Microsoft on Monday said its Hotmail problem affected more than 17,000 users, but insisted that the problem has since been resolved.

Starting December 30, Windows Live Hotmail users trying to access their e-mail were met with empty inboxes. The problem affected 17,355 accounts, which saw their sent messages, inbox, and folders disappear.

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“Customers impacted temporarily lost the contents of their mailbox through the course of mailbox load balancing between servers,” Microsoft’s Chris Jones said in a Monday afternoon blog post. “We identified the root cause and restored mail to the impacted accounts as of yesterday evening, January 2nd.”

Jones had few other details, but said Microsoft would “fully investigate the cause and will take steps to prevent this from happening again.”

“We’re very sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused to you, our customers and partners,” he continued.

Over the weekend, Microsoft’s official support forum started showing posts from people who reported that their entire Hotmail accounts were gone. Users were able to log in, but there were no e-mails in their inbox, no sent or deleted messages, and no folders.

One user reported getting an error message upon sign-in on December 31 before seeing a “new” Hotmail account welcome message.

Earlier today, Microsoft said it had restored the e-mails to those who were affected, but encouraged those who might still be affected to provide detailed information about their trouble on Microsoft’s Windows Live Help site.

A version of Microsoft’s Zune software will be available for Apple Macs by year’s end, the company said this week.

“Later in 2010 Microsoft will make a public beta available of a tool that allows Windows Phone 7 to sync select content with Mac computers,” Microsoft said in a statement.

As a result, Windows Phone 7 owners should be able to hook up their smartphones to a Mac and sync content stored on programs like iTunes.

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The news was first reported in a now-deleted Twitter post from Oded Ran, head of consumer marketing for Windows Phone U.K. “Daily #WP7 Announcement: I’m glad to confirm that Mac users would be able to use Zune on their Macs to sync with #WP7. More details soon,” according to the Tuesday night tweet, a screen grab of which was posted on Apple Insider.

Microsoft apparently considered a smaller application that would handle phone syncing, but opted for a more feature-rich offering, Apple Insider said.

Microsoft unveiled its initial Windows Phone 7 lineup on Monday, including two devices for T-Mobile, three for AT&T, and more from Sprint and Verizon expected next year. The smartphones are the first to bundle the Zune music experience on the handset – letting users tap into their music collection from phone. PCMag audio analyst Tim Gideon recently speculated that this, sadly, signals the end of the standalone Zune device in favor of Zune-enabled Windows Phone 7 devices.

For more details on Windows Phone 7 phones, see PCMag’s hands-on look at all the devices announced Monday.

Most of the major improvements in Microsoft Excel 2003 involve workgroup functions, but there are a few enhancements that may tempt individual users to upgrade.

The key new Excel enhancement—XML, IRM (information rights management), and SharePoint aside—is its new List feature. This addresses some of the problems traditionally associated with lists—including the fact that the SUM function didn’t work as you might expect on filtered lists. Once you’ve created an Excel 2003 list by clicking on Data | List | Create List, it’s surrounded with a blue border showing clearly where it begins and ends. The last row in the list contains a single asterisk, much as you’d see in an Access table. Entering data in any cell in that row (within the list) inserts a new row in the list.

Every column has the AutoFilter enabled by default, which lets you quickly filter and sort the list. Totaling a column is as easy as clicking the Toggle Total Row button on the new List toolbar and choosing one of a range of functions for each column, such as Sum, Count, Average, Max, or Min. Excel lists can be published to a SharePoint site, keeping the local and server copies in sync if required.

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There is a new Compare Worksheets feature, which you use by opening two workbooks and then choosing the Compare Side by Side option from the Window menu. Excel stacks the sheets vertically and, like Word, synchronizes them so moving around in one worksheet scrolls the other, letting you compare their contents easily.

