Microsoft has begun a campaign to actively urge users of its 8-year-old Internet Explorer 6 browser to upgrade.

After launching IE 8 in March, Micosoft has concurred with critics that IE 6 is outdated. Many people have dropped the older browser, but the remaining users are often the tough cases--those who don't have a choice because of corporate computing policy or who aren't tech-savvy enough to realize there's a reason to move on.

It's this latter population Microsoft is targeting with a campaign that runs through June 2010 that touts its own IE 8 as a better alternative. The campaign's first visible elements are a video aimed at online holiday shoppers and a Web slice to promote daily deals at eBay. Web slices are basically live bookmarks that can show miniature Web pages in the browser.

"What we're doing with the outreach is help users understand how to protect themselves against social engineering threats that exist and to help people understand how Internet Explorer 8 puts people in control of their own privacy online," said Ryan Servatius, senior product manager for Internet Explorer. Security was one of the big problems with IE 6, and Microsoft now boasts that security features in IE 8 block 2 million malware sites a day.

According to Net Applications' statistics, Internet Explorer 6 is still the most widely used browser, with 23.3 percent share of usage in October, followed by IE 7 at 18.2 percent and IE 8 at 18.1 percent. The newer browsers are gaining on IE 6, but so are rivals including Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, and Google's Chrome.

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The Hotmail hack attack this week has laid bare the woeful password choices of web users, as reports emerged that up to 1 million web email accounts could have been compromised.

The most common password was "123456", while many users had names or dates of birth - all easy pickings for the determined password cracker.

Password security was thrown into the spotlight this week after it was revealed that 10,000 Hotmail user names and passwords had been leaked online. A day later, a separate list of 20,000 addresses and passwords for Gmail, Yahoo and AOL were found on the web.

The size of the lists, one of which contains only email addresses beginning with A and B, have led security experts to fear that thousands more accounts have been compromised.

Hackers frequently target email accounts because from there they can obtain passwords to other more important accounts such as internet banking. Often, the same password is used for multiple online accounts.

Hijacked email addresses are also used to conduct spam campaigns and targeted phishing attacks on the victim's contacts. Security firm Websense reported that some of the addresses compromised this week were already being used for this purpose.

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Everyone wants to be able to run Flash applications on the iPhone. Or wait, scratch that: Every major software vendor named after a Native American earth-based building material wants to be able to run Flash applications on the iPhone. And if its latest plan comes to fruition, it looks like Adobe might finally get its wish -- albeit not in quite the way it had hoped.

So far, Adobe has been stymied by the same thing that has prevented Sun Microsystems from porting the JVM to the iPhone. According to Apple's iPhone SDK license agreement, "No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)." That means Java is out, as is the runtime for Flash's built-in ActionScript language -- ergo no Flash Player for iPhone.

iPhone apps are all the rage, but Apple makes it hard on developers. Read about one developer's torturous iPhone app dev journey..

But Adobe thinks it has found a way around Apple's requirements. Flash Professional CS5, the forthcoming version of the company's authoring environment, will allow developers to take existing Flash applications and compile them into native binaries for the iPhone. The resulting apps will be completely stand-alone, with no runtimes and no Flash Player required - if Apple lets Adobe get away with it, that is.

Is Adobe pulling a fast one on Apple?
Adobe isn't the only company looking to allow developers to build iPhone apps in unorthodox ways. If Apple's Objective C language isn't your bag, MonoTouch is a commercial SDK that lets you write iPhone apps in C#. The cross-platform Unity game engine uses similar techniques to compile iPhone apps from a combination of C# and JavaScript code. And Rhomobile's Rhodes framework enables cross-platform smartphone development using HTML and Ruby.

One thing all of these products share in common, however, is that they don't output native iPhone binaries on their own. All of them generate intermediate code that must be imported into Apple's Xcode IDE for the final build process. It's sort of like the early days of C++, where the C++ "compiler" was really just a preprocessor that output ordinary C code.

