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Microsoft said Monday that it is eliminating the ability to link accounts within Outlook.com, replacing them with aliases instead.

Currently, Outlook users can link their account with others from within Outlook.com. Outlook allows users to not only read email from within the Outlook.com context, but also send emails as if they were in those other domains.

Now, according to Microsoft, those Microsoft accounts will be unlinked, and made inaccessible to Outlook.com. In the near term, Microsoft will begin unlinking those previously linked accounts. Instead, Microsoft has proposed an alternative: using Outlook.com aliases instead.

What's the difference between an alias and a dedicated email address? An alias can provide anonymity for users, without being tied to an actual account. Let's say that one owned the email address foo@outlook.com. Using the alias feature that Microsoft pushed to the public in 2011, one could set up IamJoeSmithZ@outlook.com, hand that email out to the public, and receive email sent to that address. As an alias, IamJoeSmithZ@outlook.com wouldn't require a dedicated password; if that address was set up as a second, linked account, it would.

Why is this important? Security. According to Microsoft, owners who used the secondary accounts less frequently didn't pay as much attention to them. That can mean that those secondary accounts become a back door of sorts into your main Outlook.com accounts.

"We've found that quite often, people who use linked accounts keep their primary account's security info (including password and proofs) up to date, but don't lavish as much care on their secondary accounts," Eric Doerr, a group program manager for Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. "It's easier for a malicious party to compromise one of those... [Read More]

Three men have been imprisoned for carrying out a phishing scam that could have netted them well over £59 million, the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) announced today.

The Met said it was one of the biggest cyber cases it has ever dealt with and likely the biggest cyber phishing case in the UK to date.

When the Met’s Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) was alerted to 2,600 phishing pages on the Internet in October last year, it began surveillance on Birmingham resident Sunday Godday Etu and his Romanian accomplices Inout Caraman and Adrian Iorgovean.

The phishing pages mimicked various banking websites, targeting users in the UK, US, Russia, China, Australia and Canada, attempting to get them to hand over their login information.

The three men were tracked down to a luxury hotel in central London, where they were caught accessing servers storing stolen banking information.

It later emerged they had stolen the personal data of almost 30,000 bank customers, 12,500 of which were from the UK, whilst over 70 million customer email addresses had been obtained, so that the crooks could scale up their operation.

Having seized kit from across Europe, and taken in financial documents from Romania as evidence of money laundering, it was estimated the criminals could have made £59 million just from the UK victims. That means the final amount saved was likely to have been far higher, the Met said.

TechWeekEurope

After more than a year of rumors, Microsoft today finally released a version of its Office suite for the iPhone.

The app, available for subscribers of Redmond's Web-based Office 365, includes iPhone versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, which allow you to create, edit, and update all of your documents and sync them with Microsoft's SkyDrive cloud storage service.

However, for long-time Office users, the arrival of the app on the iPhone will likely come as bittersweet news given the stipulations surrounding its availability. Any iPhone user can download the app, but without a subscription to Office 365, you can't actually use any of its programs. Office 365 Home Premium subscriptions cost $99.99 per year and the Small Business Premium edition runs $150 per year for each user.

Another wrinkle is the fact that the app is currently only being offered for the iPhone, not the iPad and iPad mini. Whether this is a calculated move to help boost the fortunes of the Surface tablet, or simply an incremental software rollout, bringing such a powerful tool to the iPhone, but not the iPad seems like a huge missed opportunity to snag those consumers gradually switching their mobile and home office work flows to Apple's tablet.

Microsoft, however, said Office for iPhone has been optimized for the smaller screen. "For instance, the Slide Navigator allows you to page through PowerPoint presentations fast while Speaker Notes help you practice presentations on the go," Julia White, general manager of Microsoft's Office Division, wrote in a blog post. "When reviewing Word documents on your phone, the Resume Reading feature takes you to the exact point in the document where you left off on your computer so you never miss a beat."

... [Read More]

Facebook appears to have a new product up its sleeve that it will unveil next week at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

"A small team has been working on a big idea," said a letter sent to reporters on Friday, according to an ABC News report.

A new product will be announced at the event, slated for June 20, according to the report.

No other details were given. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the event.

Facebook's latest product announcement came on Wednesday, when the company unveiled hashtags to let people more easily surface content around specific topics on the site.

The introduction of hashtags is just the first of a series of features the social network plans to roll out to "surface some of the interesting discussions people are having about public events, people and topics," Facebook said in that announcement.

However, whether next week's big reveal will have anything to do with surfacing content or searching across the social network in any other way is unknown.

PCWorld

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Microsoft Corp said it would open 500 special stores within existing Best Buy Co Inc stores in the United States selling exclusively Windows-based tablets and computers and other Microsoft products in an effort to revitalize sales of its flagship operating system.

The world's largest software company, which already has a chain of 70 or so of its own Microsoft Stores and kiosks within shopping malls, said on Thursday the initiative would add more than 1,200 Best Buy Microsoft-trained sales associates to help customers.

Microsoft's new Windows 8 operating system has sold more than 100 million copies since launch in October, but sales of new tablets and PCs running the software, and its own Surface tablet, have not been as strong as it hoped. An updated version called Windows 8.1 is scheduled for release later this year.

Part of the problem has been that Microsoft has struggled to get the attention of shoppers at large retailers such as Best Buy due to the profusion and popularity of Apple Inc's iPad and tablets running Google Inc's Android system.

The new store-within-a-store approach "offers a large-scale, hands-on customer experience" of Microsoft products, said Tami Reller, head of marketing at Microsoft's Windows unit.

Economic Times

LulzSec hacker Ryan Cleary is set to be free soon, despite being convicted for hacking offences and for having indecent images of young children on his computer.

Having already been handed 32 months in prison for his part in attacks on various organisations, including Sony and the US as part of action by the LulzSec hacking crew, Cleary was given community orders for producing indecent images of children.

Due to the amount of time he has already spent in custody and wearing an electronic tag, he will soon be let go, Southwark Crown Court heard. Cleary’s guilty pleas have aided his cause too.

He has spent an equivalent of 18 months and 18 days in custody, according to his defence barrister Ben Cooper. Cooper claimed he would be out soon, indicating the full 32 months will not be served.

Judge Deborah Taylor said she had “taken into account that although the sentencing guideline recommend an immediate custodial sentence, time has been served in any event”, according to the Press Association.

Cleary’s lawyers had claimed that due to his Asperger’s syndrome, Cleary wanted to view everything on the Internet, hence why he viewed and downloaded images from a website used by paedophiles.

It was claimed he downloaded the 172 indecent images in one go and that he was not a “career sexual pervert”.

He has, however, been banned from working with children and will be on the sex offenders register for five years.

TechWeekEurope