Microsoft launches SQL Server R2

Fast, in-memory analysis and centralized management are highlights, but will it make BI more accessible to business users

Few surprises were contained in the recent official announcement on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, but the occasion did give the company a chance to stoke interest in SQL Azure cloud services and anticipation of the Parallel Data Warehouse edition of SQL Server expected to launch later this year.

Plans for an upgrade of SQL Server 2008 were first announced in October of 2008, and the community technical preview (beta) became available last November. Thus, customers know what to expect.

Highlights include in-memory analysis capabilities provided by PowerPivot add-ins for Excel and SharePoint, and master data management and complex event processing capabilities aimed at ISVs and developers. The PowerPivot add-ins will enable desktop users to do rapid analysis on up to millions of rows of data with the aid of "slicer" controls used to cut across multiple dimensions. These analyses can then be published for others to see through SharePoint. That combination ensures managed self service, according to Microsoft.

"It's self-service because companies can empower end users to do more analyses on their own in the familiar Microsoft Office environment," said Tom Casey, Microsoft's general manager of business intelligence. "It's managed because IT professionals can easily make data available for reports and analyses while governing who has access to data and monitoring who is using which analyses."

One drawback of the PowerPivot add-ins is that they only work with Excel 2010 and SharePoint 2010, which are currently available in community technical preview releases but won't formally launch until next month. Critics describe PowerPivot for Excel as little more than an in-memory upgrade of the pivot-table capabilities already available in the spreadsheet tool.

As such, the add-ins will enable power users to quickly crunch more data, but it won't make developing BI insight any easier or more accessible to spreadsheet novices. For that, developers and Microsoft partners must still create business-process-specific applications and interfaces in Excel.

"There's no doubt PowerPivot is useful and will be successful, but it's not a revolution in BI," said Anthony Deighton, senior vice president of products at QlikTech, a Microsoft rival that introduced in-memory analysis capabilities several years ago. "Microsoft BI still requires application-style development, but many companies just don't like deploying Excel applications."

Microsoft SQL Server R2 also includes several upgrades aimed at streamlining administration. New application and multi-server management capabilities, for example, enable database administrators (DBAs) to centrally manage all instances of applications running on any number of servers. Artifacts such as tables, views, and stored procedures can be grouped, deployed, and managed using unified policies and procedures.

Source:

http://www.informationweek.in/Software/10-04-22/Microsoft_launches_SQL_Server_R2.aspx

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Microsoft Rolls out Cloud for U.S. Federal Users

Microsoft on Wednesday announced a suite of hosted cloud services that will be delivered from a facility dedicated to U.S. Federal Government users.

Microsoft made the announcement at its Redmond, Washington, headquarters during its annual U.S. Public Sector CIO Summit.

The services available in Business Productivity Online Suite Federal include Exchange, SharePoint, Office Live Meeting and Office Communications, and are hosted from special facilities in an effort to meet the particular needs of federal agencies.

"It's a separate, dedicated infrastructure in secure facilities," said Rob Markezich, corporate vice president of online services at Microsoft.

Physical access to the site will be controlled with biometric systems, and the only people who will be able to access the facility will be U.S. citizens, he said. "We've heard quite often from customers in the U.S. that to meet certain regulations that was a requirement," he said.

Those workers will also be required to undergo "rigorous" background checks including fingerprinting, he said.

Other users including state agencies can use the federal service, but its use costs more than Microsoft's standard BPOS service, which complies with many of the rigorous standards that most state agencies require, he said.

Judging from the questions from the audience at the event, federal agencies may be interested in the concept but worry about a component that is out of Microsoft's control: Internet connections to the cloud. "The more that's in the cloud, the more bandwidth you need," one conference attendee said during a question and answer period, complaining about connections from commercial Internet providers. "What's the strategy for helping us get to the cloud reliably?"

Microsoft allows some existing cloud customers to use a dedicated network connection to its data centers, Markezich said. "But I don't have anything to announce" regarding such access to the dedicated federal cloud service, he said.

Even if that option becomes available, dedicated lines come with additional costs that often-strapped government agencies likely don't have. Other attendees asked if government programs like E-rate, which helps connect schools and libraries to the Internet, or Internet 2, a consortium of universities that works with the government to build networks, might help fund such dedicated connections. Microsoft said it has begun investigating whether that might be a possibility.

