p2pnet World Headlines: Feb 19, 2010
Mozilla patches critical Firefox bugs Computerworld
Mozilla on Wednesday patched five vulnerabilities, three of them critical, in older editions of Firefox and in the process extended the support life of Firefox 3.0 by at least one more month. The newest Mozilla browser, Firefox 3.6, already contains the patches. Firefox 3.5.8 and Firefox 3.0.18 address three critical flaws in the browsers’ Gecko rendering engines, the HTML parsers, and their implementations of Web Worker, an enhanced scripting functionality that lets site developers shift JavaScript computations to a background thread to reduce the performance hit on Firefox’s user interface. Hackers able to exploit any of the three critical bugs would be able to inject their own malware onto the machine, Mozilla noted in the accompanying advisories. “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,” read the advisory dedicated to the browser engine issue.
Judge puts off ruling on Google’s proposed digital book settlement Washington Post
Google confronted a barrage of criticism from opponents of its proposed digital book settlement Thursday as the Internet search giant tried to persuade a federal judge to approve a deal that would allow it to create the world’s largest online library. During a marathon hearing before U.S. District Judge Denny Chin, lawyers representing the Justice Department, children’s book authors, privacy advocates and business competitors said Google’s agreement with some authors and publishers should be rejected because it would violate copyright laws. The opponents also argued that the $125 million settlement — which would allow Google to scan and publish millions of out-of-print titles — could give the company an unfair edge over other online publishers in the nascent but exploding market for digital books.
SOCOM Fights Piracy On PSP IGN UK
Sony hopes today marks the beginning of the end of the rampant piracy seen on its PSP platform. SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 3, released today, is Sony’s first test at discouraging pirates from downloading PSP software. Those who purchase SOCOM Fireteam Bravo 3 are now required to register the title through PlayStation Network before given access to online gameplay. UMD copies of the game will come with a voucher code that must be redeemed online, while digital copies will automatically register in the background. Those who buy a used copy of the UMD can purchase a PSN entitlement voucher for $20 to play online.
Microsoft offers web browser choice to IE users BBC
Millions of European Internet Explorer (IE) users will have the option to choose an alternative browser from 1 March, Microsoft has announced. It follows a legal agreement between Microsoft and Europe’s Competition Commission in December 2009. Microsoft committed to letting Windows PC users across Europe install the web browser of their choice, rather than having Microsoft IE as a default. Figures suggest that over half the world’s internet users have IE. Testing for the update is already underway in the UK, Belgium and France. The software update choice will arrive automatically for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 customers, according to a blog post by Dave Heiner, Microsoft’s vice president and deputy general counsel.
Cannabis farm found at Swedish primary school The Local (Sweden)
A water leak led on Thursday to the discovery of a small cannabis farm in a school in southern Sweden, local newspaper Blekinge Läns Tidning reports. The school had called in maintenance to investigate a suspected water leakage and once up in the attic of the primary school in Blekinge in southern Sweden, they uncovered plants linked together with heating lamps and lighting. In total police found 13 plants. The would-be cannabis farmer had not been altogether successful with the enterprise as only one of the plants showed any sign of life.
Broad New Hacking Attack Detected Wall Street Journal
Hackers in Europe and China successfully broke into computers at nearly 2,500 companies and government agencies over the last 18 months in a coordinated global attack that exposed vast amounts of personal and corporate secrets to theft, according to a computer-security company that discovered the breach. The damage from the latest cyberattack is still being assessed, and affected companies are still being notified. But data compiled by NetWitness, the closely held firm that discovered the breaches, showed that hackers gained access to a wide array of data at 2,411 companies, from credit-card transactions to intellectual property.
WordPress failure takes 10m blogs offline Telegraph
Some of the best known technology blogs on the web, including TechCrunch, GigaOM and the Technologizer, were offline for almost two hours yesterday because of an outage at WordPress.com, the blog hosting service. The technical problem took more than 10 million blogs offline for 110 minutes and cost them an estimated 5.5 million page views. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic, which owns WordPress.com, said the outage was caused by a server problem.
Facebook, PayPal green-light payment partnership CNet News
Here’s another one of Facebook’s gradual moves into the e-commerce world: The company announced Thursday a “strategic relationship” with eBay-owned payment system PayPal to make its technology available for the purchase of self-service ads as well as the Facebook Credits currency. “We want to give the people who use Facebook, as well as advertisers and developers, a fast and trusted way to pay across our service,” Dan Levy, director of payment operations at Facebook, said in a release. “As our business has grown, offering local methods of payment has become increasingly important for advertisers who want to buy Facebook Ads. Teaming with PayPal, a global leader in online payments, makes this possible.”
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
February, 2010
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February 20th, 2010 at 5:17 am
WordPress – Why is I not surprised? lol