Microsoft Roadmap Revealed True Release Dates

One of the Dutch developers has stumbled across a Microsoft roadmap and announced that it indicated that the next version of Microsoft Office would not ship until the first quarter of the next year.

Maarten Visser, the Chief Executive Officer of Meetroo, has found the roadmap when he clicked on a link published on Microsoft’s Dutch site – it turned out that the PDF file wasn’t password protected. He posted the data he found in a YouTube video – it appeared to be quite interesting for him because his firm was building SharePoint apps and the release date of SharePoint 15 was very important for him.

Actually, there wasn’t much in the roadmap that wasn’t already known: it confirmed that Vole would release a public beta of Office along with betas of supporting products such as SharePoint and Exchange. However, it seems that the suite’s final release won’t see the light of day until the 1st quarter of 2013. That’s what doesn’t tally with what the software giant has been saying earlier. In case you accept the roadmap, the Office beta is marked as smack-dab between the 3rd and 4th quarters.

Meanwhile, Microsoft hasn’t yet officially revealed a timetable for Office, but a few months ago Office group executive promised that everyone would have a chance to try the Office 15 public beta in summer 2012. One more section of the roadmap showed timelines for Windows, Internet Explorer 10, and Windows Phone. As for Windows 8, its schedule only showed last September’s Developer Preview marked, while Windows Server 8 was labeled “Historical Release Cadence” lasting from the middle of the current year through early 2013. Finally, Internet Explorer 10’s launch was marked as somewhere in the second half of 2012. 

Half-Naked Australian Woman Led to American Hacker

Photos of a lightly clad Australian girl resulted in the arrest of a hacker who is claimed to break into American law enforcement and government sites. Higinio Ochoa III seemed to be great at breaking into police sites, but failed to hide when it came to half-naked Aussie woman.

Ochoa, known as a member of an Anonymous off-shoot, was charged by the US authorities with hacking into the online services of at least 4 American law enforcement websites. The local media confirmed that the guy was caught thanks to a headless picture of a bikini-clad woman in Wantirna South, who held a message taunting American authorities, which was posted on the Internet.

The FBI explained that a Twitter account named @AnonW0rmer has led the followers to a site where they could find data lifted from the law enforcement websites. The bottom of the site featured a picture of a girl known as Ochoa’s Australian girlfriend. She held a sign saying “PwNd by w0rmer & CabinCr3w <3 u BiTch's”.

However, the photo contained data that revealed it was taken by iPhone, including GPS co-ordinates indicating the Wantirna South street, as well as the house where it was taken. Twitter account had another link that led the FBI to a site that railed against oppression by police departments across the globe. This one revealed a picture of a woman holding a sign saying “We Are ALL Anonymous We NEVERForgive.

We NEVER Forget. <3 @Anonw0rmer.” Of course, it was the same woman and the authorities found 2 references to the pseudonym “'w0rmer'” on unconnected websites, one of which had hacker’s name.

His apartment was put under surveillance, and then the FBI found the hacker’s Facebook page, which named an Australian girl as his mate – the same woman in the picture in South Wantirna. The woman is in the US with Ochoa now, who will appear in court this week.

University Will Reveal Value of Personal Details

Special Android application will intrude on privacy on a daily basis. London’s Queen Mary University decided to carry out a research into how people value their own personal information. Within the frames of this research, the volunteers agreed to install a free Android application on their mobiles.


At first, this application will ask the volunteers some basic information about their background. Later, it will ask for more details every day over the next 2 weeks. The university claims that this will emulate the kind of data Internet companies are collecting from their users daily. The questions that the app will ask are intrusively private, but the kind of answers apps can take from user behaviour which is taken for granted – for example, what the user is doing, how he feels about what he is doing, where he is, who he is with, and how much the data would be worth to him. Everyone knows that this kind of data is given away for free, on the Internet, on a daily basis.


As for volunteers, they will get the chance to win £10-100 in Amazon vouchers via a prize draw for their participation. The leader of the research, Dr. Bernadette Kamleitner from the School of Business and Management, claimed that personal data is a huge but poorly regulated business. Despite the fact that the consumers are able to benefit from the use of their data through receiving customized offers that may be interesting for them, others can also use their private details to make money.


Queen Mary University hopes that that the research will help them understand which information people believe is more or less valuable to them. In addition, the results would show whether people really believe that personal data has no price or not.

Three Threats to Online Freedom

According to Google head Sergey Brin, there were 3 biggest threats to online freedom, and they were Facebook, Apple, and the authorities that censored their citizens.

While Facebook, Apple, and the government would have a similar list featuring Google high on it, Sergey Brin continues to claim that the multinational corporation he listed and the government that try to filter their citizens are the largest threats to the Internet freedom.

During the interview to the local media, Sergey Brin explained that the rise of “restrictive” walled gardens like Apple and Facebook became a major threat as the companies tightly control the kind of software that can be released on their platforms. In fact, it was just as bad as the efforts of countries like China, Saudi Arabia or Iran to filter and restrict use of the worldwide web. Brin claimed that Facebook and Apple could both stifle innovation and balkanise the Internet, with a lot being lost, since that information is not crawlable by Internet crawlers and you can’t search it.

In the event that Facebook existed before Google, the search engine would have had no chance to survive, added Brin, because search engines require an open Internet, and too many rules not just close it down, but they stifle innovation. Meanwhile, Sergey Brin didn’t mention anything about Google’s Search plus Your World (SPYW) feature that mainly prioritizes Google+ over other social networks. In addition, the industry observers point out that Google has already banned Facebook from accessing Gmail contact information by changing the terms of service for its Google Contacts Data API in such a way that the sites which access Google Contacts had to offer access to their information in response.