July, 2011

Posted by Paul Garnett
Director, Technology Policy, Microsoft

Summertime often conjures up memories of days spent at the beach – waves crashing, sand castles, beach balls, surfing, swimming and ice cream. For the vast majority of Americans, that time is spent at a public beach – places with names like Crane’s, Ocean Shores, Sleeping Bear Dunes, Presque Isle and yes, even Marconi, named for the telecommunications pioneer.

Today, the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Communications and Technology holds a hearing on a legislative proposal that would require all newly allocated radio spectrum to be auctioned. That would include spectrum reallocated in the TV bands, including the white spaces spectrum, soon to be used by innovative new types of unlicensed devices based on dynamic spectrum access techniques.

Posted by Jeff Meisner
Editor, Microsoft on the Issues Blog

Since successfully taking down the Rustock botnet on March 16^th, Microsoft has continued to analyze the threat, investigate leads on the operations and owners of the botnet and work with Community Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) worldwide to help the legitimate owners of Rustock-infected computers to clean their computers of malware. Today, the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), the Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) and Trustworthy Computing released a new Special Edition Security Intelligence Report (SIR) entitled “Battling the Rustock Threat.”

This report provides new data on the Rustock botnet and the impact of the malware on computers around the world.

Posted by Curt Kolcun
Vice President, U.S. Public Sector, Microsoft

Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stopped by the Imagine Cup Finals at Lincoln Center in New York.

I had the opportunity to walk through the student showcase with him as he met with some of the student teams competing at the event.