A range of statistical functions—VAR, STDEV, STDEVP, DVAR, FORECAST, SLOPE, INTERCEPT, PEARSON, RSQ, STEYX, and others—have been fixed by changing how they are calculated, to reduce the likelihood they will return incorrect answers. In earlier versions, these functions were known to fail, because of the rounding required where large numbers were involved.

Other changes include a new Date Smart Tag, which lets you schedule a meeting or display your Outlook Calendar. And a new Person Name Smart Tag lets you get data from an Outlook contact you’ve recently e-mailed. As with Word, Excel users can remove personal data from a workbook before saving it— although the option is disabled by default. To enable it, choose Tools | Options | Security.

Microsoft Windows’ market share is on the verge of falling below 90 percent this year, according to the latest data from Net Applications, diluted by the uptake of alternative mobile operating systems.

Windows’ market share, which includes its mobile Windows OS performance, sank to 90.29 percent in December 2010, down from 92.21 percent the year before.

Meanwhile Apple’s Mac and iOS platforms took 5.02 percent and 1.69 percent respectively last month. Mac OS share was down from its peak of 5.27 percent in October 2009, while iOS adoption more than doubled last year, when Apple sold millions of iPhones and iPads. The rest of the operating systems – Linux, Java ME, and ‘others’ – accounted for three percent of the pie.

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Vince Vizzaccaro, executive vice president of marketing at Net Applications, said growth in smartphone and tablet browsing posed perhaps the greatest influence on Windows’ performance.

“With a full HTML browser and multi-touch interface, the iPhone was the first mobile device to see rapid growth in browser usage,” Vizzaccaro said. “Apple has expanded on that success with iPad and iPod browsing, so that iOS is now the third most used operating system in the Internet. Since the introduction of the original iPhone, everyone else has been trying to catch up with Apple.”

Microsoft’s end-of-year Windows Phone 7 devices and Windows 7 tablets, meanwhile, have yet to make a major dent in the mobile operating system space.

But Vizzaccaro says things could heat up this year as the economy improves, and consumers finally replace outdated Windows models with newer ones. “While there is no guarantees who will benefit from this the most, we could see a growth spurt in Windows 7 usage,” he says.

The latest data from Net Applications comes from monitoring traffic into 40,000 different websites.

Microsoft on Monday said it had restored e-mail service to Hotmail users after many reported that their entire accounts were deleted without warning.

“We have restored the emails to those who were effected,” Microsoft said in a Monday note on its help site.

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Users who are still experiencing problems are encouraged to log into windowslivehelp.com and post details about the problem.

“We sincerely apologize and thank you for your continued patience,” Microsoft said.

Over the weekend, Microsoft’s official support forum started showing posts from people who reported that their entire Hotmail accounts were gone. Users were able to log in, but there were no e-mails in their inbox, no sent or deleted messages, and no folders.

One user reported getting an error message upon sign-in on December 31 before seeing a “new” Hotmail account welcome message.

On Sunday, Microsoft said it had “identified the source of the issue have restored e-mail access to those who were effected” but did not elaborate. For users who did not receive mail during the down time, Microsoft said it was “in the process of rectifying that and should be finished by late [Sunday] Pacific time.”

Can an “app store” refer to any brand other than Apple? Microsoft thinks so.

Microsoft has motioned for a summary judgment to block Apple from trademarking the phrase “app store,” as it filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on July 17, 2008.

“An ‘app store’ is an ‘app store.’ Like ‘shoe store’ or ‘toy store,’ it is a generic term that is commonly used by companies, governments, and individuals that offer apps,” said Microsoft’s Russell Pangborn, Associate General Counsel of Trademarks. “The term ‘app store’ should continue to be available for use by all without fear of reprisal by Apple.”

In 2008, the year of Apple’s applicaton, Apple launched the “App Store” to sell mobile software to its nascent smartphone, the iPhone. As the phone’s popularity took off, so has the common, though not universal, correlation of “app store” with Apple.