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has done his best over the past year-plus to try to dampen expectations around Windows 7. He’s doing it again this week during his pre-launch European tour, telling press, analysts and others there that he doesn’t expect Windows 7 to provide a sudden and miraculous boost to the PC market.

But I’m more intrigued by a related comment Ballmer made, as I’ve thought about this very scenario myself in recent months. Ballmer pointed to Vista as an example that tester feedback may not always be the best measure of the success of a new operating system release. From an October 7 Bloomberg story:

“’The test feedback (on Windows 7) has been good, but the test feedback on Vista was good,’ Ballmer, 53, said in an interview last week. ‘I am optimistic, but the proof will be in the pudding.’”

It feels like a long time ago when testers were assessing the many Longhorn/Vista builds that Microsoft issued both before and after the “reset” in 2004. Before the reset, Microsoft officials heard from testers that there were some deep-seated problems with its next planned version of Windows. As a result, the Windows team went back to the drawing board and rejiggered it. Then there were lots more builds. And finally, in the fall of 2006, Microsoft released Vista to manufacturing.

I’ve been trying to recall if there were any early warning signs about the problems Vista had when it first came out. Were there any major outcries from the hundreds of thousands of public and private testers about Vista/Longhorn being bloated; slow to power on and shut down; and including such an onerous number of security prompts that many users would just shut off UAC?

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he internet regulator Icann has approved plans to let web addresses be written in non-Latin characters – such as Mandarin, Arabic, Hindu or Russian Cyrillic script – that it says represents the "biggest change" to how it works since its invention 40 years ago.

The proposal would mean that domain names – such as guardian.co.uk – could be written in the other languages and be understood natively by the machines that connect computers together over the web.

The first such Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) could be up and running by the middle of next year, said Rod Beckstrom, the president of Icann, which oversees the development of such technologies online.

"Of the 1.6 billion users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based," Beckstrom said at the opening of Icann's conference in Seoul, South Korea, this week. The conference approved the change today, its last day, following more than nine years of work and two years of testing.

The Icann vote means there is now a universal internet address code that will work in any language and everywhere. That is needed because the computers that translate the address into a string of digits carrying the destination computer's "internet address" have previously only functioned with Latin letters. The new scheme will translate those addresses no matter what the script used for the address is.

That could mean an explosion in the number of people who can use the internet directly with keyboards developed in their own languages, rather than struggling with unfamiliar Roman letters as used in the west.

Thus a Korean user will be able to write a web address that is almost entirely in Chinese script, rather than a few characters in Mandarin with the suffix ".kr". Presently, only the domain name can be in non-Latin script; the suffix, such as .com or .org, must be in Latin script.

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Although Windows 7 has been praised for loading and shutting down faster than prior versions of Windows, one software company says that, in many cases, the new operating system can take longer to get started than Windows Vista.

Iolo Technlogies, which sells PC tune-up software, said its lab unit found that a brand-new machine running Windows 7 takes a minute and 34 seconds to become usable, as compared to a minute and 6 seconds for Windows Vista. Iolo notes that it measured not the time it takes for the desktop to appear--which can be as little as 40 seconds on a fresh installation of Windows 7--but rather the time it takes to become fully usable "with CPU cycles no longer significantly high and a true idle state achieved."

The results are also fairly similar to what CNET found in its testing of the operating system. A Microsoft representative was not immediately able to comment on Iolo's findings.

Iolo plans to release more details on its findings and methodology next week. Although it remains to be seen just how it reached its conclusion, the report is clearly not good news for an operating system whose primary selling point is doing the basics better than past versions of Windows.

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Add Chrome Frame to instantly boost Microsoft browser's JavaScript performance

Microsoft's Internet Explorer zips through JavaScript nearly 10 times faster than usual when Google's new Chrome Frame plug-in is partnered with the browser, benchmark tests show.

