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Microsoft leaps forward (and falls on its keister), Nine Inch Nails goes viral, and Wikipedia gets sexy. How’s that for a weird week? Think you’ve got the inside scoop on all things tech? Pit your knowledge against our quiz. Correct answers are worth 10 points, and some questions are sneakier than they look. Ready? Then let’s begin.

1. It seems Microsoft can’t quite get its head around Leap Year. Which of the following MSFT products did NOT have problems recognizing the date Feb. 29, 2008?

a. Exchange 2007
b. SQL Server 2008 beta
c. Windows Small Business Server
d. Microsoft Office Live

Take the InfoWorld news quiz

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer couldn't avoid being trampled by the elephant in the room – the company's bid to acquire Yahoo – during a quirky keynote question-and-answer session at the company's MIX08 conference Thursday.

Microsoft on Feb. 1 made an offer to purchase Yahoo for $44.6 billion, which Yahoo's board has rejected. Microsoft is rumored to be mounting a proxy fight for the Internet company but will not comment officially about the status of the deal.

Kawasaki, a former Apple fellow and Mac evangelist who now splits his time as a venture capitalist, author, and public speaker, minced no words in his public inquisition of Ballmer. Wielding a new MacBook Air laptop computer, he baited Ballmer about a host of topics, including Google, problems with Windows Vista, and competition with his own former company. He also complimented the attitudes of employees at what he calls the "new Microsoft" for being less arrogant and far easier to work with than people he encountered at Apple.

During his questioning, Kawasaki called Google the "G-word" and teased Ballmer when he wouldn't say the company's name in answer to a question about it. Proving his mettle as a good sport, Ballmer chided Kawasaki for not saying Google's name either, then countered, "I can say the name: Google, Google, Google."

Though Ballmer did touch on some serious topics during Thursday's keynote, the interview had many light — and sometimes downright bizarre — moments as the two men attempted to keep a professional tone during a very unconventional interview.

At one point Kawasaki asked Ballmer if he considers Apple a "little Chihuahua you kick away," to which Ballmer replied by barking in imitation of a little dog. He then acknowledged that Apple has done a good job of chipping away at Windows market share and that Microsoft is an underdog competitor in the media-player market against the iPod.

Kawasaki also showed off his ultra-thin MacBook Air, and Ballmer offered to have a "bake-off" between his Toshiba notebook and the Air. He also took the Air from Kawasaki and mimed falling to the ground because it was so heavy.

Defending Air's absence of a DVD drive when Ballmer said it was missing "half the features," Kawasaki said, "DVDs are so passe," to which the grinning CEO retorted: "Tell that to your kids on a long flight, pal!" The remark inspired Kawasaki to inform Ballmer, "I'm never going to invite you back to MIX."

After Kawasaki had his way with Ballmer, audience members had their chance to question the executive. Several of them also asked about Yahoo, including how Microsoft might split up its own infrastructure and Yahoo's — particularly investments Yahoo has made in building its platform on PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), an open-source scripting technology for building dynamic Web content.

Ballmer said Microsoft would likely use services and hardware infrastructure from both companies, including Microsoft's services that use its own ASP.NET programming language."We will be a PHP shop as much as an ASP.NET shop if we own Yahoo," he said.

He added that Microsoft has taken pains to make sure applications coded in PHP run well on its recently released Windows Server 2008 platform, though he said that Microsoft has no plans to replace all of Yahoo's infrastructure with Windows Server if it takes over the company.

However, not all services from both companies are likely to survive. "We shouldn’t have two of everything. It won’t makes sense to have two search services, two advertising services, two mail services," Ballmer said. "Some will undoubtedly come from the Microsoft side, some will come from the Yahoo side."

Ballmer even did a brief reprise of his famous "Developers" rant — immortalized in a YouTube video showing the sweaty Ballmer repeatedly chanting the word "developers" on stage while pumping his fist during a keynote address — when an audience member asked if he would "show some love" for Web developers.

"I've been in [public relations] mode this whole time, and you want me to get up right now and show some love?" Ballmer bellowed, rising from his chair. He moved to the edge of the stage, stood up to his full height before the audience and hollered, "Web developers, Web developers, Web developers, Web developers!" before returning to his chair and previously restrained demeanor.