The company will also have to satisfy government agency liability concerns, particularly around security violations. Without describing the details, Markezich said that Microsoft specifies the terms of its liability for data in its contract. "The principle we use is it's your data, we don't look to make money on it other than the service fees you pay us," he said. The contract describes how Microsoft protects data and what happens if it becomes unavailable or compromised, he said.

Microsoft also announced all of the government certifications that its standard BPOS service now complies with, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, International Organization for Standardization 27001, Federal Information Processing Standard and Trusted Internet Connections.

The federal service supports all of those plus the rigorous International Traffic in Arms Regulations. Customers can buy service contracts now, with migration to the hosted suite expected to occur over the next several months, Markezich said.


Source:

http://www.thestandard.com/news/2010/02/24/microsoft-rolls-out-cloud-u-s-federal-users

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Judge Dismisses Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage Suit

A judge dismissed a lawsuit that was filed against Microsoft over its much-criticized Windows Genuine Advantage program in 2006.

The judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington on Thursday dismissed the case with prejudice, leaving each party to pay its own lawyer fees. In a statement, Microsoft said it was pleased the case was “resolved successfully.” It did not say whether it agreed to any kind of settlement arrangement.

The suit essentially characterized WGA as spyware, charging Microsoft with failing to describe the tool’s functions before downloading it onto the plaintiffs' computers. WGA was designed to determine whether a user’s version of Windows was pirated. It sent regular information back to Microsoft about user’s hardware and software and warned users of piracy violations.

“Contrary to the express statements Microsoft made in the inadequate disclosures that were provided, the software collected and communicated private identifying information from consumer’s computers and sent that information back to Microsoft on a daily basis,” the complaint read.

In January, the plaintiffs failed to have the suit certified as a class action, a blow to their case.

Shortly after the suit was filed, amid a storm of criticism, Microsoft released a new version of WGA with a reduced schedule of reporting user information back to the software giant. Months later it changed WGA again so as to not cut off users of Windows XP who had uncertain licenses. Those users were being labeled as having illegitimate software and were periodically asked to reinstall or buy a new version, even though in many cases the software was legitimate.

WGA caused other problems as well. Once, after a worker accidentally loaded software onto the live system, Windows XP and Vista users were told via the WGA system that they had pirated copies of their software. The problem lasted more than a day before it was fully corrected.

Source:

http://www.itnews.com/windows/14114/judge-dismisses-microsoft-windows-genuine-advantage-suit

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Apple Wins Appeal of iPod Hearing Loss Case

A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld a lower court ruling that said Apple's iPod music players do not pose an unacceptable risk to users' hearing.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth District affirmed a 2008 decision by a California district court to dismiss a long-running lawsuit that claimed iPods endangered users' hearing. iPods, said the original 2006 lawsuit -- which eventually boasted three plaintiffs and sought class-action status -- were defective because they could play music at unsafe volumes above 115 decibels (dB).

The district court disagreed, saying that any dangers of hearing loss from playing music too loud were "obvious" and "unavoidable." The plaintiffs then appealed.

Yesterday's appellate court ruling essentially repeated the arguments raised by the lower court. "The district court did not err," said Senior Circuit Judge David Thompson, who wrote the court's opinion. "The plaintiffs admit that the iPod has an 'ordinary purpose of listening to music,' and nothing they allege suggests iPods are unsafe for that use or defective. [Their] statements suggest only that users have the option of using an iPod in a risky manner, not that the product lacks any minimum level of quality."

Additionally, said Thompson, the plaintiffs failed to prove injury had actually occurred. "The plaintiffs do not allege the iPods failed to do anything they were designed to do nor do they allege that they, or any others, have suffered or are substantially certain to suffer inevitable hearing loss or other injury from iPod use," added the court's opinion.

iPod sound volume has been of interest to others beyond the plaintiffs. Last September, the European Commission ordered all makers of portable music players to add a default volume setting of around 80 dB, as well as a health warning to all new devices within the next two years. Before that, the EU had set a maximum volume limit of 100 dB on all portable music players sold in its member countries.

