For a brief period on Friday, McAfee's security tools killed more than viruses.

An error in McAfee's virus definition file released Friday morning caused the company's consumer and enterprise antivirus products to flag Microsoft's Excel, as well as other applications on users' PCs, as a virus called W95/CTX, Joe Telafici, director of operations at McAfee's Avert labs, told CNET News.com.

McAfee's antivirus software detected Excel.exe and Graph.exe, two Microsoft Office components, as well as other software, including AdobeUpdateManager.exe, an application installed alongside Adobe products that deals with software updates, Telafici said.

"Microsoft has launched the Windows Live Search. Among the reports, Microsoft Search Senior Product Manager, Justin Osmer says that "The beta, and a revision expected in a few months, will challenge market leader Google."" I like the more dynamic image searching tool. It seems really slow- I'm not sure if that's the dynamicness (is that a word?) or just standard launch lag.

Today is a historic day at AOL as we announced a software development kit for AOL Instant Messenger. Open AIM will empower you, as the developer, to write custom clients and plugins. For now, lets concentrate on the Open AIM SDK and get into what it can do for you.

We now have a solution to provide all AIM users and consumers to build their own IM clients and to extend the features of Triton via plugins. Of course all of this is free of charge.

When Skype and Intel announced their joint collaboration at last year's IDF, a lot of journos recognized the deal as preparation of the terrain for Intel-only features. Indeed, with the latest version of Skype, a product of eBay Inc - enabled 10-way conference calls, but only if Intel hardware was used. AMD users were treated with "only" a 5-way option. Both Skype and Intel claimed that this was due to new, superior Intel marchitecture.

However, since 10-way works on old NetBurst marchitecture (Pentium D) as well, it was obvious that this was a marketing plot for a marchitecture world.

Of course, until Maxxuss came along. Well known enthusiast from the sphere of MacOSX86 project took a look at Skype, whacked the marketing code and enabled 10-way conference using other processors. The "protection" was actually a string in code that checks for "GenuineIntel" string inside the CPU. If the La Intella is detected, 10-way works. If string returns something else, like "AuthenticAMD", boom! Only 5-way.

Windows narrowly bumped Unix in 2005 to claim the top spot in server sales for the first time, according to a new report from IDC.

Computer makers sold $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers worldwide in 2005 compared with $17.5 billion in Unix servers, IDC analyst Matthew Eastwood said of the firm's latest Server Tracker market share report.

And in another first, fast-growing Linux took third place, bumping machines with IBM's mainframe operating system, z/OS. Linux server sales grew from $4.3 billion in 2004 to $5.3 billion in 2005, while mainframes dropped from $5.7 billion to $4.8 billion over the same period, Eastwood said.

After months of maintaining that it had not yet finalized its Windows Vista line up, Microsoft seems finally to have decided upon a half dozen core Vista versions.

On the line up are Windows Starter 2007; Windows Vista Enterprise; Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista ultimate, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Home Basic N and Windows Vista Business N.

According to information on the Microsoft site, all of the planned Windows variants will include integrated games.

Users running Windows will be charged almost $50 each year for having their PCs protected by Microsoft against attacks from hackers.

Microsoft underlined the advantage in using Windows OneCare in a statement, saying: "Research showed that most people's computers are insufficiently protected from threats... because users find the protection process confusing and frustrating." Windows OneCare Live provides a "just take care of it for me" service.

News of the pricing comes a week after exiting Windows chief Jim Allchin told Computer Reseller News (CRN) the long-awaited Windows Vista client would not feature anti-virus protection, and customers would need to subscribe to Windows OneCare Live.

Microsoft's decision to charge customers extra for anti-virus protection comes despite repeated claims by the company about the level of importance accorded to security in Windows Vista. Allchin last month said: "Safety and security is the overriding feature that most people will want to have Windows Vista for."

An independent security researcher has pinpointed a denial-of-service flaw in Microsoft's brand new Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview just moments after installing the security-centric browser makeover.

Tom Ferris said could hardly believe his eyes when the new browser crashed less than 15 minutes after he started using a homemade fuzz testing tool to poke around for potential security issues.

"I've confirmed a denial-of-service at this point, but I'm sure someone malicious could research this some more to control memory at some point to cause code execution," Ferris said in an interview with eWEEK.

The Redmond, Wash. software maker typically downplays a denial-of-service browser bug that fixes itself when the browser is restarted, but Ferris said it's dangerous to assume the risk cannot be escalated with additional research.

"According to an article in Information Week, Microsoft is aware that the 'Kama Sutra/Blackworm/MyWife' worm will hit on Friday, overwriting office documents, but will not release a patch until its regular monthly patch release on February 14th. Unless, that is, you subscribe to one of Microsoft's pay security services, in which case your machine will have the worm removed in advance." From the article: "The blog offered no explanation why the tool wouldn't be updated earlier, nor did Microsoft immediately respond to questions. Each month, Microsoft pushes a revised tool to Windows users who have Automatic Update enabled for Windows Update or Microsoft Update. The Redmond, Wash.-based company has released the Malicious Software Removal Tool off-schedule once before, in August 2005, shortly after the Zotob worm began striking Windows 2000 systems."

Steve Gibson alleges that the WMF vulnerability in Windows was neither a bug, nor a feature designed without security in mind, but was actually an intentionally placed backdoor. In a more detailed explanation, Gibson explains that the way SetAbortProc works in metafiles does not bear even the slightest resemblance to the way it works when used by a program while printing. Based on the information presented, it really does look like an intentional backdoor.