With the release of Apple’s iPhone SDK now come and gone, and the enhanced IT-oriented capabilities planned for the next major iPhone software update in June, it’s clear that the iPhone are going to be corporate mainstays. Still, at its heart, the iPhone is a consumer device, so IT leaders still have to ensure that the iPhones that come in the door fit their data management and security strategies.

[ Get the whole scoop on the iPhone SDK, how to make the iPhone fit in the enterprise, and the latest security issues that the popular smartphone raises in InfoWorld's special report. ]

So, where to begin gearing up the iPhone for use at work? How can you satisfy executive demands to make the iPhone fit for corporate essentials while maintaining security and manageability? For those looking to get a jump on business-enabling the iPhone, here’s a handy guide on what’s currently possible and how to get it done. (Note that everything here applies to the iPhone’s voiceless cousin, the iPod Touch with the January 2008 software update.)

Accessing corporate e-mail
IBM’s promise of a Lotus Notes client for the iPhone remains unfulfilled. The iPhone 2.0 software update due in June will add an Exchange client. But in the meantime, if your business uses either system, you can provide e-mail access today via POP3 or IMAP, popular protocols that many businesses already support. In either case, the iPhone’s Mail setup is where to begin configuring host addresses, user names, passwords, and SSL authentication.

A tip for Exchange: Even though the iPhone’s current Mail setup includes an Exchange pane, don’t use it. Use IMAP instead; the Exchange pane doesn’t work. (Even Apple’s support pages say to use the IMAP pane.)

Many businesses prefer IMAP over POP3 because IMAP provides greater control over message management, such as keeping the mail folders synchronized as mail is moved on any client. The iPhone will connect to the IMAP server and detect most settings automatically, making setup easy in most cases.

You can adjust the SSL settings, IMAP path prefix, server port, and other such settings by scrolling down to the Advanced portion of an individual mail account’s setup area. Note that the iPhone’s SSL options have been significantly enhanced from the first iteration’s number-only token scheme.

What you can’t do today with the iPhone — out of the box, anyhow — is get the BlackBerry’s push-based approach to e-mail, in which the mail server sends messages to the device rather than requiring the device to query the server to gain access to new messages. This push-based approach makes it harder for someone to spoof the e-mail server. To push e-mail to an iPhone (or most other mobile devices) today, you need a mobile server, such as those from Visto and Synchonica; these integrate with your Exchange or Domino server.

But that will also change in June, when the iPhone 2.0 software includes Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync technology. ActiveSync lets the iPhone use Microsoft’s Direct-Push e-mail feature (Windows Mobile and Palm OS devices use ActiveSync as well to gain this capability; Research in Motion has built in its own push e-mail technology into its BlackBerry Enterprise Server product). With Direct-Push, the connection between the OWA (Outlook Web Access) server’s mail port and the mobile device remains open so that new messages are instantly visible. (The iPhone does use OWA as its connection to Exchange, just as Microsoft’s Entourage e-mail client does for the Mac OS.)

Until the new software ships, you’ll have to live with the iPhone’s periodic mail checks (15 minutes is the shortest period, though you can easily find SSH hacks on the Web to reduce that window.)

[ See InfoWorld's in-depth reviews of the iPhone and iPod Touch ]

Accessing calendars and other shared data
The biggest issue Exchange and Notes shops face today in business-enabling the iPhone is providing access to calendars, address books, and other PIM data beyond e-mail.

Come June, Apple’s software update will add an Exchange client, giving you the same access to e-mail, calendars, contacts, and notes as you get in Outlook or Entourage on the desktop. Until then, calendars and contacts can be synchronized between Exchange and the iPhone, but this must be done through iTunes, meaning you will need a PC or Mac to act as an intermediary.

For Windows (XP or Vista) shops tapping Outlook 2003 or 2007, syncing is straightforward through iTunes. Connect the iPhone to your intermediary PC and select it in iTunes’ Devices list. Open the iTunes device Info pane and choose the calendars and contact sources you want to sync. If you have problems, consult Apple’s common fixes.

