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• Microsoft slates IE9 beta for September

  MIcrosoft will ship a beta of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) in September, a company executive said today.

• Canonical bundles Linux, IBM database for the cloud

  Canonical is offering enterprises a chance to try cloud computing via a virtual appliance that bundles Ubuntu Linux with the IBM DB2 Express-C database running on the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) public cloud platform.

• AT&T to be 'premier' Windows Phone 7 vendor

  Say all you want about whether Windows Phone 7 (WP7) will succeed, but AT&T continues to back the platform wholeheartedly after endorsing it -- and Microsoft 's mobile efforts -- repeatedly over the last year.

• Tech worker testifies of 'blue screen of death' on oil rig's computer

  A computer that monitored drilling operations on the Deepwater Horizon had been freezing with a "blue screen of death" prior to the explosion that sank the oil rig last April, the chief electrician aboard testified Friday at a federal hearing.

• Microsoft: Solid Today, Shaky Tomorrow

  Microsoft's quarterly earnings announcement on Thursday painted a rosy picture of a healthy and vibrant tech company. Revenue from Windows sales jumped 28 percent versus the same quarter a year ago.

• Microsoft sells 10 Windows 7 licenses per second

  Microsoft sold nearly 10 copies of Windows 7 every second over the last month, according to numbers the company released Thursday.

• Drop 'responsible' from bug disclosures, Microsoft urges

  Microsoft today pitched its own proposal for how software makers react to bugs reported by researchers, calling for a name change to describe the process it prefers.

• 5 makers for Windows Phone 7 now official

  Microsoft has officially divulged names of at least five manufacturers for its coming Windows Phone 7 devices, with Asus recently added to a list of four revealed at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference on July 13.

• Dell revamps hardware testing in wake of malware issue

  A sequence of errors led to Dell's delivery of motherboards with malware and the company is in the process of overhauling its testing process to resolve issues before dispatching hardware to customers, it said on Thursday.

• Microsoft warns of Windows shortcut drive-by attacks

  Microsoft on Tuesday said that hackers could exploit the unpatched Windows shortcut vulnerability using drive-by download attacks that would trigger an infection when people simply surf to a malicious Web site.

• Microsoft may face tough patch job with Windows shortcut bug

  Microsoft may have a tough time fixing the Windows shortcut vulnerability, a security researcher said today.

• Experts predict extensive attacks of Windows zero-day

  Security organizations today raised Internet threat levels to warn users that they expect widespread attacks using exploits of a just-acknowledged critical bug in all versions of Windows.

• Poll: Many enterprises still on out-of-service XP SP2

  A surprising percentage of organizations are still running desktops with the XP Service Pack 2 OS, which Microsoft said it would no longer patch as of Tuesday this week.

• Microsoft confirms 'nasty' Windows zero-day bug

  Microsoft on Friday warned that attackers are exploiting a critical unpatched Windows vulnerability using infected USB flash drives.

• CIO alert: Five new microsoft licensing tweaks

  As if Microsoft software licensing schemes weren't complex enough, the brain trust in Redmond has cooked up changes to keep up with growing trends such as mobility and virtualisation.