Current date/time is Fri 03 Sep 2010, 4:29 pm
Microsoft issued a record number of monthly patches on Tuesday, including fixes for eight critical holes affecting Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word, and other programs that could be exploited to take control of a computer.
Of the 14 patches addressing a total of 34 vulnerabilities, four of them should be given priority, Microsoft said in a Microsoft Security Response Center blog post:
• MS10-052, which resolves a vulnerability in Microsoft's MPEG Layer-3 audio codecs that could allow remote code execution if a specially crafted media file were opened or a Windows...
Adobe on Tuesday patched six vulnerabilities in Flash Player, all of them pegged critical by the company.
Tuesday’s update was 2010’s third for Flash Player, the Adobe browser plug-in that’s installed on an estimated 99 percent of all personal computers. Previous updates in March and June have fixed 33 other flaws.
As is Adobe’s practice, it revealed only the scantiest of details about the half-dozen bugs in the accompanying security advisory. Five of the six were labeled as “memory corruption” vulnerabilities, while the sixth could potentially be used in a “click-jacking”...
Yes, now that the "Get a Mac" campaign seems to have been retired by Apple, Microsoft has launched a touching attempt to reverse some of Apple's sweet and amusing put-downs.
Microsoft's new creation is a site called "PC versus Mac". Yet if you're looking for a joke or two as you weigh up your options, you will have to search very, very hard. There are no images of bespectacled gray-bearded men in loose Levi's. There are no stray comments about antennas or fanboys.
The site is a very anodyne affair. Garlanded with an image of a presumably perplexed woman...
McAfee said total malware production continued to soar and 10 million new pieces of malicious code were catalogued.
McAfee also warned users of Apple's Mac computers, considered relatively safe from virus attacks, that they may also be subjected to malware attacks in the future.
"For a variety of reasons, malware has rarely been a problem for Mac users. But those days might end soon," McAfee said.
"Our latest threat report depicts that malware has been on a steady incline in the first half of 2010," Mike Gallagher, chief technology officer of...
Remember a few weeks ago when YouTube made a big deal about its new music video page that sorts out every single music video that's hosted on the service? You can now put it to far better use with a new Firefox extension called Scrolling Lyrics Player (SLP) that turns each video page into a honest to goodness karaoke player.
Once installed, SLP will sit just to the right of any YouTube video and do a search for the lyrics of whatever music video or song recording you're watching. It then syncs that up with the timing of the video, which I might add, is nowhere near to being an exact...
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit has rejected claims by the government that federal agents have the right to conduct around-the-clock warrantless GPS tracking of suspects.
In a 41-page ruling last Friday, the appellate court dismissed government arguments about the constitutional validity of such searches and maintained that the evidence gathered from the warrantless GPS tracking in the case was obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
"It is one thing for a passerby to observe or even to follow someone during a single journey as he...
Google now offers an extension for Chrome that automates the process of adding the secure Google search site as a search engine to the Chrome 6.x branch. Google SSL Web Search is an extension, still in beta, that works with Chrome 6.0.419.0 and later on Windows and Linux computers.
First released in June 2010, installing the extension opens up a configuration window with a single button that will open Chrome's "add search engine" window. Here, you can set a keyword to speed up your use of Google SSL Web search. There are also instructions on how to set the SSL Web search as...
Adobe's Flash technology is now available for iOS devices, thanks to a new application for jailbroken iPhones and iPads. Coming from Comex, the same man who developed the browser-based JailbreakMe tool, Frash lets iPhone users view Adobe Flash content on their phones.
Frash is in its very early stages, and works with the iPhone 4, 3GS (with iOS4), third-generation iPod Touch, and iPads with the latest software (3.2.X), the developer says. To install Frash, you will also need to jailbreak your device, which can be done easily with the new Web browser-based JailbreakMe tool released...
Google this week confirmed its acquisition of online entertainment company Slide. The purchase rehashed speculation that the search giant is interested in working its way into social media, possibly with a game-centered service called "Google Me."