According to tests run by Computerworld, Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) with the plug-in was 9.6 times faster than IE8 on its own. Computerworld ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite three times each for IE8 with Chrome Frame, and IE8 without the plug-in, then averaged the scores.

Released Tuesday, Chrome Frame lets IE utilize the Chrome browser's WebKit rendering engine, as well as its high-performance V8 JavaScript engine. Google pitched the plug-in as a way to instantly improve the performance of the notoriously slow IE, and as a way for Web developers to support standards IE can't handle, such as HTML 5.

The extra speed and HTML 5 support are necessary, said Google, if IE users are to run advanced Web applications such as Google Wave, a collaboration and communications tool that debuted last May.

Notably, IE8's SunSpider scores with Chrome Frame running equaled Google's Chrome browser, a solid indication that the plug-in effectively turns any version of IE into the speed equivalent of Chrome itself.

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A list of applications and their compatibility status with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is available via the link below. Snow Leopard is the most recent operating system from Apple.

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When I think of Exchange 2010 and its hybrid approach to cloud computing, it reminds me that Microsoft [1] 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.

Exchange's hybrid approach is the exception, however. Overall, Microsoft struggles mightily with innovation for these six hard-to-fix reasons.

No. 1: Me-too thinking.
No. 2: Microsoft's customers don't like change.
No. 3: An inability to partner for great technology.
No. 4: Running counter to where everyone else is going.
No. 5: Tying new ideas too tightly with its established wares.
No. 6: Offering too many versions of the same basic product.

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Stop the presses: According to the U.K.'s Daily Mail, a security guard was hunting around on Google Earth and spotted a mysterious object that he believes is the storied Loch Ness Monster.

The most shocking part of the report: The fact that it took this long for anyone to claim that Google Earth has found something funny swimming around in Loch Ness. I mean, hello, people. Google Earth has been feeding us tasty satellite maps for over four years now. If Google Street View can surface multiple puking drunks and streakers, you'd think that a massive sea monster (enthusiasts claim it may be a long-thought-extinct reptile called a plesiosaur, to be more specific) would have a tough time staying hidden from Larry and Sergey's snooping.

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For most companies, bosses come and go and nobody notices, let alone cares. Apple is different, and if Steve Jobs catches a cold the share price plummets. That's because Steve Jobs is Apple, and his fingerprints are on everything Mac addicts love.

So what would happen if, through a bizarre and completely unlikely set of circumstances, he decided to take his magic touch to Microsoft?

It's something Bill Gates has apparently thought about quite a lot – and not just in his nightmares. According to The Economist, "the one person Bill Gates admires most for his geeky prowess – and might have chosen to succeed him as software architect – is almost certainly Steve Jobs."

Gates' successor was, of course, Ray Ozzie – but what would Microsoft look like with Jobs in the top job?

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witter's plans to let its users attach geographic coordinates to their messages have external developers very interested at the possibilities this new geolocation functionality will open up for their applications.

By the company's own admission, geotagging in the popular microblogging and social-networking service has been a rudimentary and inexact affair, dependent on a text field that users can leave blank or fill in with anything they like.

However, Twitter announced last week that it will soon let users stamp their postings with precise location data, and give external developers access to that data via a new geolocation API (application programming interface.)

The news has thrown many developers into an intense brainstorming mode, thinking up ways to enhance existing applications and build new ones that use this location data.

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More than three months into a medical leave, Apple CEO Steve Jobs remains closely involved in key aspects of running the company, according to the Wall Street Journal. Jobs, according to the Journal, is continuing to work on Apple's most important strategies and products from home.

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A worm apparently infected Twitter on Saturday.

The worm may originate with the StalkDaily.com site, and Twitter warned people against visiting the site or linking to it.

"If you have been locked out of your acct due to the StalkDaily issue, pls do a p/w reset; we may have reset your p/w for safety," Twitter informed its users on Saturday afternoon.

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