Developers on the “Shiretoko” track for Mozilla’s new open source Firefox 3.5 Web browser now have very good reason to expect a ship date for the first round of bug fixes and vulnerabilities. A very big vulnerability has turned up in just the wrong place: a public site for posting exploits. The problem is a new permutation of an old exploit technique that, ironically,...
The first of the month always brings a bountiful harvest from Google’s blogging troops, and two posts yesterday pointed us to some nifty changes to Gmail’s labels features and passed along some cheerful numbers concerning spam levels as measured by the company’s Postini group. With one notable exception, those who rely even moderately on Gmail’s labels ought to like where things are going. The...
For a good part of Tuesday, the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 testing server was offline. With it went 25% of our browser performance testing capacity, which kept us from being able to publish our initial Mozilla Firefox 3.5 performance index as originally planned. As Acid3 started coming back, browsers were posting curiously low scores (for instance, Opera 10 Beta below 100%) that led us...
Last year, Sprint and Clearwire consolidated their WiMAX businesses in the Clear 4G wireless network, which was partly funded by investments from Google, Intel, and cable companies Time Warner, Bright House Networks, and Comcast. Today, Comcast officially became the first Clear reseller among the investors, launching its “High Speed 2go” WiMAX subscription service in Portland, Oregon. The cable company announced that there will be...
About three months ago, Gianfranco Lanci flew into San Francisco International Airport, got off the plane and made his way to the passport control stations. As he pulled out his documents, the passport agent immediately recognized him as the chief executive of Acer. “It was the first time in my life that has ever happened,” he says. Mr. Lanci may need to come to...
A post today on the IE support blog got me really curious. Apparently, if you install the Microsoft Software Inventory Analyzer, you lose print preview functionality. The culprit would be the fact that MSIA registers itself to use the .dlg file extension. Feeling unsatisfied, I decided to investigate further. I can confirm that it’s easy to reproduce and it affects more then just the...
Exactly one year after it re-announced the commercial subscription edition of its anti-malware service for individual Windows users, Microsoft announced it will discontinue Windows Live OneCare, replacing it with a free alternative. The new service, which has yet to be formally named but which is being referred to by its code-name “Morro” (perhaps named after a famous Spanish fortress) is said to be constructed...
An international group formed in May to lay some ground rules for anti-malware testing has delivered a pair of documents setting forth basic principles. The Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO), which includes representatives from most of the major vendors on its membership roster, has published two documents setting forth fundamental principles (PDF available here) and best practices for dynamic testing (PDF available here). There’s...
Reports are reaching us that today’s update of the AVG 8.0 crashed many computers. After the update AVG 8.0 thinks that “user32.dll” is a virus: PSW. banker4.APSA. This file, however, is not (part of ) a virus but in fact an essential part of your Windows program. In the event you have deleted this vital file as a result of the faulty detection, your...
Microsoft is hard at work on Service Pack 2 for both Windows Vista and Server 2008. Very little information is available at this time. Currently, the product release notes and related information about Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Windows Vista SP2 are not available. We will be keeping a watchful eye for any changes and updates about Service Pack 2. If you want to...
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