New details are now available on what will be coming in the Windows Phone 7 ‘Mango’ update. These details came to light during the 2011 Microsoft MIX event,via WindowsPhoneSecrets: Mango will contain new hardware capabilities for developers to work with, along with better browsing, and larger opportunities and abilities in regards to the WP7 Marketplace. As we have long noted, Microsoft is desperate to grow its pool of WP7 applications and active developers....

Microsoft has posted a new developer-centric blog post to itsWindows Team Blog, providing a very detailed insight into how well the Windows Phone 7 ecosystem has performed in its first year of availability. Whilst the post is pretty self-congratulatory, Microsoft does has some some numbers to be proud of. The company can boast over 1.5 million downloads of its Windows Phone Developer Tools, with roughly 36,000 developers paying to become members of the AppHub – 1,200 being added every week – where they interact with other members of the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace and submit their apps....

Computer graphics are steadily becoming more realistic in both movies and video games, but Disney’s Brave and Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire will one day look like amateur’s work. Microsoft researchers have taken 3D modeling a step further with a new technique that leverages both motion capture and 3D scanning. It creates high-fidelity 3D images of the human face that depict not only large-scale features and expressions, but also the accompanied movement of human skin (such as wrinkling)....

Updates at the foot of the post. Hotmail users in the Middle East, Africa and Asia have had secure access to their email accounts disabled, after Microsoft turned-off its “always use HTTPS” option within its popular email service, potentially allowing governments and hackers to eavesdrop on sensitive communications. Initially reported byJillian C. York, the issue was originally thought to only encompass Arabic and Iranian users, but with further investigation by theElectronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), it was found to be affecting users in more than a dozen countries, including: Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Congo, Myanmar, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan....

Oh dear, I wonder how many twelve-year-old kids just lost their collective cool. Microsoft, in avery terse statement, made it known today that it hadbanned a number of Xbox LIVE userswho had ripped off content from the console’s Marketplace. Users who suffered the ban have reported that they are suspended until, get this, December 31, 9999. That is quite the sentence, if we can say so ourselves. The crime that we are dealing with, according to Microsoft, is that some users “illegitimately accessed Xbox LIVE Marketplace downloadable content....