Microsoft security news: bounty on cyber-criminals; botnet problem; "critical" vulnerabilities and more

Tough week to the Web due to security issues (mostly Microsoft-imposed)

This digest covers clouds, Windows, security, and a lawsuit over lock-in.

Backed by Microsoft, IBM, and three other outfits beckoning developers into the sky, Zend Technologies has unleashed an open source API for fashioning PHP apps that float on multiple clouds. Zend calls it the Simple API for Cloud Application Services.

Red Hat's Deltacloud project is developing a open source standardised API for addressing different cloud architectures in a uniform way. Cloud service users can use the Deltacloud API to access Amazon's EC2 as well as private clouds that are based on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation (RHEL-V); drivers for private VMware ESX clouds and the cloud services offered by Rackspace are to follow.

Clouds continue to dominate my life, as they do (or will) many of yours. While major corporations try to convince us to rent space or resources on their clouds, it doesn't have to be expensive, and some services like Ubuntu One, offer some amount of free cloud storage. But public institutions can get in on the act as well, and seed their own clouds.

An important reminder that Microsoft's screwing with the competition - not those reacting to it - is the problem

For Microsoft, trouble likely to come from China; another big dip in value

Almost 10 months ago, I wrote the post, "Dear China, Microsoft Wants to Charge You for Air Too" and now Novell follows up with its own plan to charge China for air. The Chinese assume that since Linux is open source that it means that it is less capitalistic and less money driven.