On the Mac, use the built-in iCal and Address Book software as the way station, and then configure Entourage to sync with them (use the Sync Services pane of the Preferences dialog box). In iCal, you must create and use a calendar called Entourage for any entries you want synced to Exchange. (And Exchange calendar items will be placed in iCal in the Entourage calendar as well.) Then, with your iPhone physically connected and selected in iTunes’ Devices list, open the Info pane to choose the calendars and contact sources to be synced. All three programs — Entourage, iCal, and iTunes — must be set up properly for this m?nage ? trois to work.

A tip: In Entourage’s preferences, choose whether to sync your server’s calendar or your local calendar. If you change this setting, it’s very likely that your calendar will stop syncing. It turns out the issue is in iCal: You’ll see multiple Entourage calendars listed (one for each time you changed the setting in Entourage). Delete all but the “real” Entourage calendar (you can right-click on a calendar and choose Delete from the contextual menu).

Likewise, for Notes on the Mac, iTunes is the go-between as described for Exchange — and you will need a separate app, such as Information Appliance Associates’ PocketMac GoBetween, to make iCal and Address Book sync with Notes. Ironically, there doesn’t appear to be a way to get calendar and address book data from Notes to the iPhone in Windows. If IBM follows up on its promise to ship a Notes client for iPhone, there’ll be no need for a third-party app or other work-around.

You can, of course, access calendar and contact data without connecting through the desktop by tapping Exchange or Notes Web access via the iPhone’s Safari browser. Unfortunately, navigating those desktop-oriented pages even in the iPhone’s fairly large screen makes this method a somewhat frustrating quick fix.

Another access issue to consider is that the Safari browser in the iPhone does not support Java or ActiveX, so Web pages that use these applet-delivery technologies won’t run on the iPhone. ActiveX is a Microsoft technology available only on Windows, so the iPhone’s lack of support mirrors the Mac’s lack of support, but the lack of the cross-platform Java technology on the iPhone is less justifiable for Apple. (Note that it does support JavaScript.)

Securing the iPhone
The biggest issue for IT when it comes to the iPhone has been security, even with the availability of SSL authentication for securing e-mail connections. Make sure your Exchange or Domino server requires SSL and one of these SSL options: MD5 challenge-response, NTLM, or HTTP MD5 digest. The iPhone also supports password-based SSL authentication, but that can be more easily spoofed than the other options.

All SSL does, however, is encrypt e-mail messages, not any other traffic between the iPhone and the company’s servers. Typically, you would mitigate this concern by using a VPN client — or a BlackBerry or Motorola GoodLink server and its proprietary secured network — as the conduit to safeguard all traffic with the iPhone.

The iPhone didn’t originally support VPNs, but Apple added that capability via a software upgrade in late 2007. The iPhone’s VPN capabilities are solid — comparable to Windows Mobile and Palm OS devices — with a choice of L2TP and PPTP protocols and support for EMC RSA Security’s SecurID key-based authentication. (You access those through the General preference pane’s Network option.) But the iPhone VPN client does not work with all VPNs; Cisco-based VPNs in particular are incompatible unless they are set specifically for Mac OS X and iPhone compatibility. The June iPhone software update will improve VPN capabilities by supporting Cisco IPsec and two-factor authentication, certificates, and identities, Apple said,

Three security issues have caused the most complaints from IT, when compared with Windows Mobile, Palm OS, and BlackBerry. Apple plans to address all three in the June software update, though the details are not yet fully clear.

First, the iPhone has not provided device encryption, meaning that any data stored on the iPhone can easily be obtained by a thief. With nearly 16GB visible to PCs as an external drive when connected over USB, the iPhone can store a lot of could-be precious corporate data.

Second, password protection on the iPhone is scant. More than providing a four-digit maximum for passwords, the iPhone has provided no way to enforce password use or policies as users can simply turn the password feature off.

Third, the iPhone’s lack of a remote lock or kill feature has left IT in the lurch if the device is stolen or lost.

Apple said it will add on-device encryption, IT-manageable security policies and remote-kill features as part of the iPhone 2.0 update, though it is unclear whether this means IT will need an iPhone-specific management tool or can use popular management systems they likely have already deployed. Apple is making the new software available before the June release to IT organizations willing to test the beta version.

