DEPARTURES from Microsoft carry on as the company is failing [1, 2, 3, 4]. The latest Microsoft manager to jump ship will add to Amazon poison (many former Microsoft executives are moving there, e.g. [1, 2]), but the most interesting detail was his professional focus at Microsoft:
Microsoft has lost another key employee to Amazon.com. George Stathakopoulos, a computer security expert who'd been with Microsoft for nearly two decades, took a job at Amazon, Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos confirmed. Stathakopoulos was general manager of the Trustworthy Computing Group at Microsoft and was front and center in Microsoft's efforts to combat the Conficker worm last year.
Hardware hacker Christopher Tarnovsky just wanted to break Microsoft's grip on peripherals for its Xbox 360 game console. In the process, he cracked one of the most heavily fortified chips ever put into a consumer device.
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Its genesis came when Tarnovsky learned that manufacturers of video game controllers had to obtain a license from Microsoft for the peripherals to work on the Xbox 360. The requirement offended his sense of fair play, so he put his reverse engineering muscle to breaking it.
"I was very surprised they would put a security chip in a wired controller, as well as a wireless controller," he said. "It's very monopolistic what they've done. They have a right to do it, but I have a right to break it too."
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Using the tungsten as microscopic bridges, Tarnovsky said, he can digitally clone chips used to prevent piracy of satellite TV service, to disable unauthorized cartridges in printers - or to make Xbox game controllers.
"You could counterfeit this chip," he said, although he stressed he had no plans to use the hack for illegal purposes.
Outlook bug creates monster e-mail files
Microsoft is trying to fix a bug in the e-mail program Outlook 2010 Beta that creates unusually large e-mail files that take up too much space.