However, Microsoft argues in a 23-page motion (PDF), which is posted on techflashpodcast.com, that the phrase “app store” is too generic to belong to any one company:

“Terms that combine the generic name of a product with the generic designator ‘store’ or ‘warehouse’ are generic and unregistrable for retail store services featuring the product. THE COMPUTER STORE, for example, was held generic for stores selling computers,” Microsoft wrote.

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Furthermore, the motion argues, the phrase “app store” has been widely used as a generic term by members of the trade, press, consumers, and even Apple CEO Steve Jobs, to refer to any retail store offering computer software.

“Amazon, Verizon and Vodafone have all announced that they are creating their own app stores for Android. There will be at least four app stores on Android,” Jobs reportedly said in an interview, according to Microsoft’s motion.

If Apple trademarked “App store,” it could sue anyone who dared use the phrase to describe its own, er, app store.

Google and Microsoft distinguished their own retail software stores early on with names like Android Market and Windows Marketplace for Mobile, but others are less differentiated: Blackberry has App World, Samsung calls its store Samsung Apps, and HP has the App Catalog. Microsoft notes that most of these rivals, at one point, have publicly referred to their own retail sites as an “app store.”

Microsoft’s appeal freezes the status of Apple’s trademark application to “opposition pending.”

Last October, Apple successfully trademarked the phrase, “There’s an app for that.” Facebook also convinced the USPTO to block other businesses from using the word “face” in their names.

Apple declined to comment.

With this release, Windows Live Photo Gallery becomes more of a full-fledged consumer photo editing tool/organizer on a par with the Apple’s iPhoto ($79 Direct, 4 stars), Google’s Picasa (Free, 4 stars); it even matches some of Adobe Photoshop Elements’ power ($99.99 direct, 4 stars). The new big-ticket features in Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 are face recognition and geotagging, but the application as a whole feels more polished and powerful than earlier incarnations.
View Slideshow See all (19) slides
Windows Live Photo Gallery Images : Installation Choices
Windows Live Photo Gallery Images : Start Importing
Windows Live Photo Gallery Images : Import Groups
Windows Live Photo Gallery Images : Home View

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Interface
Windows Live Photo Gallery’s new release now feels more like a full-blown image editing application than it has in any previous version, yet manages to maintain its ease of use for general consumers. The main window is now adorned with an Office-like ribbon toolbar across the top; and the new Find tab lets you filter by keyword, rating, date, face, and more. Below the ribbon is a three-panel interface, showing your folders on the left, the images in the middle, and actions like tagging and editing in a right pane.

As in more advanced photo apps like Lightroom, double-clicking an image in Windows Live Photo Gallery brings it up, and doing so again returns you to gallery view. At the bottom right, there are rotate image arrows, next and previous buttons, and a zoom slider that lets you size both thumbnails and single image view to whatever zoom level you want (the mouse wheel can also be used for zooming). Holding the left mouse button lets you pan around the photo, which I found to be a very fluid way of navigating images.
Specifications

Type
Personal, Professional
Free
Yes
OS Compatibility
Windows Vista, Windows 7

More

I do wish the left panel offered a Last Import option the way iPhoto does. The Find tab, however, can fill this role; it lets you limit the gallery view by date, month, or year taken, as well as by the people in the pictures, star ratings, and flagged status. You can also click the binocular icon to search within those results. If the default interface doesn’t suit you, you can customize it by adding or subtracting options from a quick access toolbar located either below the ribbon or up in the window border to save viewing space.

Photo Importing
The import experience is just what you’d want. As you import, you can group photos by date and time, add tags, add the date to filenames, and now set a base file name. Raw camera files are supported, but only if you’ve installed your camera manufacturer’s codec in Windows. Fortunately, gallery tells you if you need to do this, and it even takes you to the camera manufacturer’s download site.

I found working with large raw files slower in Windows Live Photo Gallery than in pro-level apps like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 ($299 Street, ), and unlike iPhoto and Picasa image adjustments didn’t work with raw images.