Apple already includes a warning with all iPods that reads in part, "Permanent hearing loss may occur if earphones or headphones are used at high volume."

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld . Follow Gregg on Twitter @gkeizer , send e-mail at gkeizer@ix.netcom.com or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed .

Source:

http://www.itnews.com/mac/12419/apple-wins-appeal-ipod-hearing-loss-case

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ERP Vendor offers to Take over MySQL

French ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor Nexedi made a public bid Monday to take over stewardship of the open-source MySQL database from Sun Microsystems, offering a symbolic €1 in return.

Oracle announced plans to buy Sun in April. The deal has been held up for months while European regulators conduct an antitrust review, which has reached a climax in recent days. A main concern of the E.U. has been the fate of MySQL if owned by Oracle, which holds a major chunk of the database market with its own proprietary platform.

If the deal is approved, it will leave Nexedi and end-users in an uncertain place, according to a letter that company CEO Jean-Paul Smets sent to the E.U. Monday.

Nexedi's open-source ERP5 product is based on MySQL, which has enabled the vendor to support a number of storage platforms and use the MySQL Cluster technology to handle large amounts of data, according to the letter.

But the pending acquisition of MySQL by Oracle "has changed the situation," the letter states.

"MySQL has become a liability to Nexedi. Our competitive advantage in the field of business applications has decreased because of the acquisition of MySQL by Oracle," Smets wrote.

"There are no competing open source relational databases which can match the performance of MySQL Cluster for very large data sets," Smets added. But Oracle's "poor track record" with past acquisitions means "the risk is very high that Oracle will destroy the value of MySQL and of its underlying open source technologies in order to promote its own proprietary technologies, both in the field [of] database and in the field of business applications," he wrote.

Nexedi is asking the E.U. to ask Oracle to sell off MySQL to a third party "which offers reasonable guarantees to develop it commercially under an open source business model." It is offering €1 to "relieve Oracle from what has become both a negative asset in its merger and acquisition strategy, and a negative asset to the open source and Free Software communities."

On Monday, Oracle sought to ease concerns about MySQL under its ownership by issuing a press release listing 10 "commitments" to the database. They include a pledge to continue releasing MySQL in the future under the General Public License, to increase spending on research and development, and to create a customer advisory board. The commitments would be valid for five years after the purchase is completed.

Smets was unmoved by Oracle's gesture.

"I usually do not believe in commitments from companies unless they can be enforced by something tangible such as a contract, a jurisdiction, cash handed to someone, etc," he said via e-mail.

Oracle and Sun did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The E.U. is expected to make a final decision on the merger by Jan. 27, but in recent days has signaled it will approve the deal.

Source:

http://www.itnews.com/business-issues/11936/erp-vendor-offers-take-over-mysql

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Microsoft Developer Technologies Take Center Stage at PDC

With a full schedule on tap, the 2009 Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference) next week will tout efforts ranging from the company's Windows Azure cloud platform to plans for programming languages.

Session descriptions for the Los Angeles event reveal topics such as "Architecting and Developing for Windows Azure," "Future Directions for C# and Visual Basic" and "Software + Services Identity Roadmap Update."

Introduced at last year's PDC, Azure remains a hot topic for the company, based on this year's PDC schedule. One session, entitled "Bridging the Gap from On-Premises to the Cloud," invites attendees to hear " how Microsoft views the future of cloud computing and how it is starting to deliver this vision in the Windows Azure platform."

"Learn how applications can be written to preserve much of the investment in code, programming models, and tools, yet adapt to the scale-out, distributed, and virtualized environment of the cloud," the session description reads. Migrating applications to Azure also will be covered at PDC.

In addition to hearing C# and Visual Basic plans, attendees interested in programming languages can learn about Axum, which provides a .Net language for "safe and scalable" concurrency, the PDC Web site states.

Axum is a project from Microsoft's Parallel Computing Platform. "It's a language that builds on the principles of isolation, agents, and message-passing to increase application safety, responsiveness, scalability and developer productivity," according to the PDC site.