In the meantime, IT will have to decide whether these three security shortfalls justify banning the iPhone from the enterprise until the new software is out and its capabilities better understood. A good way to judge that is to make an honest assessment: Are you as tough on USB thumb drives, smartphones, and work-at-home users’ PCs as you want to be on the iPhone?

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Note: An earlier version of this story published on March 3, 2008, did not include any information on the iPhone 2.0 software update’s capabilities

Apple’s iPhone SDK offers far more than many developers expected, according to developers that InfoWorld spoke with after the long-awaited SDK unveiled today. “It looks like this is what everybody wanted,” said Tony Meadow, principal at Bear River Associates, a mobile application development vendor. “Apple is doing it the right way.”

[ Get the whole scoop on the iPhone SDK, how to make the iPhone fit in the enterprise, and the latest security issues that the popular smartphone raises in InfoWorld's special report. ]

Developers get a solid database and a familiar API tool set
What pleased Meadow and other developers was a set of functionality that will let them write native iPhone applications through access to the iPhone APIs.

In addition, Meadow thought Apple hit the right note by offering SQL Lite as the built-in database layer. SQL Lite, an open-source database, is widely used by the mobile developer community and runs well on small devices. “It will make it easy to store data,” he said.

Cocoa Touch, the built-in set of APIs that re-creates the Cocoa tool set used to handle the user-interface-generated events in Mac OS X is targeted at the iPhone’s and iPod Touch’s unique touchscreen as well as their gesture-based UI. “It’s an elegant way to deal with the interface paradigm,” said Meadow.

IT gets better, more secure connections
Also garnering praise from mobile industry watchers is the planned inclusion of Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, the technology required to synchronize mail, calendar, and other data directly with Microsoft Exchange rather than use third-party gateways or synchronization services. Apple licensed the technology from Microsoft and will include it in the iPhone 2.0 software planned for release this June. (All the additional features described here will be released with that software update, Apple said.)

The iPhone also will gain remote wipe and lock and on-device data encryption, two features that caused much IT criticism. Plus, Apple will enhance the VPN capabilities it added to the iPhone in late 2007, adding support for Cisco IPsec and two-factor authentication, certificates, and identities. Information Builders’ Kotorov said he was particularly enthusiastic about iPhone’s deepened support for VPNs. Apple will also provide a way for IT to enforce security policies on the iPhone, though the mechanism was not described at the Apple press conference.

Users get push messaging and desktop equivalency
The licensing of ActiveSync benefits not just IT but users in Microsoft Exchange-based environments. They not only can access the same calendar, contacts, e-mail, and other data as they can from their desktop, but they also gain push e-mail. In push e-mail, the iPhone gets a new message almost as soon as it is sent — a feature beloved by users of the BlackBerry, which pioneered the concept. Previously, the iPhone had to poll the server periodically, typically at 15-minute intervals, so unless users manually polled the server, an urgent message might not be seen for some time.

Still, IT won’t be completely happy
As welcome as the SDK and enhanced business-oriented features are, people still have more they want Apple to offer.

A common request is availability from more than one carrier. Currently, the iPhone only works on the AT&T network. “Companies don’t want a single carrier for voice and data,” said Forrester’s Yates.

Second, the iPhone isn’t supported by management tools like LanDesk and lacks a consistent set of management tools like those from Credant Technologies and LanDesk, which support BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Palm OS devices. This means that IT has to manage the iPhone separately from other devices as well as separately from PCs. “What [Apple] needs to do is natively integrate into management tools that companies already use for their other mobile devices,” Yates said.

Perhaps worse, the iPhone requires IT and developers to push applications to users through the Apple iPhone store. Apple says it is doing so in a way that will be IT-friendly, though it did not specify any details: “We’re working on a model for enterprises for them to distribute applications to their end-users, specifically with a program for them to target their end-users. We have a model we’re building for that,” said Phil Schiller, a product marketing exec at Apple.

Microsoft received plaudits and criticism for its openness efforts at the MIX08 event Thursday with a Microsoft official also citing an overture toward the Eclipse Foundation for open-source tooling.

During a panel session, officials from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Microsoft business partner Zend Technologies debated issues ranging from patents to open source and the planned Linux version of Microsoft’s Silverlight multimedia plug-in technology, called Moonlight. Novell plans to release Moonlight in June, although a beta release already has been available.

