anyhow, if you want to do your part to increase entropy, TrackMeNot is available here, but requires Firefox.