A roadmap for the Silverlight rich Internet application platform will be detailed at PDC. Microsoft's M data and modeling language will be covered as well. "Explore the future of M, where DSL, schema, and lots of other great ideas come together as a single Web-centric data processing language," the PDC Web site states. XAML futures for .Net Framework, Silverlight, and tools will be covered in a separate session.

The Microsoft "Velocity" project, featuring distributed in-memory caching, is to be detailed at PDC. Velocity "will change how you think about scaling your Microsoft .Net-connected applications," a session description reads. Also on the roster of sessions is one entitled, "InferNet: Building Software with Intelligence." Infer.Net is a machine-learning framework for building .Net software that can adapt to a user, learn from examples or work with uncertain information.

Also at PDC, Microsoft will discuss its SQL Server Modeling technology, formerly known as the Oslo modeling platform, Microsoft's Douglas Purdy, a software architect, revealed this week in a blog. But the transformation of Oslo has not sat well with some Microsoft observers.

"Oslo seems to have gone from a potential new enterprise architect modeling platform to just a modeling tool and DSL stack for SQL Server. This ignores all those large enterprise IT departments with heterogeneous data platforms," said one person commenting in the blog.

A community technology preview featuring SQL Server Modeling technologies is set for release at PDC.


Source:

http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/microsoft-developer-technologies-take-center-stage-pdc-292

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Microsoft, IBM And Yahoo Are Vying To Take Part In India’s Unique ID Project

It appears that both Yahoo and Microsoft are duking it out to help power the technology for India’s Unique Identification project. Spearheaded by Indian tech czar and Infosys co-chairman Nanden Nilekani, the project aims to assign every Indian citizen with a unique identification number that will identify him or her, similar to a U.S. social security number.

This is no small task considering India’s population of 1.2 billion citizens. It will involve a powerful technology to assign the numbers and a vast database to organize each unique ID. That’s where Microsoft and Yahoo come in.

Earlier this year, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates expressed a strong interest in participating in the project, meeting Nilekani and assuring him that Microsoft would be able to assign the IDs swiftly.

This week Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz lobbied India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to use Yahoo for the project, but Bartz says that there’s no commercial interest in the deal and Yahoo would help power the project on a non-profit basis. Bartz added that Yahoo would be the optimal choice because Yahoo has a major presence in India. The company claims that three out of four Indians access the Internet through Yahoo.

While Yahoo is vastly popular in India thanks to sites like Yahoo Cricket that appeal to the population, its hold may be slipping. Gmail recently overtook Yahoo Mail as the most trafficked email site and Yahoo was forced to shut down its Indian social network SpotM a few months ago, as Google’s Orkut and Facebook emerge as the dominant social networks in India.

It’s unclear if Microsoft has the same “non-profit” stance as Yahoo, but obviously both companies want a piece of a highly ambitious project that could be implemented in other emerging countries. And it looks like IBM is also throwing its hat into the ring as well, so it should be interesting to see which tech giant wins out.

Source:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/11/microsoft-and-yahoo-are-battling-to-take-part-in-indias-unique-id-project/

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Google's Desire to Scan Old Books has Critics Casting it as Goliath

Google's ambitious plan to scan millions of old, out-of-print books, many of them forgotten in musty university libraries, has turned into one of the biggest controversies in the young company's history.

A broad array of opponents, ranging from Google competitors Microsoft and Amazon to libraries and copyright scholars, has joined forces to oppose Google's proposal to create a comprehensive online repository of the books and split the revenue from access to that catalog with authors and publishers.

Facing a November deadline to revamp the proposal, which Google struck with the book-publishing industry after a class-action lawsuit, the company with the unofficial motto "Don't Be Evil" is fighting the perception among some that the plan is an unseemly power play to seize the lucrative dominance of digital books.

Company co-founder Sergey Brin has said repeatedly in recent weeks that Google is primarily acting with the public good in mind to preserve the world's cultural heritage in old books.

"I've been surprised at the level of controversy there," Brin said at a recent Internet conference in San Francisco. "Because digitalizing the world's books to make them available, there's been nobody else who's attempted it at our scale."

Federal regulators didn't see it that way, with the U.S. Department of Justice asking a federal judge this fall to reject the proposed class-action settlement. Department officials say Google's plans would potentially violate federal antitrust laws.