Photo Editing
All the expected photo adjustments are on offer: cropping, red-eye fixing, straightening, exposure, color correction, and even noise reduction. Buttons let you apply fixes automatically, but a “Fine tune” button offers deeper control (such as an adjustable histogram, highlights, shadows, sharpness, and color temperature). This version adds a new tool: Blemish removal, which worked excellently in my testing, as did the red-eye fix.

An Auto-adjust option lets you configure what you want fixed—any combination of exposure, color, NR, and straightening. It did a mostly good job on my test images, never drastically exaggerating brightness or other factors, as some editors occasionally do. The editing is non-destructive, so, at any point, you can revert to the original. A new batch edit lets you apply fixes to a bunch of selected images at once, but it only works with the auto-fixes—color, exposure, straightening, and noise reduction—not with the fine-tuning.

Jazzing Up Photos
Gallery doesn’t offer frivolous frames, doodads, or wild effects to embellish your pictures the way some tools like Roxio do. Instead, it gives you a few tools for tasteful effects: Sepia, cyan, and black and white. The app’s panorama-stitching feature has long been impressive for a free tool; iPhoto or Picasa still don’t offer an equivalent ability.

An innovative new Photo Fuse option lets you get everyone’s best look in group photo composited from multiple shots. It’s sort of a companion to the application’s panoramic stitch tool, and comparable to what you find in Adobe Photoshop Elements. My results were intriguing but not perfect—some people ended up with big hair, or worse, two ears on one side of the head.

Photo Gallery now joins Elements, iPhoto, and Picasa in offering a retouching tool for blemishes. It worked beautifully at correcting skin discolorations in my tests, and more simply than Picasa’s, which requires you to select a source and target area.

We’ve been big fans of Google’s Picasa photo software for years—it’s been our Editor’s Choice for entry-level photo organizing and editing since version 2. Version 3.8 adds even more polish, with “Face Movies” (more on this later), batch uploading, integrated editing with Picnik, and an extended Info panel. These join Picasa’s already astounding face-recognition, geo-tagging, leading ease-of-use, and integration with Picasa Web Albums. So no matter what your computer’s operating system, Picasa is the best choice for digital photo fans who want the best way to organize, improve, and share their digital photos.

Interface
Picasa has one of the most innovative, intuitive, and usable interfaces around. Instead of using a standard scrollbar to move through your photo sets, you get a “shuttle”-type control that accelerates you through the galleries. This makes a lot of sense, especially after you’ve built up a good size library of galleries. The interface view is of the three-panel ilk, with source organization on the left—albums, people, dated folders, the thumbnail or full image in the center, and options and info on a left panel for things like tags, people places and camera EXIF metadata. A further metadata improvement in version 3.8 is the ability to display standard Adobe XMP info, which includes info like titles and descriptions.
View Slideshow See all (18) slides
Google Picasa 3.8: People and Places
Picasa 3.8: Importing Gets Easier
Picasa 3.8: Unnamed People Album
Picasa 3.8: Naming the Unnamed

More

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Updating Picasa to version 3.8 is an automatic snap, once you check in the Help menu for updates. This downloads, closes, and installs the new version without requiring any futher intervention on your part. And it didn’t require long reprocessing of the images as the Apple iPhoto ’11 update did. If you’re installing for the first time, you’ll get a choice of having the app scan your hard disk or just My Documents, My Pictures, and the desktop for image files. The scan is fast, and a small gray bar on the right-hand side of your screen shows its progress. From then on, any photos added to those folders will be imported automatically into Picasa. This automation beats that of enthusiast-level app Photoshop Elements, in which you have to specify the exact folder of images to manage.
Specifications

Type
Personal
Free
Yes
OS Compatibility
Windows Vista, Windows XP

More

Next, a dialog proposes that you use Picasa’s Photo Viewer as a replacement for Windows’ Preview, the default app launched when you double-click an image file’s entry in Windows Explorer. The viewer gives easy access to editing, uploading, and slideshow playing, and on a fast system its startup delay won’t be significant. Picasa’s viewer also takes an interesting approach to displaying an image by centering it with no border, graying out the rest of your screen.