Microsoft’s Sam Ramji, director of open source and Linux strategy, said after the session that in two weeks, Microsoft will reveal plans to collaborate with open-source Eclipse Foundation projects. Those details are to be aired at the EclipseCon conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on March 19. Microsoft has been one of the industry’s few holdouts from Eclipse participation. (The foundation declined to comment afterward.) Microsoft also plans to work with the Apache Software Foundation.

“I think Microsoft has made tremendous progress,” in becoming open, said Andi Gutmans, CTO at Zend Technologies, which offers software for running PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) applications on Windows platforms.

“Microsoft’s business was built out of open APIs,” Ramji said. But in the last decade, the bar in open source has been raised beyond open APIs, he said. (Separate from Tuesday’s panel session, Microsoft offered on Monday Silverlight 2 controls via open source; these controls provide different capabilities for developers.)

Ramji also noted the company’s recent decision to open access to various Microsoft technologies. “Obviously, we did announce the interoperability commitment that the company has made in opening the specifications,” he said. The company also has made moves to work better with Firefox. “Piece by piece, I think we?re transitioning to [increasingly] support open development,” Ramji said.

But questions were raised about Novell’s arrangement with Microsoft pertaining to Moonlight. Novell’s Miguel de Icaza, a Novell vice president in charge of the open-source Moonlight project, said Novell gets access to the regression test suite and codecs from Microsoft as well as to technical people inside Microsoft.

Novell has a patent covenant with Microsoft pertaining to Silverlight. As far as whether these covenants would be extended to third parties, that is something Microsoft would have to discuss, he said. “I wish they were different and anybody could get them, but that is not the case,” de Icaza said.

Ramji said persons who download Moonlight from Novell do not have to pay for it. But Mozilla Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer raised the issue of complicated IP patent restrictions and known patents pertaining to Moonlight. De Icaza cited Microsoft’s history of not suing anyone over this issue.

Schroepfer noted Mozilla’s own shunning of patents. “We don’t hold any patents. We don’t have any form of indemnification from anyone,” Schroepfer said.

One of the longstanding tensions in open-source development has been the existence of patents and settling these issues, Ramji said. “[This] becomes a question of U.S. business law,” said Ramji.

Panelists also cited benefits of open development. “What open allows is someone in Mexico can meet up with someone in Boston and, by sharing a common interest, say, hey, we can build this thing together,” de Icaza said.

But issues were raised about security and open source. Schroepfer said openness helps with security by enabling as many people to look at the project as well. “I think in general, having more people look at the source code is a way to bulletproof that source code,” he said.

De Icaza also stressed obstacles of a pure open-source business model. “What you need to do is have a mixed strategy,” and use open source as a tool,” he said.

Microsoft officials also cited reasons for wanting to buy Yahoo including its personnel and assets. Microsoft has proposed acquiring Yahoo for $44.6 billion. Gutmans stressed that Yahoo is focused on PHP. “It’s really going to force a lot of PHP into Microsoft,” he said.

Also at MIX08, Microsoft released a preview version of its Express Blend 2.5 interactive design tool, which is geared to work with Silverlight 2.

Move Networks at MIX08 announced plans to partner with Microsoft to enable Move’s video-streaming technology to work within Silverlight. Move’s technology allows for fast start times, smooth playback with no buffering, and high-quality video resolution, Move said.

Combining the Move product with Silverlight will give media companies and developers the ability to deploy online television offerings, said Move. Developers within one environment can provide unique branding and navigational elements with online video on the Internet.

The Business Software Alliance wants the U.S. Congress to pass a patent reform bill and executives at the trade group say they're optimistic that the legislation will move forward in the Senate soon.

Patent reform heads up a list of five legislative priorities the trade group released Thursday. The BSA wants Congress to approve the Patent Reform Act, which the House of Representatives passed back in September, but the legislation has been stalled in the Senate due to objections from inventors, pharmaceutical companies, and some small tech firms.

The Patent Reform Act would overhaul the U.S. patent system. Among other things, it would create a new way to challenge patents after they've been granted, and it would allow courts to change the way they assess damages in patent-infringement cases. Currently, courts generally consider the value of the entire product when a small piece of the product infringes a patent. The legislation would allow courts to base damages only on the value of the infringing piece.

