It’s been a troublesome couple of months for Sony; finding itself the target of adedicated hacking campaign, the company’s PlayStation Network was breached and millions of customer records stolen. With the security of cloud-based services in doubt and worries that Microsoft’s Xbox Live service could be the next target for attackers, despite remaining unaffected by events, Dennis Durkin, COO and CFO of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB) has spoken out in support of his company’s gaming rivals, stating that hacks on Sony were “bad for the industry”:...

Accordingto Bloomberg, Microsoft has left the bidding process and auction for Hulu, telling the firm that it would not participate in its second round. While this might disappoint certain parties, it is not overly surprising given the company’s close ties to Netflix, a firm that competes with Hulu on several fronts. If Microsoft had purchased Hulu, it would have owned a company that competed directly with Netflix, something that would surely disappoint NFLX’s CEO Reed Hastings, a Microsoft board member....

TNW Quick Hit: In a bid to boost the appeal of Bing to users of every stripe, Microsofthas movedthe popular Bing Rewards program out of its walled garden and into its homepage on every modern browser in the US. The move follows what Microsoft claims to be repeated calls to loose the Rewards program from the Bing Toolbar and Internet Explorer. This will allow users to earn credits in the service while merely logged in, and not just on their home computer:...

Microsoft has now released Internet Explorer 9 in 12 Indian languages including Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Malyalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. As with rest of the world, Internet Explorer is experiencing a huge dip in browser market share in India, thanks to better browsers like Firefox and Chrome from Mozilla and Google respectively. Microsoft’s move suggests at gaining back this lost market share by promoting local language computing in rural regions....

Microsoft continues to blog and explain the coming Mango update to its Windows Phone 7 platform, to both boost awareness, and to satiate the fans that it has managed to accrue in the months since the phone line launched. Today the companyreiterated elementsof the expanded language support that Mango will contain, along with several new details about how they will function, and gave a look into the future as to what it has coming next....