Today is a very exciting day for Windows Live – for the hundreds of people who work on building and delivering Windows Live, for the hundreds of millions of people who use Windows Live, and for the thousands of Windows Live advertisers and partners. Around the world, today is the day that we’re finally able to share the innovations in communications and sharing that we’ve been working on and will release shortly.

Today, Seagate announced it's rolling out two new self-encrypted laptop drives, designed to guard against information theft. Dell will be an initial OEM customer.

Seagate on Monday announced new full disk encryption (FDE) Momentus self-encrypted drives with capabilities of up to a half-terabyte, along with software from McAfee for encryption management. Although standalone editions of the 5,400 RPM and 7,200 RPM drives are available to consumers and organizations of all sizes, Seagate is also selling the FDEs to OEMs, starting with Dell.

As Word celebrates its 25th birthday, we look back at the changes and challenges Microsoft's flagship word-processing program has been through during its first quarter-century.

AOL has notified its users that it is to close its AOL Pictures service at the end of the year. Consumers with images stored on AOL Pictures will be able to access them in 2009 via AOL's photo-service partner Pixum. US users are pointed at American Greetings PhotoWorks.

For those of us who not only need to keep dozens of Firefox tabs open at once but need to see them to remember they exist, Tab Mix Plus' upgrade to Firefox 3 compatibility is some of the week's best news.

There are dozens of little tools and services you need to download from Microsoft in order to actually start developing Web applications on your own. Finally, the company has decided to make them all available through a single form.

10 key questions to ask before you buy anti-spyware software for your business.

Big Brother may not be watching, but plenty of other people have their eyes on your data. Spyware — software that's surreptitiously placed on a computer in order to report on or control its user's actions — has become a major business scourge.

A dodgy anti-virus update from AVG wrongly flagged up the popular ZoneAlarm firewall as a Trojan on Tuesday.

The mis-firing AVG definition file tagged components of ZoneAlarm as infected with the Agent_r.CX Trojan horse and quarantined important files. As a result users running the popular antivirus package alongside security suite software from Check Point were left with a malfunctioning firewall, mystery infection reports and an inability to re-install their ZoneAlarm software.

IT security and control firm Sophos is warning computer users to be vigilant following its discovery that legitimate webpages on the website of Adobe Systems were hosting malicious code that can infect visiting computers.

Sophos identified the threat, known as Mal/Badsrc-C, on the Fortune 1000 company's 'Vlog It support center section' - an area providing tips for video bloggers - on Friday 3 October.  Despite repeated attempts by Sophos to contact Adobe about the problem, the malicious code was still present until last night.