That so-called apportionment of damages provision has been a major hang-up for the bill in the Senate. But Robert Holleyman, BSA's president and CEO, said the Senate may be moving toward passage of the bill in the coming weeks. Some changes may still happen to the bill, he said.

"We are optimistic it will be considered in the Senate, and we are optimistic that the final solution will address the inadequacies in the current patent system that have been well identified," Holleyman said.

Many large tech vendors, including BSA members Microsoft, Symantec, and Apple, say it's too easy for patent holders to claim that a small piece of a tech product infringes a patent and to collect huge court awards. But some small tech vendors, independent inventors, and pharmaceutical companies have opposed the Patent Reform Act, saying it would water down the value of patents and give small companies fewer protections against large companies that steal their ideas.

Late last month, more than 170 California businesses and organizations sent a letter to California's senators, saying they opposed the Patent Reform Act in its current form. "California's high-tech industries lead the world in innovation across numerous sectors," the letter said. "The cutting edge research they do is extremely risky and expensive, and strong patent protections form the basis upon which they are able to attract the investment necessary to commercialize a new product. This is especially the case for the hundreds of smaller, venture capital-backed firms in the state, many spun out of California's world-class research universities and private research institutes."

The Patent Reform Act would "increase costs to obtain and maintain patents, undermine patent certainty, incentivize infringement, and weaken the enforceability of patent rights and intellectual property protections," said the letter, signed by companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, California Wireless, and Mi5 Networks.

But the U.S. patent system is "antiquated," BSA countered. "The Senate can take a giant stride toward stimulating innovation, spurring job growth, helping consumers and boosting U.S. competitiveness by completing action" on the patent bill, the group said in a position paper released Thursday.

Chief technology officers of several BSA members will come to Washington, D.C., next week to lobby for patent reform and other issues.

Among the BSA's other legislative priorities:

– Legislation that protects consumers' data while providing a technology-neutral framework for businesses that handle such data.

– Funding for the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to improve its IT focused on intelligence gathering, counterterrorism, and information sharing.

– Support for free trade agreements, which have come under fire in the U.S. presidential race, particularly from Democratic Sen. Barack Obama. For most BSA members, more than half of revenues come from outside the United States, Holleyman said.

Enterprise bans on iPhones may be lifted with the announcement on Thursday that the iPhone will support Microsoft Exchange e-mail.

[ From app dev to security, discover how to frame your iPhone strategy with this special report. ]

Apple joins a host of other prominent phone makers, including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola, among ActiveSync licensees.

The Exchange capability is being released as part of a beta of the iPhone 2.0 on Thursday to hundreds of companies. Apple expects to ship the new software as a free update to iPhone customers in late June.

It apparently took a long time for the rival companies to hammer out the agreement. Microsoft started talking to Apple about licensing ActiveSync before the launch of the iPhone last year, said Terry Myerson, corporate vice president for Exchange, in a statement.

In addition to e-mail, ActiveSync will allow iPhone users to sync calendar items and contacts from their Exchange accounts to their phones. In addition, the iPhone will support the remote wipe feature of ActiveSync, so if a user loses the phone, sensitive data can remotely be erased from the device.

E-mail is likely the first of many enterprise applications that Apple will support in the iPhone, said Stephen Drake, an analyst at IDC. "This is the start," he said.

He doesn't expect that the iPhone Exchange capability will significantly affect sales of other dominant mobile e-mail platforms like BlackBerry or Windows Mobile. "This raises the level of interest," he said.

Plus, despite all the buzz about mobile e-mail, the use of it now is quite small. There are hundreds of millions of e-mail boxes and 3 billion phones in the world, yet the number of mobile e-mail subscribers is in the double-digit millions, he said. "There's plenty of room to grow. I don't think anyone will be taken out by this," Drake said.

The agreement should also give a boost to Exchange. "It's just making Exchange more sticky and ubiquitous," Drake said.

Microsoft hopes to beef up online privacy with the acquisition of the U-Prove technology, the company announced on Thursday.

U-Prove was developed by Stefan Brands at Credentica as technology that allows Internet users to disclose only the minimum amount of personal information when conducting electronic transactions as a way to reduce the likelihood of privacy violations. U-Prove also employs cryptography to prevent systems from pulling together information about users from various sources.

