eBay to Discontinue Using .NET Passport Sign-In
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In late January, eBay will no longer support the ability for members to sign in to eBay through Microsoft Passport. This means that members currently using this service will have to sign in through eBay directly.
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Will dirty dealers scare eBay users off?
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Internet auction website eBay on Monday withdrew an unusual second-hand sale item, the country of Belgium, which had attracted an offer of 10 million euros (13.9 million dollars).
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(Source: VeriSign)  Legitimize trust in e-business with new Extended Validation SSL Certificates. Extended Validation SSL triggers a green address bar in Microsoft&trade; IE7, which helps prove site identity. Get the green bar and higher sales by reading the technical white paper.
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Microsoft has given up on trying to hawk its controversial Passport sign-on service to other companies. Microsoft&#39;s decision to shut down its Passport partner program comes after one of its largest allies
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Antivirus software is now generally sold as a subscription-type service, which is helpful for keeping users up to date but potentially nightmarish when it's time to cancel accounts.
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By Frederick Melo, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.  Dec. 19--Here's one way to get rid of those old campaign lawn signs -- hawk them on eBay.
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(InfoWorld) - A U.K. company that has made a business out of selling preowned licenses for Microsoft Corp. products has brought its products to the U.S. for the first time. Disclic recently closed its first deal selling licenses it procured from companies going out of business in the U.K. to a company in the U.S., said Noel Unwin, a director of Discount-licensing.com, the Web site and trading arm of the company that sells the licenses. Discount-licensing.com sold licenses for Microsoft Office it obtained from two companies that divested their property in the U.K. -- Food Brokers and Quidnunc -- to WaferTech LLC, a U.S. semiconductor manufacturer, he said. Discount-licensing.com also recently made its first deal selling licenses it procured from a U.S. company to companies in the U.K., Unwin added. Discount-Licensing.com sold preowned licenses from an insolvent U.S.company, Cornell Trading Inc., to U.K. businesses in September and October. The U.K. businesses that purchased former Cornell Trading licenses were Benefit 2 Business, which purchase licenses for Exchange 2003; Abnormal Loads, which purchased licenses for Terminal Server 2003 CALs; 3D Computer Systems, which purchased licenses for Exchange, Windows and Terminal Server 2003 CALs; and Orange IS, which purchased Office 2003 Professional licenses. Unwin said his company did not sell preowned licenses in the U.S. until recently because it believed there would be license restrictions in reselling licenses from one region to another. Discount-licensing.com worked with Microsoft to ensure this was not the case before selling its licenses, he said. Microsoft could not be reached for comment through its public relations firm on Wednesday. But the company has acknowledged in the past it is legal to transfer product licenses for software owned by companies that are divesting. Disclic has built its Discount-licensing.com business since November 2005, gathering up Microsoft product licenses from insolvent companies and distributing them through its Web site. The company recently updated its site with comprehensive product search and ordering features, so customers can do their entire transactions online. Customers can access Discount-licensing.com's product search feature here Unwin said prices for U.S. customers are generally 15 percent less expensive than prices for U.K. customers. The company sells preowned licenses for about 35 percent to 40 percent cheaper than the original cost of the license. Because of these discounts, software resellers have been purchasing software from Discount-licensing.com to sell to their customers so they can make higher margins, Unwin added. Discount-licensing.com has added several hundred new customers so far in 2006, in addition to repeat customers. The most popular licenses the company sells are for Office XP, Unwin said. Other product licenses that do well include the SQL Server database and Exchange 2003 messaging server.
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Microsoft&#39;s Passport authentication technology lost a prominent partner this week when eBay announced that it would stop supporting customer logins through Microsoft&#39;s Passport and .
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EBay will close its China site and begin a relationship with Tom Online to create a replacement, news reports indicated Tuesday.
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Flickr, the photo publishing, sharing &#038; tagging network, has just announced that they will be cancelling their older email address based login system, and migrating over to Yahoo registered ID&#8217;s for users to sign in to Flickr. We&#8217;re making this change now to simplify the sign in process in advance of several large projects launching this [...]
