Category: Security
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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Mozilla Responds To Microsoft’s Claims
Recently, Microsoft has created a new web site, designed to highlight the advantages of the Internet Explorer web browser. As it turns out, Mozilla did not like the idea of such page at all and has responded to the software giant claims.
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Amazon’s Silk Criticized By US Congress
Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, voiced his discontent about the browser at a public hearing this week, while Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, urged Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for more clarity regarding the data collected from Silk users. The reason for the outrage had to do with how everything a user did in Silk, Amazon would know about. This isn’t the first time that Silk has caused privacy concerns to arise either.
Markey went into a bit more detail in a letter addressed to Amazon, stating that Silk is the only browser available for Silk and that Amazon could essentially keep track of each and every click its customers make. This includes knowing where people shop, what products they buy, when they buy them, and how much they pay.
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Mozilla To Prompt Firefox 3.6 Users To Upgrade
Mozilla said it will begin to send Firefox 3.6 users an offer that urges them to get on the rapid release train.
It would be the first time it has offered what it calls an “advertised update” or a “major update” to people still running 2010’s Firefox 3.6.
According to Mozilla, the offer does not hint at an impending retirement of the older version.
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