Microsoft did not disclose a purchase price for the technology. Brands has joined Microsoft's Identity and Access Group along with his colleagues from Credentica, Greg Thompson and Christian Paquin.

Microsoft plans to integrate U-Prove into Windows Communication Foundation and CardSpace. WCF is built on the .Net framework and allows programmers to build and run connected systems. CardSpace is also technology built on .Net that developers use to build software and Web sites that are less susceptible to common identity attacks like phishing. CardSpace is used in sites that support shopping, banking and bill payment.

In a blog post, Brands said that since he developed the U-Prove technology in the 1990s, he has turned down many buyout offers and venture capital investment opportunities because he thought the business model behind the technology wasn't strong enough. However, the demand for this type of security technology has grown, he said. In addition, Microsoft makes an ideal driver of the technology because it can influence both the client and the server sides of applications, he said.

U-Prove may be particularly interesting in medical applications, military systems, and identity outsourcing, wrote Kim Cameron, Microsoft's chief architect of identity and access, in a blog post. U-Prove "is the equivalent in the privacy world of RSA in the security space," he wrote.

The European Commission is expected to approve Google's planned acquisition of Internet advertising company DoubleClick in the coming weeks, according to people following merger reviews by Europe's top competition authority.

The Commission ruling on the deal is the last remaining obstacle, after shareholders approved it and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission gave its go-ahead in December.

The Commission has until April 2 to reach a decision on the deal, so there doesn't appear to be time to block it now. If officials conducting the investigation of the deal were planning to block or substantially change it, they would have to send Google an official statement of objections. The company would then have the opportunity to propose remedies to meet the concerns of the regulators. If that failed, Google would be invited to argue its case face-to-face with Commission officials; then the Commission's planned ruling would have to be discussed at a meeting of national competition regulators from the 27 member states.

"If they had problems with the deal, they would have sent Google formal notice of the fact by now. There doesn't appear to be time to go through all the motions needed in order to block a deal," said one lawyer who has had hands-on experience with European merger reviews.

Neelie Kroes, the commissioner in charge of competition, said last month that privacy concerns raised by the deal would not be considered by her team of officials investigating the deal, and she stressed that the deal would be judged purely on how it may impact fair competition.

When it notified the European competition authority about the deal last September, Google claimed that its activities didn't overlap at all with DoubleClick's. Google described itself as a provider of online advertising space, and DoubleClick was described as a "supplier of technology for the delivery, management, and reporting of display ads to advertisers, ad agencies, and web publishers."

Nevertheless, the Commission opened an in-depth probe of the deal last November to see whether without this transaction, DoubleClick would have grown into an effective competitor to Google in the market for online ad intermediation.

Competition spokesman at the Commission, Jonathan Todd, declined to comment on the investigation Thursday.

Google wasn't immediately available to comment.

Apple unveiled on Thursday the iPhone SDK (software development kit) at a special event at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. Apple executives said the SDK provides developers with the same tools it uses to develop applications for the iPhone.

[ From app dev to security, discover how to frame your iPhone strategy with this special report. ]

Apple also introduced a new development tool called iPhone Simulator. This tool runs on a Mac, and simulates the entire API stack of the iPhone OS. Apple said that you can run your iPhone application in the simulator, which gives developers an incredible turnaround time on development.

Scott Forstall, Apple’s vice president of iPhone Software, explained that Apple had to build a version of its development framework, Cocoa. Dubbed Cocoa Touch, the new development tools are based on the touch interaction with the iPhone instead of the keyboard and mouse interaction users have with a desktop computer.

Forstall said the SDK is made up of several Core technologies. Much of what you find in the iPhone operating system is the same as what you would find in the Mac, except power management, which is even more robust on the iPhone, according to Apple. Core Services, Core Location, and Core Audio will also be available to developers.

“So we have a fantastic set of tools, in addition to the amazing set of frameworks that make up the iPhone OS,” said Forstall.

Apple also took some time to show off some of the newest Web apps that run in Safari. Forstall highlighted sites like Facebook and Bank of America during his talk.

More information on the SDK will be posted as it becomes available.