The only thing hotter than the Xbox 360 this holiday season may be invites to join the Windows Live Messenger beta test. Thankfully, Microsoft has a recommendation for those who can’t wait for access to the latest bits: pay for an invitation on eBay. Microsoft’s new instant messaging client is in private beta, but users are granted a limited number of invitations for friends and family — similar to the approach Google took with Gmail. In response, eager Messenger fans have begun to leave their e-mail all over the Web hoping someone grants them an invite.

Windows Live Messenger, which replaces MSN Messenger, includes features such as offline messages and PC-to-phone calls. File transfers are beefed up through online drop boxes called “Sharing Folders” that actually store the data on a Microsoft server.

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Source: BetaNews via MSFN

Stop, hold the presses! The RIAA is not the evil spying corporation that we’ve been reading about the past year.

No contrary to popular belief it is not the RIAA who employee techs to spy on naughty people downloading copyrighted material, it’s Bay TSP. Bay TSP is a comprehensive, automated 24×7 surveillance operating with worldwide coverage of:

- Websites
- All major P2P networks
- 65,000+ newsgroups
- FTP sites
- IRC
- Auction/retail sites

The RIAA/MPAA are clients of Bay TSP who collect all the data and work out exactly what pirated movie or software application is popular each month and whom is downloading it.

According to Bay TSP last month, The Interpreter was the most popular movie after being downloaded 50,336 times, shortly followed by The Skeleton Key at 47, 348. Interestingly the most pirated software was SUSE Linux 9.0 at 78, 159 copies followed by Acrobat 7 at 43, 803.

The data is comprehensive pinpointing the peak time of day, average shared files per user and how this varies across different methods of sharing files. It’s impressive that this kind of data can be extracted from file sharing networks, IRC and newsgroups to name a few but is it stopping piracy? You have to wonder whether said data is being collected until such a time when the companies have more power to act against those who pirate copyrighted materials.

View: Bay TSP
Source: Neowin

The December Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Windows Vista will be build 5276, plus or minus one build, I was told today. Beta testers, Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscribers, and TechNet members can expect to see the December CTP in a week or 10 days. It includes many new features compared with the previous CTP in October, but it isn’t the feature-complete version of Vista that Microsoft promised to deliver in December. Microsoft will deliver that version internally this month, but testers won’t see a feature-complete CTP until January or February.

Speaking of Vista, you might recall that Microsoft had originally planned to deliver three versions of the new UI, called Aero Glass, Aero Express, and Aero To Go. Those plans have been revised. Now, Microsoft will offer two modes only, called Windows Vista Aero (which includes the glass effects) and Windows Vista Basic, which is roughly like the Windows XP display. However, the capabilities of the three previous modes are still there: Vista Aero is the equivalent of Aero Glass, and you can get the equivalent of Aero Express by turning off the translucency effects while running Vista Aero. The best news? Contrary to rumors, you’ll need only a 64MB video card with 3-D capabilities to run Vista Aero on a typical PC .

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Source: WindowsITPro via MSFN

Recently discovered that the controversial email/host 30gigs.com is being owned and operated by the same person that also operates a Battlefield 2 cheat site MSXSecurity. The list of issue’s with MSX appear to be long and are being documented. The 30gigs.com site is believed to possibly be in place for email harvesting, judging by the privacy policy on the site. More info can be found at MSX Exposed.

Source: MSX Exposed via Flexbeta

Japanese printer makers Seiko Epson and Canon hope the increasing popularity of digital TV broadcasting and home networks will earn their printers a new place in your home: the living room. The companies, which are the second and third-ranked ink-jet printer makers in the world, are both developing printers that can be connected to digital TV sets, they said this week. The printers will work with data broadcasting services that could offer users coupons related to TV commercials or program-related information such as recipes or travel destination formatted for printing on regular sheets of paper.

“Digital TV printing is something you might hear a lot about soon,” said Seiichi Hirano, chief executive of Epson’s imaging products division, at a news conference in Tokyo on Tuesday. “People want to take information from anywhere they can and we think digital TV is an excellent way to achieve this.”

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Source: InfoWorld via MSFN

Firefox is an award winning preview of next generation browsing technology from mozilla.org. Firefox empowers you to accomplish your online activities faster, more safely and efficiently than any other browser, period. Built with Tab browsing, popup blocking and a number of other seamless innovations, Firefox stands out ahead.

Download: Firefox 1.5 Final
View: Release Notes | Homepage

After a host of test releases and one false start, a new version of the Firefox browser will be ready tomorrow, according to a media alert issued by the Mozilla Foundation today. Firefox 1.5 will be available for free tomorrow afternoon, U.S. Pacific Standard Time, at www.getfirefox.com and www.mozilla.com, according to the open-source group. A complete statement outlining the new features in Firefox 1.5, as well as some additional Mozilla news, will be issued tomorrow at the time the new version is available.

New features in Firefox 1.5 include a better system for updating software, faster navigation using the “Back” and “Forward” tabs, and a redesigned Options/Preferences window that increases the number of category icons and moves them from the left side of the window to the top. Firefox 1.5 also includes new support for Web standards, adding support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), JavaScript 1.6 and new versions of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). SVG is a language based on XML (Extensible Markup Language) for writing sophisticated two-dimensional graphics, and JavaScript 1.6 is the latest version of the scripting language.

Full Story: Computer World
Source: MSFN

The six month old flaw in Microsoft Windows’ IE has been re-rated to “Extremely critical” by security company Secunia. This flaw, exposed to the public not too long ago by Computer Terrorism, still exists, since Mircrosoft is more busy with trying to get the exposers of the flaw to pay then fixing this now extremely critical flaw.
The reason Secunia has now made the flaw extremely critical is according to The Inquirer:

S. Pearson, of computerterrorism.com, has worked out that if a Javascript prompt box was of the right size and form to allow the insertion of custom shellcode a remote attacker can execute arbitrary code embedded into an otherwise normal looking Web page.

Source: The Inquirer | Computer Terrorism | Security IT Hub

With speculation of a ship date for Windows Vista ranging in the second part of 2006, word has surprisingly surfaced that it can be expected much earlier. BusinessWeek has received a copy of the internal blog of Chris Jones, who is a top Windows executive. The blog states that the code for Windows Vista will be completed by August 31, giving Microsoft the opportunity to place Vista on PCs for the 2006 Christmas season.

If Microsoft is able to release Vista around October 2006, the company could benefit from a major spike in sales for December ’06. Five years ago when Windows XP was released, Microsoft was rewarded with record revenues of US$7.74 billion, which was an 18 percent increase over the previous year. Will Microsoft set records again in 2006 with the release of Windows Vista?

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Source: MSFN

In an effort to gain developers attention regarding the lack of anticheat support in Call of Duty 2, a mass server strike, whereby Call of Duty 2 servers will be renamed to “on strike” and locked, or simply shutdown. This event is set to take place on December 16th and seems to be gaining mass server admin support.

View: Digg | IW Nation Forum
Source: Flexbeta