You don’t get Apple iPhoto’s slick thumbnail skimming, but you get a couple more important abilities, like being able to zoom or rename a photo whether you’re in library or edit view. There’s also Picasa’s handy hand tool that lets you drag around large, zoomed in images, rather than just using iPhoto’s thumbnail navigator. On Windows, Picasa can match iPhoto’s full-screen view, but the Mac version can’t, and the darker iPhoto interface does give more prominence to your images.

As you’d expect from a Google product, Picasa’s search feature is top-notch, including searching by tags, captions, date, and camera. Convenient buttons let you limit the library view to show just movies or photos that you’ve starred, uploaded photos, or those containing people or geo-tags. iPhoto has a powerful search box, but it lacks the quick filtering buttons, while Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 offers a Find tab with comprehensive searching options.

Import and Organize
When it comes to importing and organizing your pictures, Picasa is alone in its class. Even before importing, it organizes photos by time groups, and you can view, rotate, and star photos. To its credit, Windows Live Photo Gallery adds the ability to add tags during import, though it can’t rotate and star.

It also had no trouble with camera RAW files in my tests, to which it could apply all its fixes and enhancements. iPhoto, too, works fully with RAW files, but Windows Live Photo Gallery can only import and display them—no editing. Picasa helpfully shows a text overlay saying “Rendering” when the image hasn’t displayed to full resolution; with iPhoto, by contrast, you have to eyeball and guess when the image has reached full res.

As with iPhoto, Picasa’s photos are automatically organized by date, you can create your own albums with pictures from any folders; adding photos from anywhere within Picasa is easier than in Apple’s iPhoto ’11, though, with a simple right-click option. Photo Gallery only uses folders, rather than albums.

But the one organizational tool that makes Picasa shine brighter than the rest is in its face recognition. All three major entry-level photo apps have gotten really good that this, but Picasa does the best job of identifying your photo subjects’ visages. The program automatically scans images for faces, and creates an Unnamed folder under People in the source list. After you identify some people, the program suggests more potential photos with likely faces to match the names.

In my tests, I found Picasa’s People feature and Windows Live Photo Gallery’s, similar feature both made good guesses about people’s identity earlier than iPhoto did. Picasa’s process of confirming faces was slightly quicker. In iPhoto and Windows Live Photo Gallery, I was presented with inanimate objects that looked like faces. All three let me play slideshows of just pictures containing a selected face, but Picasa was the only that could create a “Face Movie” of images zoomed in to show just the faces.

I do like iPhoto’s full-window Place’s map that can show all the places in the world your photos were taken, but Picasa did just as good a job finding specific locations for your photos using a search box, and more importantly, it preserves face and geo-tags for photos uploaded to its Web Albums. Neither iPhoto nor Windows Live Photo Gallery offer maps on their Web galleries. A separate Geotagging feature also lets you place your Photos on the Google Earth globe.

Edit and Enhance
Picasa makes it dead simple to get your photos looking good, even if you didn’t have all the settings right when you took the shot. Its “I’m Feeling Lucky” button did at least as good a job at one-click photo fixing as iPhoto. In most cases, Picasa did better than Windows Live Photo Gallery, though I liked how the latter’s autofix straightened pictures as well as attempting to fix lighting and color. Picasa actually trails those two in that it doesn’t let you manipulate a photo’s histogram.

Picasa’s red-eye correction works well and, like iPhoto’s, finds and corrects all eyes automatically. Windows Live Photo Gallery still makes you find the eyes yourself and drag a box around them, but its results are fine. I got slightly better results with iPhoto’s blemish retouch tool than Picasa’s or Windows’, but Picasa lets you choose a neighboring area to match the color of the area you want to fix, which can be helpful in some cases.