Although there isn't any word on specific product details David Glazer, engineering director at Google confirms the company will invest more effort to make its services more "socially aware" in a recent blog post.
This shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone. Google has repeatedly expressed interest in the past...
Google CEO Eric Schmidt had some scary things to say about privacy yesterday. In a nutshell, he said there's an almost incomprehensible amount of data out there about all of us -- much of which we've generated ourselves via social networks, blogs, and so on -- and we are totally unprepared to deal with the implications of that fact.
Schmidt was speaking at the Techonomy confab, currently underway at California's Lake Tahoe, where large-brained people gather to talk about how technology and the economy intersect.
Marshall Kirkpatrick of
Adobe will release an emergency patch, expected within two weeks, to plug a security flaw in Adobe Reader, the latest in a series of the program's recent vulnerabilities. The problem is, this flaw was found through a presentation at the Black Hat conference last week, and not by Adobe's security team.
Perhaps Adobe should put the presenter, Charlie Miller, an analyst with Independent Security Evaluators, on the payroll? Maybe then it can become proactive rather than reactive in meeting its clients' needs.
Miller's presentation, based on his white paper, illustrates how the...
Taking a page from rival Google's playbook, Mozilla plans to introduce silent, behind-the-scenes security updating to Firefox 4.
The feature, which has gotten little attention from Mozilla, is currently "on track" to make it into the final of Firefox 4, the major upgrade slated to ship before the end of the year. Mozilla has released two beta previews of Firefox 4 in the last four weeks, and has set a third beta for next week.
Firefox 4's silent update will only be offered on Windows, Mozilla has said.
Most updates, including all security updates, will...
The FCC has called off negotiations with major Internet industry players to arrive at a compromise for net neutrality. The meetings were an attempt to come to an amicable agreement over net neutrality rules and dodge political pressure over FCC jurisdiction and authority--but asking the fox how to protect the henhouse is generally unwise.
Reports of a secret deal between Verizon and Google for preferential treatment of Google traffic on Verizon's networks may have been a catalyst to the breakdown of negotiations. But, whether that is true or not, the end of the negotiations is great...
Researchers at Trend Micro have found that a widespread piece of malware used a digital certificate from a competing security company's product in an attempt to look legitimate.
The malware is Zeus, a bot that is used to steal all kinds of data from computers and has proved to be a tricky application for security companies to detect.
The version of Zeus detected by Trend Micro had a digital certificate belonging to Kaspersky's Zbot product, which is designed to remove Zeus. The certificate -- which is verified during a software installation to ensure a program is what it purports...
Available in many browsers, the private modes are not supposed to log information about sites visited. However, the study found that in many cases the privacy mode was compromised by additions to the browser or extra security on websites. Many extras that people add to browsers can "completely undermine" the anonymity of private browsing.
Computer scientist Dan Boneh from Stanford University led the study of private browsing modes on the Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari browsers. The researchers tested when people used private browsing modes by employing adverts...
The open-source Mozilla project has been offering cash bounties for security bugs for six years, but often bug finders simply turn down the cash.
Between 10% and 15% of the serious security bugs reported since Mozilla launched its bug bounty program have been provided free of charge, according to Mozilla. "A lot of people would say, 'Don't worry about it. Donate it to the EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] or just send me a T-shirt,'" said Johnathan Nightingale, the director of Firefox development, in a recent interview.
Mozilla was a pioneer in this area. It...
Microsoft today said it will deliver a record 14 security updates next week to patch a record-tying 34 vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer (IE), Office and Silverlight.
But people still running Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) will receive only a few of those fixes.
"Call it Massive Patch Tuesday," said Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of security risk and compliance provider Qualys. "It's a huge update, and more importantly, everybody's involved. I'm actually a little surprised at how large it is."
Eight of the 14 updates were tagged with Microsoft's...
Adobe said Thursday that it will release an emergency fix the week of August 16 for a critical hole in Reader that was publicly disclosed at the Black Hat conference last week.
