Transcendigital blog

Mozilla Corp. late Tuesday patched 11 vulnerabilities in Firefox 3.0, more than half of them labeled “critical,” and fixed 14 flaws in the older Firefox 2.0.

Firefox 3.0.2 quashes six critical bugs, four marked “high” and one pegged as “low” in Mozilla’s four-step threat ranking system. Among the most serious were four stability bugs in the browser’s graphics rendering, layout and JavaScript engines that can crash the program and might be exploitable with malicious code.

“Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code,” said Mozilla in the accompanying advisory.

Mozilla also updated the older Firefox to 2.0.0.17, patching all but one of the bugs fixed in 3.0.2, but also addressing several issues specific to the aging browser.

Original Article Here:computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9115399&intsrc=hm_list

Chrome’s share of the browser market is fading as users who abandoned Internet Explorer and Firefox start to return, an Internet measurement company said today.

At the end of its third week of availability, Google Inc.’s Chrome accounted for 0.77% of the browsers that visited the 40,000 sites tracked by Net Applications, down from a 0.85% share the week before.

“The trend line on Chrome still has a slight downward angle, and these weekly numbers reflect that,” said Vince Vizzaccaro, Net Applications’ executive vice president of marketing. Although Chrome popped above 1% within hours of its release, the new browser now reaches that mark only in the middle of the night, U.S. time, Vizzaccaro added.

Chrome’s numbers, like those of Mozilla Corp.’s Firefox and Apple Inc.’s Safari, typically climb after work hours and then fall as work resumes the next day. Many businesses standardize on Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer (IE) and don’t allow employees to use alternate browsers.

Original Article Here: computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9115341&intsrc=hm_list

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook’s new face is drawing frowns from some of its users.

They’re grousing about a spanking new redesign intended to unclutter their profiles on the social network. Several groups requesting a return to the old design have surfaced, including one with 1 million members.

Facebook has shifted millions of users to its new design in a bid to draw more members and advertisers to a cleaner interface. Facebook’s torrid growth — it has added 90 million members the past two years — has put it in a prime position to vie for an estimated $2 billion market for social-networking ads this year.

But the new look has rankled some. “It’s really difficult to read, and I don’t like the tabs that you have to go through to see the whole profile. I hate it,” says Jenny Smelyanets, 22, a public relations specialist in Palo Alto, Calif.

The facelift includes partitioning members’ personal profiles into different areas of the site and offering more tools to make it easier to share information and photos. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the changes, although for the better, might alienate some of the more than 100 million active users.

Original Article Here:http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2008-09-21-facebook_N.htm

Amazon.com’s curious ambitions as a computing infrastructure provider continue to grow. The company this week revealed a new service that will help companies of all sizes ship files like MP3s and software packages to people scattered around the globe.

The “content delivery service” joins Amazon’s existing storage, software and database services where customers can store their data and code at Amazon’s data centers. The idea behind this push is that Amazon has developed vast expertise at running a complex Web operation, so it can lend a helping hand to those customers who would prefer not to manage their own computing systems. In addition, Amazon charges on a per-use basis, so customers can pay for the amount of disk space consumed instead of purchasing an entire storage system.

Original Article Link here:bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/amazon-enters-the-file-shipping-business/

INTERNET surfers will be able to walk through their favourite websites as if they are characters in a computer game with the launch of the world’s first 3D browser in Australia today.

Melbourne-based software developer ExitReality has created software that can be quickly downloaded to computers and that converts standard two-dimensional web pages into virtual rooms.

Individual web users are then shown as avatars (virtual people) in the same way as people are featured in virtual games.

ExitReality founder Danny Stefanic said users of the software, which ran in tandem with popular browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox, would be “blown away” by the rendering of traditional two-dimensional web pages as full interactive 3D environments.

“It is the entire web in 3D — making 40 billion virtual worlds — and it will instantly transform 2D content into 3D,” Mr Stefanic said.

Article Continues here:www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24362633-7582,00.html

Guess who may be checking you out on Facebook, Wikipedia and MySpace?

The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are poring over non-verifiable profiles on the Web to help decide who should be allowed into the country and who may pose a threat to national security.

Information is even being collected through Google searches, DHS and FBI sources confirmed to FOXNews.com.

Sources say that immigration officials vetting applicants for citizenship or asylum scan personal profiles, looking for telling pictures or information to help confirm marriages, verify background details and see with whom they’re chatting online.

Article Continues here:www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,419705,00.html

Yahoo recently announced they are testing a new home page in the US, UK, France and India. The new homepage will contain information from both Yahoo and non-Yahoo properties, such as AOL Mail and Gmail data. Yahoo will also keep the “Featured” section more up to date with “timely content from across the Web” and adding more social content based on your network.

Article Link:ycorpblog.com/2008/09/17/testing-testing-a-new-yahoo-com/

Additional Resource:

A WebmasterWorld thread is currently reporting early signs of a major Microsoft Live Search update. The rankings, indexing and algorithm seems to have updated.

Early reports came in from senior member, textex, at 9:30am (EST) yesterday. Since then, other members began to confirm the update. Long time member, Marcia, said:

A ten place drop from first to second page for the first site I checked isn’t looking too appealing right now.

It looks like sites with a LOT of backlinks have risen to the top, I’m seeing some that have been ranking at Google for similar search terms, and have checked their link profiles in the past.

It’ll take more looking, but I’d say it’s definitely an update.

I checked my analytics and I see a major change for many keywords overnight from the Live Search referrals data. So I also can confirm seeing changes with Live Search.

Original Article can be found here:www.seroundtable.com/archives/018268.html

New mobile search data has just been released by comScore’s M:Metrics unit. Generally the data show mobile search penetration growing and frequency increasing. The market share data show Google as the dominant mobile search engine across six countries, with the US market being most competitive.

The U.K. saw the greatest percentage of mobile users accessing search at 9.5 percent. The US was next with 9.2 percent (but the actual subscriber numbers are greater). The EU average was 5.6 percent.

Article Link:searchengineland.com/080915-161634.php

Additional Info:www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2469

Last November, Google introduced its My Location feature in Google Maps for Mobile. It uses cell tower IDs to triangulate the location of the phone and then identifies that location on the Google Maps interface. With a bit less precision, it essentially does the same thing that GPS does: eliminate the need to enter a geomodifier to find things nearby.

It thus saves keystrokes in mobile and also lays the groundwork for more precise mobile ad targeting at some point in the near future. Google has now taken that same cell tower triangulation approach and brought it directly into Google Search for mobile.

Article Link Here:searchengineland.com/080912-075705.php