Stories by: Gregg Keizer

Hackers have launched a large-scale spam attack masquerading as CNN.com news notifications about the Israeli invasion of Gaza, security researchers said Thursday, in a repeat of a massive campaign last summer that also posed as CNN alerts.

Late yesterday, Microsoft unveiled the public beta for Windows 7, the follow-on and follow-up to Vista, which from all signs the company is trying to forget as fast as possible.

Hackers have seeded LinkedIn, the business networking service, with bogus celebrity profiles that link to malicious sites serving up attack code, a security researcher said Wednesday.

Microsoft Tuesday said it would launch new Mac software later this year that will let Office 2008 for Mac users collaborate with people running the Windows version of the application suite.

Microsoft Corp. will offer free or discounted Windows 7 upgrades to users who buy Vista PCs after July 1, according to a Web site that has accurately predicted the company's moves in the past.

Microsoft Monday again pushed its claim that consumers pay an "Apple tax" when they buy Mac hardware rather than PCs running the Windows operating system.

Microsoft developers overlooked a critical bug in the Internet Explorer browser because of a lack of adequate testing tools and training, a company official acknowledged last month.

Windows lost nearly a full percentage point of market share for the second month in a row in December, pushing Microsoft's operating system to a new low, an Internet measurement company reported yesterday.

Google is pushing users of its Gmail e-mail service to dump Microsoft's Internet Explorer for its own Chrome browser or Mozilla's Firefox.

Downloads of a new build of Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 operating system have soared in the past two days, with thousands of systems now pulling pirated copies from BitTorrent sites.

Microsoft last week applied for a patent that spells out a "pay-as-you-go" concept where users would be charged for both the software they run and the computing horsepower they use.