The issue has clearly become more prominent because of Google's vast ambitions -- its dominant search index to more than a trillion of web pages, and its march into digital maps, mobile phones, online video and other sectors of the Internet.

The controversy has shown Google is not that different from other profit-driven corporations, said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia.

"It really took something this big and grand to show that Google does have problems, and does have vulnerabilities, and can be exploitative," Vaidhyanathan said. "I'm as surprised as anybody that this turned out to be the moment in which Google's true nature came to light."

Source:

http://www.physorg.com/news176738669.html

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Windows 7 Share Surges 40% in First Week of Release

Overall, the Windows OS continued to lose share globally while Apple's Mac OS X picked up most of that loss, according to Net Applications

Windows 7's market share surged nearly 40 percent in the week following its release, according to Web measurement company Net Applications.

Overall, Windows continued to lose share globally, dropping 0.23 of a percentage point during October, while Apple's Mac OS X picked up most of that loss, gaining 0.15 of a point to finish the month near 5.3 percent, its highest ever.

For the week after Microsoft launched Windows 7 on Oct. 22, the new operating system's share averaged 2.66 percent, a jump of more than 39 percent over the 1.91 percent average for the part of October prior to its retail release.

Windows 7's peak of 3.48 percent on Saturday, Oct. 31, represented an even larger 82 percent increase over the average of Oct. 1 through Oct. 22. For the month, Windows 7 finished with a market share of 2.15 percent, up 41 percent over the 1.52 percent for September. The numbers from Net Applications mean that about one in every 44 personal computers was running Windows 7 last month.

But some countries boast a much higher Windows 7 share, Net Applications said. "Upon analysis of global Windows 7 usage share, we noticed a distinct pattern," the company said in a note posted on its site. "Russia and many Eastern European countries already have significant share of Windows 7 usage. We are sure these are all properly licensed users."

The tongue-in-cheek comment was well taken: Of the top 25 countries by Windows 7 usage, 17 are in Eastern Europe or formerly part of the U.S.S.R. Slovenia, where 7.8 percent of the computers ran Windows 7 last month, led the list, followed by Lithuania in the No. 3 spot (6.5 percent), Rumania as No 4 (6 percent) and Latvia at No. 5 (6 percent). In Russia, at No. 21, 4.2 percent of all machines used Windows 7.

Net Applications' implication -- that the Windows 7 share in Eastern Europe is due to counterfeit copies -- is backed up by data from a May 2009 report generated by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), an industry-backed anti-piracy organization, and research firm IDC. In 2008, the piracy rate in Central and Eastern Europe was the highest of all seven regions the BSA and IDC tracked.

Slovenia's piracy rate -- the estimated percentage of all software in use that is not legally licensed -- was 47 percent last year, more than double the rate in the U.S. Lithuania, Rumania, Latvia and Russia, meanwhile, had piracy rates of 54 percent, 66 percent, 56 percent and 68 percent, respectively.

However Windows 7 was acquired -- legally or not -- its increase was outweighed by a steeper-than-usual decline in Windows XP last month. The eight-year-old operating system lost 0.92 percentage point in October, significantly more than the 0.64 point average loss each month during the past year, falling to 70.6 percent.

Vista rebounded from September, when it fell for the first time in more than two years. Vista's October share of 18.77 percent, however, was still off its record of 18.8 percent in August.

Windows' overall share dropped 0.23 of a percentage point to 92.5 percent. Microsoft's OS has lost about two and a half share points in the last year.

As it has repeatedly, Mac OS X was the recipient of most of the users lost to Microsoft: Apple's operating system climbed by 0.15 of a percentage point to end October at 5.27 percent, a new record and only the second time it's finished above 5 percent since Net Applications revised its methodology in June.

Net Applications Measures Operating System usage by tracking the machines that surf to the 40,000 sites it monitors for clients, which results in a pool of about 160 million unique visitors per month. It weights share by the estimated size of each country's Internet population.

Source:

http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/windows-7-share-surges-40-in-first-week-release-471

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Yahoo and Microsoft Extend The Deadline to Close Search Deal

The companies originally planned to finalize the deal by October 27; they now say the deal will be done by early 2010

Yahoo and Microsoft have missed a deadline for finalizing their search and advertising deal and have now extended the deadline for an unspecified period.

