In a rare move, Microsoft on Friday said it would be releasing security updates on Tuesday–outside of its monthly patch cycle–for a critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer and a moderate vulnerability in Visual Studio.

The two security bulletins will address one overall issue and are being released separately “to provide the broadest protections possible to customers,” Microsoft said in a statement.

The vulnerabilities affect Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 and Visual C++ 2005 and 2008, according to the security bulletin advance notification.

“While we can’t go into specifics about the issue prior to release, we can say that the Visual Studio bulletin will address an issue that can affect certain types of applications,” the statement said. “The Internet Explorer bulletin will provide defense-in-depth changes to Internet Explorer to help provide additional protections for the issues addressed by the Visual Studio bulletin.”

“The Internet Explorer update will also address vulnerabilities rated as critical that are unrelated to the Visual Studio bulletin that were privately and responsibly reported,” Microsoft said.

Customers who are current with their security updates are protected from known attacks related to the updates, the company said. The updates will be released through the Microsoft Update, Windows Update, and Windows Server Update services.

A Webcast to address customer questions is scheduled for Tuesday from 1 p.m. PDT to 2 p.m. at this site.

Microsoft typically releases security patches on a monthly basis, the second Tuesday of every month, and did not say why it is making this rare, out-of-cycle release.

Source

According to twitter’s recent status updates , the twitter staff have corrected the followers and following counts which were displayed incorrect for some people . In fact many accounts that contained spam tweets were perished or removed from the database , due to which many users have found that their followers – following count has decreased .

Well there is nothing to worry about , since i myself have lost a couple 100 followers . This means that the count you see in your sidebar should match what you see on your follower and following pages.

As said by the twitter team ” No legitimate followings should be affected—we’re just cleaning up artifacts in the system.”

Twitter’s Status update – 23d July

Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with others. Now, people are turning to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to businesses, too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter.

So what does Twitter do for businesses?

Twitter is a communications platform that helps businesses and their customers do a number of useful things. As a business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and other people who care about your company.

So how does it work?

Twitter lets you write and read messages of up to 140 characters, or the very length of this sentence, including all punctuation and spaces. The messages are public and you decide what sort of messages you want to receive – Twitter being a recipient driven information network. In addition, you can send and receive Twitter messages, or tweets, equally well from your desktop or your mobile phone.

So how do businesses use Twitter?

Twitter connects you to your customers right now, in a way that was never before possible. For example, let’s say you work for a custom bike company. If you run a search for your brand, you may find people posting messages about how happy they are that your bike lets them ride in the French Alps—giving you a chance to share tips about cyclist-friendly cafes along their route.

Others may post minor equipment complaints or desired features that they would never bother to contact you about—providing you with invaluable customer feedback that you can respond to right away or use for future planning. Still others may twitter about serious problems with your bikes—letting you offer customer service that can turn around a bad situation.

You don’t have to run a bike shop or a relatively small company to get good stuff out of Twitter. Businesses of all kinds, including major brands, increasingly find that listening and engaging on the service lead to happier customers, passionate advocates, key product improvements and, in many cases, more sales.

Twitter’s Special Guide for Business

Microsoft has yet again suffered a disappointing result for the months – April and June . Net profit for the period was $3.1bn (£1.9bn), down by 29% from the same period a year earlier. Revenue came in at $13.1bn, down 17% from a year ago.

“It looked like a pretty tough quarter for Microsoft. The top line was very weak,” said Toan Tran at Morningstar.

The one bright spot was the company’s cost-cutting measures.

“In light of the environment, it was an excellent achievement to deliver over $750m of operational savings compared with the prior year quarter,” said Chris Liddell, Microsoft’s finance chief.

Microsoft makes most of its profit selling the Windows operating system and business software such as Office.

However, demand has been hit by falling sales of PCs as consumers and businesses trim spending.

Microsoft – which became a public company in 1986 – has been looking at ways of cutting costs.

In January, it said it would cut up to 5,000 jobs over the next 18 months, including 1,400 immediately.

Google is developing an operating system for personal computers in a direct challenge to market leader Microsoft and its Windows system.

Microsoft itself is poised to launch its new operating system, Windows 7, this autumn.

Source

This Thursday Paypal Opened its payment system to many 3rd party developers , so that they can embed Paypal on to their websites and make online transactions for internet based services .

“PayPal will be the first and only global payment service open to third-party developers,” PayPal President Scott Thompson said at the launch event, Adaptive Payments includes a variety of tools for creating new payment tools. For example, it allows one payee to take its cut of a customer’s payment and then split the rest among partner companies. Developers can also separate transaction approval from payment so the payment can take place offline or in some other setting with another approval, Bedier said. Adaptive Payments could also support payments over set-top boxes or mobile gaming platforms.

Several companies joined PayPal with plans to use or support Adaptive Payments. Most notably, Microsoft said it will enable developers to embed PayPal payment systems in applications developed and delivered on Azure, its cloud computing infrastructure due later this year. TwitPay, a startup offering payments on Twitter via PayPal accounts, is a beta tester of Adaptive Payments. It used PayPal’s APIs to create capabilities such as making a single payment that is split up among several recipients, said TwitPay CEO and cofounder Michael Ivey. Among other things, TwitPay allows users to settle debts, run up tabs and get paid for Twitter-based applications, he said.

Source