Microsoft research
Microsoft Researchers say cybercrime loss estimates are a bunch of bunk
I get a real kick out of people who are unafraid to buck the system with their unconventional wisdom such as Microsoft Researchers Cormac Herley and Dinei Florêncio. Read more
Wi-Fi for White Spaces: Will Microsoft's WiFi-NC set new network standard?
Once upon a time, Microsoft had applied to the FCC to become an approved white spaces administrator. Read more
Microsoft Research: Hunting for HIV vaccine with techniques that fight spam
Everyone hates spam, except for the spammers, but what do spammers who are continuously trying to avoid spam filters have in common with the HIV virus? Microsoft Research has spotted similar patterns in the way they mutate and avoid detection. Read more
Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon researchers turn any surface into a touch screen
Researchers at Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University are showcasing a new wearable computer dubbed OmniTouch that turns any surface into a touch screen ... a wall, a notebook, your arm. One nit-picky detail, you have to be willing to clamp a projector to your shoulder, a la a pirate and his parrot. Read more
Happy 20th anniversary, Microsoft Research
Microsoft has just wrapped up a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Microsoft Research, which employs about 1,200 people (including about 3/4 of them with Ph.Ds) at labs around the world.
The celebration is well earned, considering Microsoft's advances in not just Windows, Kinect and other technologies it is best known for, but in areas as diverse as AIDS research and the environment. Read more
World Gone Mad: Microsoft Security Praised Again? MS Researchers Embracing GIMP?
If you aren't sitting, you might do so, since hackers are praising Microsoft security, Kapersky Labs likes Microsoft's security, and now IE9 has been crowned with offering the best protection against drive-by-downloads. If that didn't shock you, how about Microsoft Research using the open-source graphic editor Gimp to build a prototype for tracking changes to binary files like images in a revision control system? Here's a roundup of Microsoft news that either shocked or amused me. Read more
FBI Eyeing Microsoft Technologies to Assist Law Enforcement
In dealing with how law enforcement must keep pace with technology, and the challenges represented by the ever-changing world of wireless devices, the FBI published Wireless Evolution [PDF]. It was originally published in the March 2011 Emerging Technologies Research Bulletin, but this FOIA publication on Secrecy News was obtained by the Federation of American Scientists. Read more
Microsoft Researchers Find Spammers by Graphing Social Networks
Do you believe in the theory that only good people have lots of social media friends, while "bad people" don't have friends and don't leave many traces of themselves online? According to recent Microsoft Research, a spammer email account can be identified by the lack of connectivity to other people. Read more
Microsoft’s automated Future Home, what can go wrong?
Submitted by Ms. Smith on Thu, 06/09/11 - 3:02pm.Most folks love to try out new apps, yet what if those location-aware apps were not for your phone but instead for your home? Would you trust apps to control your home, turn the lights off and on, control the thermostat, or unlock your front door? Smart homes have not really taken off, mostly due to costs and complications to implement futuristic automation. Yet during a tour of the Microsoft Home of the Future, there was talk of these futuristic innovations eventually coming down in cost, just as smart devices did, so this type of futuristic home would be common. Read more
Microsoft's Project Tuva celebrates Richard Feynman lecture series 50-year anniversary
UPDATED/CORRECTED: 04/21: Microsoft acquired the rights to a famed filmed lecture series by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and posted them online for all to see via its Project Tuva site. The series includes seven lectures by Dr. Feynman speaking at Cornell University in 1964. However, Dr. Read more
Latest sign Google is smarter than the rest: 4 Googlers named ACM Fellows
Google led the way with four of its employees elected ACM Fellows this week in recognition of their contributions to computing and computer science. Overall, 41 membes of the Association of Computing Machinery were named fellows. Read more
Microsoft Wiffler lets smartphones use free WiFi from moving vehicles
Microsoft Researchers have been working on a technology that would let mobile phones and other 3G devices automatically switch to public WiFi even while the device is traveling in a vehicle. The technology is dubbed Wiffler and earlier this year, researchers took it for some test drives in Amherst, Mass, Seattle and San Francisco. Read more
Research: Unusual, Unpopular Passwords Are Simple and Most Secure
Microsoft researchers studied password security and concluded that popularity is everything. Enterprises might be interested to discover that simple but weird is what works as the best way to protect passwords from statistical-guessing attacks. In fact, a study found that popular passwords are easy to guess and pose a bigger risk to online security than weak ones. Read more
Researchers sound alarm on Web app "side channel" data leaks
New research from Microsoft and Indiana University has found that data leaks from Web applications such as popular tax programs and online health programs - even when encrypted -- is a real and growing threat.
According to the research, it's inevitable that a Software-as-a-Service application's data flow will be exposed on the network to some degree when passing back and forth between a web client (browser) and server even when HTTPS and encryption such as WPA/WPA2 is in effect. Read more
Microsoft Research to strut its stuff at annual TechFest
Microsoft Research this week will show off its latest creations, which include a Mobile Surface that lets you turn any tabletop surface into a computing input device and a telephone that lets you translate conversations between people speaking different languages. Microsoft Research is blogging the event here. Read more
Can Microsoft be the new Apple? Why failure would be its savior
The world is agog at the most obvious editorial published in the New York Times yesterday about Microsoft's lack of innovation. Today, Microsoft responded with equal predictability. The thing is, Microsoft has always been a follower. It hasn't got a roster of ground-breaking ideas to its credit. It has risen to success by noticing others' great technologies and building its own version that works 80% as well as the original, but costs less. Read more
Microsoft's data cache technology, code-named Velocity, speeds app performance
Microsoft is achieving impressive performance gains with "Velocity", the code name for a new Microsoft data caching technology currently in Community Technical Preview. Velocity is a distributed in-memory application cache technology that combines in-memory data caches across multiple servers, appearing as one large data cache to data hungry applications.
By accessing data in Velocity data caches, expensive hits to the SQL database are avoided and application data is delivered with much less latency. Server CPU and disk resource consumption are also lowered. Read more
Microsoft, researchers release new operating system project: Barrelfish
You've likely heard of Microsoft's next-gen operating system projects Midori and Singularity, but earlier this month researchers released a prototype for another OS, code-named Barrelfish. Barrelfish is an OS written specifically for multicore environments. It hopes to improve the performance of boxes with such chips by creating a network bus, if you will, between cores. Read more
Six reasons why Microsoft struggles with innovation
When I think of Exchange 2010 and its hybrid approach to cloud computing, it reminds me that Microsoft can be innovative. With Exchange 2010, users can keep some e-mail accounts on premises while sending others to the cloud. It strikes a good balance between maintaining what customers want in an e-mail server product while gently leading them into next-generation cloud e-mail. But Exchange's hybrid approach is the exception. Overall, Microsoft struggles mightily with innovation for these six hard-to-fix reasons. Read more
Microsoft demos SecondLight 3D UI with its next-gen Surface
Submitted by Microsoft Subnet on Tue, 05/19/09 - 7:41pm. Microsoft has been investing a lot of energy into new user interfaces such as gesture-based interactions that replace mouse clicks and hologram virtual meetings. Here's a quick look at how the company envisions the next generation "touch" computing interface for its Surface PC. Read more
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