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Blog: Buyers of XPS systems, Dimension desktops and Inspiron notebooks will be able to opt out of most preinstalled software.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft forced a popular alternative to Windows Update off the Internet today, sending the maker of AutoPatcher cease-and-desist e-mail. The free utility has been removed from its download site. Microsoft did not give a reason for the move, which came more than four years after AutoPatcher debuted. "Today we received an e-mail from Microsoft requesting the immediate take-down of the download page, which of course means that AutoPatcher is probably history," said Antonis Kaladis, the 20-year-old Greek college student and author of the program. "As much as we disagree, we can do very little, and although the download page is merely a collection of mirrors, we took the download page down." AutoPatcher, which was in version 5.6, let users collect Windows hotfixes and security patches from Microsoft's update services, then package them so they could be applied to multiple machines, or reused multiple times on a single PC. It was especially popular among people who frequently reformatted drives or those who did informal tech support for friends and family or in a small business. Each month, the current set of Windows' -- and as of this month, Office's as well -- updates and hotfixes would be added to the packages. The program supported Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Server 2003. This month, Kaladis and his team of volunteers added support for Office XP 2003 and 2007. The Microsoft take-down e-mail was posted to the Neowin.net forum that AutoPatcher used for its user support. "Microsoft has received information that the domain listed above [www.autopatcher.com/downloads/], which appears to be on servers under your control, is offering unlicensed copies of, or is engaged in other unauthorized activities relating to copyrighted works published by Microsoft," the e-mail read. "We hereby give notice of these activities to you and request that you take expeditious action to remove or disable access to the material described above, and thereby prevent the illegal reproduction and distribution of this software via your company's network," it continued after listing various versions of Windows and Office. The e-mail was signed by a Peter Anaman, a Microsoft Internet investigator. Users of AutoPatcher were, not surprisingly, hot. "I cannot believe that Microsoft did this," Andrew Lucas said in a response to Kaladis' posting of the news. "You are providing a service Microsoft refuses to do. It has now been over 3 years since Microsoft released SP2 for XP." "The end of AutoPatcher is the end of my use of any Windows product, period," swore a user identified only as KMan. Other users -- lots of others -- literally swore at Microsoft in the comments attached to Kaladis' post or on the Neowin forum. More than a few however, took a more c'est la guerre approach to AutoPatcher's demise. "I don't get why everyone is so annoyed, I'm shocked AutoPatcher was allowed to continue for so long in the first place. Is anyone really surprised by this?" asked a user calling himself kudos in a post to Neowin. Microsoft has dealt similar cease-and-desist orders to other patch-related Web sites or services in the past. In April, it leaned on Hotfix.net, whose operator, Ethan Allen, had posted more than 100 hotfixes he expected would be part of Vista SP1. Coincidentally, Vista SP1 was talked up by Microsoft today. Allen also complied by yanking the download. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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The clock is ticking: Microsoft will end OEM and shrink-wrapped sales of Windows XP on June 30, 2008, forcing users to shift to Vista. (System builders, meaning those who do white-box PCs, can sell XP through December 31.) Don't let that happen!                                                      Millions of us have grown comfortable with XP and don't see a need to change to Vista. It's like having a comfortable apartment that you've enjoyed coming home to for years, only to get an eviction notice. The thought of moving to a new place -- even with the stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, and maple cabinets (or is cherry in this year?) -- just doesn't sit right. Maybe it'll be more modern, but it will also cost more and likely not be as good a fit. And you don't have any other reason to move. That's exactly the conclusion people have come to with Vista. For most of us, there's really no reason to move to it -- yet we don't have a choice. When that strong desire to stick with XP became obvious in spring 2007, major computer makers such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard quietly reintroduced new XP-based systems (but just to business customers, so as not to offend Microsoft).But come June 30, even that option goes away. (See InfoWorld's live XP countdown clock. To use this clock on your own Web site, please e-mail Executive Editor Galen Gruman for the code snippet.)So what to do? Let Microsoft decide where your personal and enterprise software "lives"? Or send a loud and clear message that you don't want to move?We're going for the loud-and-clear option. Join us, and tell Microsoft that you want to keep XP available indefinitely. Not for another six months or a year, but indefinitely. Sign InfoWorld's petition today. And consider submitting a "Save XP" video to our site to help spread the word.And