p2pnet World Headlines – July 15, 2009
Critical JavaScript vulnerability in Firefox 3.5 Mozilla
A bug discovered last week in Firefox 3.5`s Just-in-time (JIT) JavaScript compiler was disclosed publicly yesterday. It is a critical vulnerability that can be used to execute malicious code. The vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker who tricks a victim into viewing a malicious Web page containing the exploit code. The vulnerability can be mitigated by disabling the JIT in the JavaScript engine. Alternatively, users can disable the JIT by running Firefox in Safe Mode. Windows users can do so by selecting Mozilla Firefox (Safe Mode) from the Mozilla Firefox folder.
British academics protest after Russia closes down history website The Guardian
A group of British academics including the historian Orlando Figes and the poet and translator Robert Chandler have spoken out after authorities in Russia closed down a website dealing with the country’s controversial Soviet past. On 19 June the home affairs ministry in St Petersburg shut down the site www.hrono.info. The website had been Russia’s largest online history resource, widely used by scholars in Russia and elsewhere as a unique source of biographical and historical material. Officials said they closed the site because it published extracts from Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf. Today, however, its founder, Vyacheslav Rumyantsev, said the closure had nothing to do with Hitler, adding that the text was widely available elsewhere and was only summarised on the site Rumyantsev said the authorities may have pulled the plug after an article was posted on 16 June criticising St Petersburg’s pro-Kremlin governor, Valentina Matviyenko. The article attacked Matviyenko’s decision to cut an allowance given to survivors of the Nazi siege of Leningrad. The closure comes amid official attempts in Russia to rewrite some of the darkest aspects of its 20th-century history. School textbooks now portray Stalin not as a mass murderer but as a great, if flawed, national leader and an “efficient manager” who defeated the Nazis and industrialised a backward Soviet Union. In December, police in St Petersburg raided the human rights organisation Memorial, removing much of the material used by Figes in The Whisperers, his acclaimed book on family life under Stalin. It included interviews with gulag victims, photos and personal testimonies. Figes’s Russian publisher later scrapped plans to publish the book in Russian.
Bill Gates on Google’s Chrome OS CNet News
To Bill Gates, Google’s Chrome OS looks a lot like a familiar foe: Linux. “There’s many, many forms of Linux operating systems out there and packaged in different ways and booted in different ways,” Gates said in an interview with CNET News this week. “In some ways I am surprised people are acting like there’s something new. I mean, you’ve got Android running on Netbooks. It’s got a browser in it.” Gates said it was hard to really say much about Chrome OS, since Google has said so little about how it will actually work. “The more vague they are, the more interesting it is,” he said. As for the notion that the browser needs to act more like an OS, he noted that the browser has already become an extremely broad concept, with all of the plug-ins and other things that are now done inside a browser. “It just shows the word browser has become a truly meaningless word,” Gates said. “What’s a browser? What’s not a browser? If you’re playing a movie, is that a browser or not a browser? If you’re doing annotations, is that a browser? If you’re editing text, is that a browser or not a browser? In large part, it’s more an abuse of terminology than a real change.”
Developer: Apple blocking push on unlocked iPhones CNet News
Czech developer PoweryBase is claiming that Apple is intentionally blocking push notifications to users of unlocked iPhones. PoweryBase, makers of several applications that use Apple’s push notification service, said 80 percent of its customer support complaints are coming from a very small minority of its customers. All of these customers are using unlocked iPhones. The developer explains that when a push application requests an ID from the Apple server, the iPhone receives a unique token. Once the token is received, push notifications proceed as you would expect. The process only takes a few seconds to complete. However, PoweryBase says on unlocked phones they have seen the Apple server not respond at all. This just leaves the user’s app in limbo until it times out.
Company Settles Case of Reviews It Faked New York Times
Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company, has reached a settlement with the State of New York over its attempts to fake positive consumer reviews on the Web, the New York attorney general`s office said Tuesday. The company had ordered employees to pretend they were satisfied customers and write glowing reviews of its face-lift procedure on Web sites, according to the attorney general`s statement. Lifestyle Lift also created its own sites of face-lift reviews to appear as an independent sources. One e-mail message, discovered by the attorney general`s office, told employees to devote the day to doing more postings on the Web as a satisfied client. The company will pay $300,000 in penalties and costs to the state. It has also agreed to stop publishing anonymous reviews on Web sites in the voices of satisfied customers and to identify any content created by employees, the statement said.
Blockbuster, Samsung set on-demand video pact Reuters
Blockbuster Inc on Tuesday announced an agreement that allows consumers to instantly view movies and video from its OnDemand service on Samsung’s televisions and electronics devices. The deal expands the reach of the company, best known for its brick-and morter-movie rental stores, further into the market for digital distribution of video. The service, due to launch in September or October in the United States, is similar to Blockbuster’s existing pacts with TV maker Vizio and digital video recorder maker TiVo Inc, which was announced in March.
Robot Unemployment Rate Soars in Japan Pop-Sci
Recession times have proved a harsh reality check for Japan’s ongoing love affair with robots. Novelty robots have fared the worst, unsurprisingly, as cute or quirky represents the first to go when consumers check their wallets. But even the 370,000 industrial robot workers–the most of any nation–toiling away tirelessly in Japanese factories have seen a sharp drop in demand that mirrors Japan’s 40-percent overall decline in industrial production. One analyst told The New York Times that he expects the industrial robot market to shrink by up to 40 percent this year. And the Japan Robot Association noted that shipments of industrial robots fell 59 percent in the first quarter of 2009.
Computer battery life sparks highly charged debate Mercury News
Benny Villanueva recalls being in a Starbucks rushing to finish a college paper that was due when his laptop battery, which he’d been led to believe would last hours, conked out after only about 30 minutes. “It just shut off on me,” said the 30-year-old from San Jose, who is studying dentistry. “I almost started yelling. It’s kind of frustrating, but what can you do?” Consumer complaints about being misled on how long their laptop batteries will last aren’t new, of course. But the issue has had the Web roiling lately, with much of the hullabaloo centered on those two longtime chip-making antagonists, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
More cannabis plants in Sweden Stockholm News
The police have confiscated four hundred percent more cannabis plants this year than most of the years before. So far in 2009, they have confiscated cannabis plants at six hundred occasions. So much cannabis is now produced in Sweden that the market is self-supporting and there is no need for import. According to the police it is not about people who have a little plant at home for their own use, it is more the really big commercial producers that have increased their business.
Microsoft Office users attacked by cybercriminals Reuters
Microsoft Corp warned that cybercriminals have attacked users of its Office software for Windows PCs, exploiting a programing flaw that the software giant has yet to repair. The world’s largest software maker issued the warning on Tuesday as it released patches to address nine other security holes in its software. “Despite today’s fixes, Windows users continue to be under attack. Microsoft is taking two steps forward, while attackers are putting it one step back,” said Dave Marcus, McAfee Inc’s Avert Labs director of security research. Cybercriminals target Microsoft programs because they are so widely used, allowing them to go after the largest number of potential victims with one set of code. (Windows runs more than 90 percent of the world’s PCs. Office has some 500 million users).
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
July, 2009
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