McAfee apologizes for dodgy antivirus update

In today's podcast: McAfee apologizes for dodgy antivirus update; Microsoft wins software piracy case in China; and Windows 7 gives Microsoft's results a boost.

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McAfee apologized for its anti-virus update that took down Windows XP computers around the world, but says it affected a small percentage of its customers. A statement issued by a McAfee spokesman says that less than 0.5% of McAfee users were hit by the update, which misidentified a legitimate SP function as a virus and killed it. The results were computers locked in a reboot loop. The statement also says the fatal fix passed the company's quality testing and describes the effects on customer machines as "moderate to significant issues." The company is still trying to figure out how the error made it into the update.

Microsoft won a Chinese court case over pirated software used by a local insurance company, scoring a point in its ongoing fight against intellectual property violations in China. A Shanghai court on Thursday ordered Shanghai-based Dazhong Insurance to pay Microsoft 2.2 million yuan (US$320,000) in damages for using illegal copies of Microsoft software, the U.S. company said in a statement. Dazhong was running 450 illegal copies of software spanning nine different Microsoft programs, including Windows XP and Microsoft Office. An employee of Dazhong Insurance reached by phone said the company was preparing to appeal the case.

Windows 7 has once again kept Microsoft's balance sheet healthy. On Thursday, the company announced strong income and revenue growth for its third fiscal quarter, thanks in part to continued brisk sales of the new OS. For the quarter ended March 31, Microsoft reported net income of US$4.01 billion, up 35 percent from the same period a year prior. As in the previous quarter, Windows 7 provided much of the boost needed to achieve the positive numbers, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein said in a statement. He also pointed to the company's Bing search, Xbox Live and emerging cloud services as areas of growth.

Apple responded to Adobe's announcement that the company has no plans to continue developing iPhone application building technology after Adobe Creative Suite 5. The decision was blamed on a change in Apple's iPhone Developer Program License Agreement. Section 3.3.1 that banned "applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool. Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller responded in a statement yesterday: "Someone has it backwards -- it is HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and H.264 (all supported by the iPhone and iPad) that are open and standard, while Adobe's Flash is closed and proprietary."

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.