ask your friends and colleagues to join in, too. Just point them to SaveXP.com.Don't think Microsoft will listen? Consider this: Although Microsoft denies that anything is wrong with Vista or that most people don't want it, the company has already postponed XP's demise by six months. That's a start, but it's not good enough.Microsoft doesn't have to admit failure; it can just say it will keep XP available indefinitely due to customer demand. It can take that opportunity to try again with a better Vista, or just move on to the next version that maybe this time we'll all actually want.There is a precedent for that, too: In many respects, Vista is like the Windows Millennium Edition that was meant to replace Windows 98 in 2000 but caused more trouble than it was worth. At that time, Windows 2000 was promising but didn't support a lot of hardware, so users were stuck between two bad choices. Without admitting Millennium's failure, Microsoft quietly put Windows 98 back on the market until the fixed version of Windows 2000 (SP1) was available. Microsoft needs to do something like that again today.Make your voice heard to Microsoft. Sign our petition to save XP today. We will present it to Microsoft.For more on why Vista isn't the right replacement for XP, check out InfoWorld's analyses: The (post-SP1) Vista verdict: Wait for Windows 7 Randall Kennedy's assessment is that for the vast majority of enterprise IT shops, Vista is not -- and likely never will be -- the right choice for their immediate desktop computing needs.Service pack vs. service pack: XP SP3 beats Vista SP1 According to tests by Devil Mountain Software comparing the release candidates for the last Windows XP service pack and the first Vista service pack, XP SP3 performs twice as fast as Vista SP1 on the same machine -- and slower than the initial release of the Vista OS as well.Businesses having second thoughts about Vista Fewer businesses are now planning to move to Windows Vista than seven months ago, according to a survey by patch management vendor PatchLink.Forrester: Businesses still saying no to Vista An anticipated rush by businesses to adopt Windows Vista hasn't materialized as IT managers stick with familiar systems and wait for the release of Vista Service Pack 1.Microsoft: Vista follow-up likely in 2009 With Vista just out the door, Microsoft is now drawing up plans to deliver its follow-up client operating system by the end of 2009.Farewell Vista, hello XP From PCWorld.com: How to make the switch back and deal with the gnarly problem of transferring your Vista e-mail, contacts, and user data back to the old standby operating system.HP CEO: Vista never had its moment in 2007 From CIO.com: Wondering what's happened to momentum for Microsoft's Vista operating system in corporate America? Fact is, enterprise IT has continued to decline the Vista plate like it's an undercooked holiday casserole. Listen to what Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd said: HP never saw a "Vista moment at any time over the past year."UK government report: Don?t upgrade to Vista Report warns British schools not to upgrade to Microsoft's Vista OS and Office 2007 suite, and to avoid Microsoft's OOXML document format because of compatibility concerns.
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Notorious adware maker DirectRevenue has closed shop.The company, which was recently doing business as Best Offers, gave no reason for its sudden closure, which was announced on its Web site. &quot;Best Offers and Direct Revenue have ceased operations. To service legacy consumers, we are maintaining this page of uninstall instructions, an uninstall software tool, and an e-mail based support service.&quot;E-mail sent to the Gmail address listed on the company&#39;s Web site was returned as undeliverable.DirectRevenue was founded in 2002, but it managed to make a lot of people unhappy during the course of its short life. Its software, which was often installed without user consent, would bombard victims with unwanted pop-up ads and was difficult to remove.The company was fined $1.5 million by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in February and it was also&#160;sued by the New York attorney general. Critics called the FTC fine a slap on the wrist, however, as the company is thought to have made more than $20 million from its questionable business practices.&quot;This is a business that never should have existed,&quot; said Ben Edelman, a critic of the company who is an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School. &quot;They never did anything useful for users and merely preyed on victims too trusting or hurried to protect themselves from DirectRevenue&#39;s attacks.&quot;Company management had recently positioned Best Offers as a legitimate software company, and Edelman said that he did not know if they were planning on continuing in business under a different name.&quot;The people behind this company walked away with tens of millions of dollars,&quot; he said. &quot;They&#39;ve got the money. If they&#39;re smart, they&#39;ll take it and run.&quot;
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eBay has announced that its users no longer will be able to sign in to its Web sites using Passort, Microsoft&#39;s identity-management technology.
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EBay Inc. plans to announce soon  that it will shut down its main Web site in China and replace  it with one run by a joint venture with Beijing- based Tom  Online Inc., a person familiar with the matter said on Monday.