p2pnet World Headlines: Nov 24, 2009: #2
Microsoft confirms critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer H Online
Microsoft has confirmed the existence of the critical security vulnerability that was reported over the weekend and released information on which systems are affected. According to the report, Internet Explorer 6 SP1 under Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 under Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are all vulnerable. The bug is not, however, present in Internet Explorer 5.01 SP4 or Internet Explorer 8. The problem is caused by an invalid pointer reference in the Microsoft HTML Viewer (mshtml.dll) when processing specific CSS/STYLE objects using the getElementsByTagName() JavaScript method. If this pointer points to an object which has been deleted, this can be exploited to crash the browser or run injected code. The exploit currently doing the rounds is not particularly stable and often just causes the browser to crash. There do not appear to be any known websites actively exploiting the vulnerability to infect visitors’ PCs with malicious code at present, but this can quickly change.
News Corp. Joined by Rivals Weighing Google Block Bloomberg News
Publishers of the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News may pull some of their stories from Google Inc.’s news site, a move that would emulate News Corp.s Rupert Murdoch. News Corp. is considering blocking Google’s search engine from displaying its news articles and is talking to Microsoft Corp. about displaying stories on its Bing site, people familiar with the situation said yesterday. MediaNews Group Inc., the Post’s publisher, will block Google News when it starts charging readers in Pennsylvania and California for online content next year, Chief Executive Officer Dean Singleton said in an interview. Morning News owner A.H. Belo Corp. may also introduce online subscription fees and also block Google, Executive Vice President James Moroney said. ‘The things that go behind pay walls, we will not let Google search to, but the things that are outside the pay wall we probably will, because we want the traffic,’ Singleton said.
Opera web browser ‘censors’ Chinese content BBC
Web browser Opera has closed a loophole which allowed Chinese users to access sites banned by the government. At the weekend mobile users of the Opera Mini browser were asked to upgrade to a Chinese version. According to the BBC’s Beijing Bureau, this version no longer allows access to sites such as Facebook. Previously traffic ran over Opera servers bypassing the so-called Great Firewall of China, making the browser popular with Chinese users. Opera confirmed that it had started directing users of the international version of the mobile browser to the Chinese version on 20 November.
Restructuring costs dent Warner Music earnings Financial Times
A strong schedule of releases in international markets, coupled with a steady US market share in the face of surging sales from the catalogues of Michael Jackson and the Beatles, helped Warner Music report higher-than-expected revenues for its fourth fiscal quarter. The only quoted music company among the big four labels and publishers announced that turnover grew 0.8 per cent to $861m, up 4.7 per cent before currency effects, thanks to overseas sales of albums from Paramore, Muse, Jay-Z and a trio of Japanese artists. However, the costs of a September restructuring, which cut the number of employees working on CD releases as Warner builds up its digital efforts, contributed to a loss for the period of $18m, or 12 cents per share, compared with earnings of $6m, or 4 cents, in the corresponding quarter of 2008.
Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages Wall Street Journal
Wikipedia.org is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with roughly 325 million monthly visitors. But unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting. That could have significant implications for the brand of democratization that Wikipedia helped to unleash over the Internet — the empowerment of the amateur.
Here’s a First: Man Arrested for Not Using Twitter All Things Digital
Terrifying? Inevitable? Harbinger? In any case, it’s a first: Police in Long Island, New York, have arrested a man for not using Twitter. Someone named Justin Bieber, who apparently is a teenage singer, was supposed to appear at the Roosevelt Field mall on Friday, but stayed away because the crowd had become too unruly. Police asked a record label executive to help disperse the horde using the messaging service, and claim he didn’t cooperate. More from Newsday:
Murder probe explores World of Warcraft ties The Local
Prosecutors are looking into what role the popular online adventure game World of Warcraft may have played in the weekend death of a woman in a Stockholm suburb. Police discovered the body of Erika Eriksson on Sunday morning in an apartment located in Spånga west of Stockholm.A 33-year-old man from Sandviken in eastern Sweden who was in the apartment when police arrived has been detained on suspicions of murder. The night before, Eriksson, a native of Arvika in central Sweden, had been celebrating her 28th birthday with friends.
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November, 2009
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November 25th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
“Microsoft has confirmed the existence of the critical security vulnerability that was reported over the weekend and released information on which systems are affected. According to the report, a Windows component called ‘Internet Explorer’ is the problem. This vulnerability affects all versions of Windows. Users are strongly encouraged to disable this component and seek out safer alternatives.”
November 25th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
“Apparently they were spelling Explorer with a D…”