When the companies announced in July that Microsoft's Bing search engine would power Yahoo's search results, they said that they planned to finalize the deal by Oct. 27 or use an arbitration panel to hammer out their differences.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, Yahoo said the companies have agreed to extend the period to negotiate and execute the deal.

"Given the complex nature of the transaction, there remain some details to be finalized," Yahoo said in the filing. "The parties are working diligently on finalizing the agreements, have made good progress to date, and have agreed to execute the agreements as expeditiously as possible."

The filing does not provide a new deadline for finalizing the agreement.

In a joint statement, Microsoft said it was committed to the agreement and that the companies had mutually agreed to extend the deadline.

"We plan to do this as expeditiously as possible. Both companies are optimistic that we will be able to close this deal by early 2010," Microsoft said.

Yahoo and Microsoft initially estimated it would take them two years to fully implement the deal, which also involves Yahoo providing premium Search Advertising Services for both companies.


Source:

http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/yahoo-and-microsoft-extend-deadline-close-search-deal-986

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Researcher Refutes Google's, Microsoft's Accounts of Hijacked Passwords

Could botnets that infected PCs with keylogging or data stealing Trojan horses really be to blame for the leak of Gmail and Hotmail passwords?

One researcher isn't buying Microsoft's and Google's explanation that Hijacked Hotmail and Gmail Passwords were obtained in a massive phishing attack.

Mary Landesman, a senior security researcher at San Francisco-based ScanSafe, said it's more likely that the massive lists -- which include approximately 30,000 credentials from Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other sources -- were harvested by botnets that infected PCs with keylogging or data stealing Trojan horses.

Landesman based her speculation on an accidental find in August of a cache of usernames and passwords, including those from Windows Live ID, the umbrella log-on service that Microsoft offers users to access Hotmail, Messenger and a slew of other online services.

That cache contained about 5,000 Windows Live ID username/password combinations, said Landesman, who found the trove while researching a new piece of malware. "From the organization [of that cache] and what the data looked like in raw form, I think it's more likely that this latest was the result of keylogging or data theft, not phishing," Landesman said.

She dismissed the idea that the passwords had been collected in a large-scale, industrywide phishing attack , as Microsoft and Google both maintained.

"Another indicator is the sheer number of compromised accounts," Landesman said, referring to the two lists that have gone public. "Phishing is not generally a wildly successful scam, it doesn't have a big return. People are more savvy about phishing than we give them credit for."

Instead, it's more logical to assume that the passwords were acquired by botnet operators, who hijack PCs using security exploits, then later plant data-stealing malware on those machines. "That s a much more realistic source," said Landesman. "Regardless [of] what the final intent is of a botnet, one of the core capabilities of every botnet is the harvesting of e-mail credentials. If it looks like a horse, it's a horse, it's not a zebra."

Landesman's theory contradicts not only Microsoft and Google, but also the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), an industry association dedicated to fighting online identity theft. On Monday, the APWG's chairman, Dave Jevans said a phishing attack that garnered thousands of passwords was do-able. "It's not outside the realm of possibility," he said then.

Also against the phishing explanation, argued Landesman, is the fact that the second list -- approximately 20,000 passwords -- contained usernames from not just Hotmail, but also Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Comcast, EarthLink and others. "That makes [the purported phishing campaign] a much broader attack across multiple services."

Her first thought when she read about the compromised Hotmail accounts was of the cache of credentials she'd found two months before. "Those public lists reminded me of the lists I found," she said. "It was definitely not a complete list, but seemed to be an advertisement for what this [hacker] had to offer."

The hacker was either inexperienced, or none too bright: The data was not password-protected, which is the norm for credential caches.

Landesman's theory is not just an academic exercise, she maintained.

"Everyone who suspects that their account has been compromised should change their password," she said, repeating advice by Microsoft, Google and other security experts. "But if, after changing their password, they have another reoccurrence where they see their account being used to e-mail spam, or they again can't access their account, then they need to suspect that there's a local infection on their PC."


Source:

http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-central/researcher-refutes-googles-microsofts-accounts-hijacked-passwords-036?page=0,0

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