Microsoft today held a presser to announce how far the piracy fight has come. Truth be told, it has come a long way.

According to a study done in May of 2011, Microsoft loses up to 85 Million USD annually through piracy of their software packages in Kenya alone. According to their OEM Lead for East and Southern Africa (ESA) region, Wanja Muriithi, this is attributed to by the many installations done in offices, schools, cyber cafes and home personal computing systems across the country.

On an authoritative note, Microsoft in conjunction with the Kenya Copyright Board (KECOBO) conducted a raid yesterday, 21^st December, at the premises of an industrial company and confiscated computers allegedly installed with pirated software. The biggest culprits were the Windows operating system and the Microsoft office suite which is largely pirated across the country, even in mid-size companies and SMEs.

The raid comes after the Kenya Copyright Board recently concluded their debatable successful 30-day amnesty campaign for software offenders and did much to send messages n the dangers and tough penalties should one commit an intellectual property crime.

Read more »

Now, before you get into a panic and start wondering how come Google knows and has access to your machine (You people who are always ‘stumbling’ upon porn sites), Google can now know if your PC (personal computer) is infected.

The company has recently partnered with various security companies have began campaigns to check client computers and see if they are infected.

This is a step further by this company after they recently auctioned to rid Android phones of Malware and Trojans by automatically deleting Android Apps that behaved in suspect manner from both the Android phone and the Android Market.

The popular search engine now has capability to warm users that their PCs are infected.

Routine maintenance on one of the technology giant’s data centers revealed unusual traffic from computers infected with a form of malicious software, according to Google security engineer Damian Menscher. Read more »

Microsoft recently announced that they are offering free antivirus software for local small and medium enterprises beginning sometime this year.

This comes at a time when Microsoft increasingly got feedback from customers with businesses that they needed something to combat viruses. In response, Microsoft made changes to licensing agreements to ensure that Microsoft Security Essentials is now available, free-of-charge, to those companies with no more than 10 PCs.

Kevin Connolly, Windows Product Manager for Microsoft West, East, Central Africa & the Indian Ocean Islands said that “Microsoft Security Essentials is Read more »