Category: Security
Future Firefox Releases To Include Sandboxing And More
If you are wondering what Mozilla has been up to recently, then this article is a good starting point.
According to Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox Engineering, the company has been quite busy at brainstorming and implementing new ideas to improve Firefox’s security,
First in the list is the JIT (just in time) compiler hardening, which should protect users against JIT spraying attacks.
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Researchers Say Google Wants To Undermine Firefox’s Growth
Google denies the charges.
Remember the study by Accuvant, which concluded that Google Chrome is the most secure web browser?
NSS Labs, a California based company that publishes web browser security results of its own, has issued a statement, which claims that Google is pretty much on its own now and has already done some dirty things to undermine Firefox’s and other web browsers growth.
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Google Chrome Is The Most Secure Web Browser
Google funded study confirms.
Accuvant, the US based research, firm has published a new study, which compared security features of the three most popular web browsers: Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Firefox.
As it turns out, the search giant funded study has made a conclusion that Google Chrome is the most secure browser out there, followed by Internet Explorer and Firefox.
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Download Firefox 8.0.1
Mozilla has officially released Firefox 8.0.1. What this minor release does is fix a couple of bugs, nothing major, hence why it’s a minor update.
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Update Your Parents’ Browser Day
The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal came up with it as a practical avocation for the day after Thanksgiving, when many people are paying their folks at home a visit.
Madrigal proposes that if you cannot dissuade your parents from keeping Internet Explorer 6 because YouTube will stop working, “wait until they slip into a tryptophan induced coma and then sneak into the den.”
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Mozilla Progresses On Silent Updates
Mozilla is making progress on adding a silent update mechanism to Firefox, with plans to integrate the new service in Firefox 10 early next year. One of the developers working on the feature cautioned that silent update might slip, however.
At this point, we’re not quite sure which version of Firefox this will land in…We’re working to land it as soon as is safely possible. - Ehsan Akhgari, a Firefox engineer in charge of one of the silent update components, said in a blog post last weekend.
“Occupy Flash” Movement Desires Death Of Flash
A small group of website and mobile app developers recently started off an “Occupy Flash” campaign in the hope of putting an end to Adobe’s popular browser plug-in.
The group, which launched a website earlier this week, said its goal was to “Get the world to uninstall the Flash Player plug-in from their desktop browsers.”
Flash Player is dead. Its time has passed. It’s buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates. It’s a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of Web technology. - The Occupy Flash site
Tor: Online Anonymity Not So Anonymous After All
As you might know, the Anonymous group has declared a war on pedophiles and their “favorite” web sites. After releasing 190 IPs of alleged pedophiles, they also revealed how such data was collected.
Turns out, the TorButton (aka “The Honey Pawt”) has been modified to track usage of visits to the child pornography web sites and sent data back to Anonymous.
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Record Sum Paid Out In Chrome Bug Bounties
$26,511 were paid out by Google to researchers who made the search giant aware of some of the 18 Chrome vulnerabilities that were taken care of recently. 11 of the 18 vulnerabilities received the second highest rating on Google’s danger meter, namely “high,” while three were classified as “medium” and another four were pegged as “low.”
The $26,511 were paid out to four researchers, two of which were Sergey Glazunov and “miaubiz” who earned $13,674 and $10,337 respectively. Being regular Chrome vulnerability finders, they account for 57% of all bug payments this year. An amount exceeding $170,000 in bounties has been paid out by Google so far for the year of 2011. Set more than two months ago, the previous bounty amounted to $17,000.
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Opera Denies SVG Patch Accusations
With the release of Opera 11.52, Norwegian browser maker has fixed a security vulnerability, which enabled hackers to execute the arbitrary code through the SVG font manipulation.
There is one issue though, José A. Vázquez, security researcher from Spain has made this exploit public 10 days ago, putting Opera users at risk.
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