Microsoft coders take a month off

Microsoft has announced that it has called a halt on new code creation during February as part of its move towards heightened security.

Speaking to a group of privacy and security officers at the Privacy and Data Security Summit in Washington, Richard Purcell, Microsoft's director of corporate privacy, said the company would go over its old code as the first step in cleaning out bugs and flaws.

He described the state of computing today as "unstable and unreliable", and maintained that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is "really annoyed by the incredible pain we put everyone through in computing".

As well as stopping the development of operating system software for the entire month, Microsoft is sending its 7,000 systems programmers to a special security training programme, according to the company.

The announcement follows up on Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative unveiled last month, which said that the software giant would go back over all the Windows operating system code to detect security flaws.

According to Purcell, the initiative is just the beginning in a series of changes that Microsoft is undertaking. He said that privacy and reliability would play bigger roles in the company's future development efforts.