Look for new pop-ups to appear on your computer if you happen to use a counterfeit copy of Microsoft Office.

The company announced that it will be launching a pilot program called Office Genuine Advantage in other countries that will notify users if they are using a pirated copy of MS Office. The reminder will come in the form of pop-ups. The program, which will be available on a voluntary basis (why the hell would anyone want to volunteer in this program), will be available in Chile, Spain and Turkey.

A user who opens a pirated copy of Office will get a pop-up notification and this will appear again after 2 hours for a total 30 days. At the end of this 30-day period, a “permanent visual reminder” will be seen on the documents although users can still open or edit files.

This sounds so much like the digital version of the scarlet letter. How medieval can you get, eh?

Firefox faithful have reason to be excited. Mozilla recently announced that Firefox 3 has reached the fifth beta. The new beta is now available for download for those who want to experience the new browser earlier than others.

The new beta version will have about an astounding 750 changes from the previous beta, which was no slouch either as it was already considered as very fast and stable. Beta 5 is seen as the last before the actual release. With the number of changes for Beta 5, one would be hard put to consider that the final release will still have a number of changes. This is good news for us users because, frankly, I am sick and tired of doing the beta for software companies who love to just release half finished or unstable builds and yet claim it is an official release (hear that, Microsoft?).

Some of the features that we can expect from Beta 5 are native Windows icons as well as widgets as well as support for 45 languages. The new “Places” feature has also been updated.

Firefox 3 Beta 3 was released a few days ago. Developers and testers of the new version of Firefox have complained about the memory leaks that have plagued Beta 2. The new version has attempted to plug in the said leaks. To date, about 350 memory leaks were plugged.

In total, about 1300 changes were made to the browser, addressing issues in security, bug fixes, performance improvement as well as changes in the user interface. But security has been the main focus of this particular beta release. For example, a user can now click on a site’s icon in order to find out if the connection if safe and protected from eavesdropping. There is also a new malware protection module that alerts users if they visit a site that installs malware or perform other malicious processes.

Additional features also include a download manager and a tagging function.

Those who want to actually check it out can download the software at this address.

In what could be considered a rarity for the company, Microsoft recently announced that it Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office 2007 will be arriving earlier than the expected date. Previous releases suggested that SP1 will be made available by early 2008. But it has been announced that it will be made available by today, December 11.

One of the factors that brought about this fast deployment is the fact that testing was done for just a few months and was only limited to big enterprises who are part of their Technology Adopter program.

The limited testing decision was arrived at because the SP1 team thinks that there are no real modifications in the release that would have a big impact on users. Is Microsoft implementing some new AGILE methodology that could result in faster delivery dates from the company or is this a big oversight on their team? Let’s see what the first batch of news will bring after the deployment of SP1.

If you are a web developer or just one of those geeks that want to tinker with beta releases, then you will be happy to know that Mozilla has released Beta 1 of Firefox 3. The new browser will purportedly have 30 new features, most of them answering users’ request for more security, easier usage and better performance.

One of the new features is a location bar that will allow users to know who owns a particular website. This has become an important feature because of the rise of bogus sites that trick users into giving personal information or phish for other important data. Aside from this feature, Firefox 3 will also have additional malware protection against sites that install potentially dangerous (or at least irritating) trojans, spyware or even viruses.

Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 platform and has been under development for almost three years. Mozilla hopes that the new iteration of Firefox will address the increased demand of users for an additional layer of security. From a technical perspective it looks like this version is going to be very robust and secure, but the proof is in the testing, so to speak. We’ll see how it performs in real world situations.