News from the RSA Conference 2005

There are a couple of things worth repeating from the news from the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week (I'm sure many security experts would say there is a lot more than this...).

The first was directly pertinent for me as I was helping a friend just last night trying to help cleanse his system of SpyWare.  Although the Microsoft Windows AntiSpyWare has been around for awhile (in fact the beta is posted as a top download on Microsoft's home page), there has been speculation about what would become of it.  One big thing of note is that this will become a free service.  The underlying SpyNet technology and process of detecting and guarding against SpyWare/MalWare/AdWare is pretty interesting.  Here are some links from ZDNet, the first with a video subset of the Bill Gates keynote and the second is an article entitled Windows anti-spyware to come free of charge.  The official Microsoft Press Release is also worth browsing.

The second piece of interest was the decoupling of Microsoft's future IE7 from the operating system.  The IEBlog provides a few more details on the when and who for IE 7.