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Journalism of Courage
Microsoft Corp chairman Bill Gates unveiled new products on Sunday that promised to cut down on spam, secure computer networks and make it easier to find information on personal computers.
Available in mid-2004 as an add-on to most of Microsoft’s email software, ‘SmartScreen’ technology developed by Microsoft’s research arm will filter email to prevent unwanted advertising and malicious messages from reaching recipients’ inboxes.
Microsoft also said it will introduce new server-based software to secure computer networks. Dubbed ‘Internet Security and Acceleration Server,’ Microsoft said it will make the network protection product available in the first half of next year.
The software will act as a secure firewall that can be deployed alongside existing firewalls made by other software companies, or alone. In order to tackle the increasing proliferation of information passing through desktop computers, Gates demonstrated a new feature called ‘Stuff I’ve Seen,’ which could be incorporated into the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn.
‘‘Longhorn is a very ambitious piece of work,’’ Gates told, ‘‘We wanted to bring visualisation (of data) to a whole new level.’’
The new feature will allow users to track their files, email, calendars, Web pages and other information that they see on their computers.