The flaw, which could be exploited to take control of a computer, is related to the way Adobe's PDF (portable document format) reader software handles fonts, said Charlie Miller, principal analyst at Independent Security Evaluators. He disclosed the hole in his presentation on a tool that can be used to figure out the underlying bugs to software crashes, he said.
"I don't give the exploit, but...
iPhone 4 users and would-be owners who have been waiting for a way to unshackle carrier-locked versions of the phone have some tapping to do. The infamous Dev Team has released a new version of ultrasn0w, its iPhone unlock utility, which has been updated for the iPhone 4.
Announced on the Dev-Team Blog, ultrasn0w is now available in Cydia, the app store for jailbroken iOS devices. To access Cydia, you must first use JailbreakMe, a new Web-based jailbreak utility for iOS devices that takes advantage of a fairly significant PDF exploit in iOS 4.
Apple has promised an update...
Apple has already identified the iPhone security exploit used by the Web-based jailbreak procedure released earlier this week and, according to a statement the company provided to CNet, the company has a software fix ready to go.
The hole reportedly consists of two separate exploits: one that allows a maliciously constructed PDF file to execute code and one that allows that code to burrow its way out of the sandbox that should prevent just such an exploit from having free roam of the rest of the phone’s software.
Apple on Wednesday said it was investigating the reported security...
Google Thursday denied reports that it is in talks with Verizon for a deal that could undermine net neutrality.
According to reports in today's Wall Street Journal and The New York Times Google and Verizon, both major online players, are close to finalizing an agreement that would have Verizon speeding some online content more quickly than other content if the content's creators pay for it. YouTube, which is owned by Google, could greatly benefit by having its bandwidth weighty videos get priority treatment.
Google, however, told Computerworld this morning that there is no...
With the success of Internet Explorer 8--gaining 1.38 percent market share in the United States to lead the pack with more than 42 percent of the market--it is easy to forget that Microsoft is hard at work developing Internet Explorer 9. Today, Microsoft unleashed the fourth Platform Preview release for developers, and told partners and developers to start preparing--the public beta of IE9 is coming soon.
Internet Explorer 9 is in high demand in the developer community. The IE9 Platform Preview has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times, and the Test Drive site has been viewed 20...
Google is waving good-bye to Wave.
The company said on its blog on Wednesday that it is halting development on Google Wave, a real-time collaboration tool aiming to combine various forms of online communication.
"Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," Senior Vice President Urs Holzle said in the blog post. "We don't plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site, at least through the end of the year, and extend the technology for use in other Google projects."
Google debuted Wave in...
With all the news about jailbreaking iPhones in recent days, the security of Apple's popular smartphone has been called into question. But, with the hype hitting overload and scare mongers everywhere, how do you know what to believe? Let's examine the origin of the latest iPhone security flaw stories, and look at them in detail to find out how concerned you ought to be.
Reports of iPhone security flaws are nothing new, but the latest batch of reports began earlier this week with the release of Jailbreakme 2.0, a new tool that lets you jailbreak your iPhone without connecting it...
The British government has rejected a call to dump Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), saying that it is saving taxpayers' money by staying with the nine-year-old browser.
Late last week, Her Majesty's Government (HMG) officially responded to a citizen petition that urged it to "encourage government departments to upgrade away from Internet Explorer 6" because the aged browser is vulnerable to attack and requires Web developers to specially craft sites.
The petition was added to the government's online petition site in February 2010 by Dan Frydman, the managing...
Google has more deeply integrated its Web search history product into the mobile version of its search home page. Users in the U.S. who are accessing Google from a compatible mobile phone will see a new history option on the bottom of the page that takes them to a mobile-friendly version of their last 10 searches, along with what time they were queried and from what device. Additional results can then be loaded in 15 at a time.
To use the new listing, which is simply an optimized version of the Web history product that's been around since early 2007, users first have to opt in. After...
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