For fun effects Picasa was on par with iPhoto, adding matte and vignette effects to the usual black-and-white, sepia, and saturation. Picasa adds the very cool “Focal B&W” effect which puts all but a target object in the image in B&W; and with version 3.8 Picasa now adds an “Edit with Picnik” button, which integrates the well-regarded online photo app to add a slew more effects.

Microsoft’s monthly patch release for April 2004 caught a number of security specialists by surprise due to the number and severity of the vulnerabilities fixed. The four new Microsoft Security Bulletins are:

* MS04-011 “Security Update for Microsoft Windows”
* MS04-012 “Cumulative Update for Microsoft RPC/DCOM”
* MS04-013 “Cumulative Security Update for Outlook Express”
* MS04-014 “Vulnerability in the Microsoft Jet Database Engine Could Allow Code Execution”

Additionally, Microsoft has made major revisions to four earlier Security Bulletins (one from each of the past four years)—MS00-082, MS01-041, MS02-011, and MS03-046—as detailed at the end of this article.

Details
According to a CNET News.com report, Microsoft says that some of these fixes have been available for months but the company delayed the release of patches to ease the burden on harried administrators.

With the release of these patches, numerous companies are coming forward with distressing information about just how long many of these critical vulnerabilities were known. Symantec, for example, has been sitting on an Outlook Express MHTML vulnerability since November 25, 2003, waiting for Microsoft to release a patch that has been included in MS04-013.

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eEyeDigital Security, which has been given credit for discovering six of the recently patched flaws, reports that some of these had been known for more than 200 days before being patched.
Author’s note
Please note that any of the Mitre CANdidate listings for individual vulnerabilities listed below can be accessed using this URL format: www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CAN-2003-0807. Simply substitute the correct year and item number after CAN.
MS04-011
This “Security Update for Microsoft Windows” replaces some earlier bulletins and also covers some new threats. The patches provided address:

* LDAP Vulnerability (CAN-2003-0663) – A denial of service (DoS) threat
* PCT Vulnerability (CAN-2003-0719) – A buffer overrun may allow an attacker to take over a vulnerable system
* Winlogon Vulnerability (CAN-2003-0806) – A buffer overrun allows remote execution of arbitrary code
* Help and Support Vulnerability (CAN-2003-0907) – A remote code execution threat
* Utility Manager Vulnerability (CAN-2003-0908) – A privilege elevation threat
* Windows Management Vulnerability (CAN-2003-0909) – A privilege elevation threat
* Negotiate SSP Vulnerability (CAN-2004-0119) – A buffer overrun may allow an attacker to take over a vulnerable system
* SSL Vulnerability (CAN-2004-0120) – A DoS threat
* ASN.1 “Double Free” Vulnerability (CAN-2004-0123) – A DoS threat
* LSASS Vulnerability (CAN-2003-0533) – A buffer overrun allows remote execution of arbitrary code
* Metafile Vulnerability (CAN-2003-0906) – A buffer overrun allows remote execution of arbitrary code
* H.323 Vulnerability (CAN-2004-0117) – A remote code execution threat
* Local Descriptor Table Vulnerability (CAN-2003-0910) – A privilege elevation threat
* Virtual DOS Machine Vulnerability (CAN-2004-0118) – A privilege elevation threat

MS04-012
This “Cumulative Update for Microsoft RPC/DCOM” fixes vulnerabilities identified as:

* COM Internet Service and RPC over https: (CAN-2003-0807) – A DoS threat
* RPC Runtime Library (CAN-2003-0813) – A DoS threat caused by a race condition
* RPCSS Service (CAN-2004-0116) – A DoS threat
* Object Identity (CAN-2004-0124) – An information disclosure threat

MS04-013
This “Cumulative Security Update for Outlook Express” replaces MS03-014 and all previous Outlook Express updates.

MS04-014
This “Vulnerability in the Microsoft Jet Database Engine Could Allow Code Execution” is a remote code execution threat that results from a buffer overrun. An exploit would require that the attacker craft a special database query and send it to the Jet Database. The only vulnerability covered by MS04-014 is CAN-2004-0380.