TechBlog

Symantec: Only a few days ago, Japan experienced one of the worst earthquakes in its history. The earthquake registered 8.9 on the Richter scale and triggered an enormous tsunami. The heart-wrenching images on television have left the world shaken. It was the worst earthquake and tsunami in the past century and at least 50 countries have since received related tsunami warnings. As the death and injury tolls continue to rise, one must not forget those who awake to exploit such delicate situations—spammers continue to maintain the guise of charitable institutions and governmental organizations! Don’t be surprised to suddenly see an email message in your inbox marked as URGENT and pleading with you for “monitory help” [sic] or a phishing mail urging you to donate to the rehabilitation of those affected by the quake and tsunami. Use prudence in finding out the genuine intent of email senders before you reach out or respond. ...

Sophos Labs Blog: If you’re interested in computer security, you’ve probably heard of PWN2OWN. It’s a competition which has become an annual fixture at the annual CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. The competition gets its name because, as the CanSecWest organizers explain, “If you can execute arbitrary code (PWN) on these [laptops or mobile phones] through a previously undisclosed browser (Firefox, IE, Safari) exploit, you can go home with one (OWN).” ...

Avira TechBlog: Well, actually we expect some more updates as some security vulnerabilities have been revealed at the Pwn2Own contest during the CanSecWest security conference. Google is the first and pushes out version 10.0.648.133 – which fixes one security vulnerability within WebKit (the base of the Blackberry, Chrome and Safari webbrowsers). As usual, the update is spread via the built-in automatic update mechanism. Users can make sure to use the latest version by clicking on the tool symbol and choosing the “About Chrome” menu entry. ...

Today I’ve read a nice article in readwriteweb.com so I wanted share it with you: We believe that Google will preview a major new social service called Google Circles at South by Southwest Interactive today. Update: Google has now officially denied that Circles will launch here, but not that it exists. Others, including Tim O’Reilly, have also now confirmed that they’ve seen it and that it’s awesome. If what we’ve heard is correct, the service will offer photo, video and status message sharing. Everything users share on Circles will be shared only with the most appropriate circle of social contacts in their lives, not with all your contacts in bulk. Circles may be shown off at an event co-hosted tonight by the ACLU, an organization focused on privacy and the liberties it affords. It may not be a big public launch yet, but it’s clear that this is a major product in the works at the very least. ...

Examiner.com wrote: As many people are aware, bullying today is not like it used to be. Back in the day, all one had to do to turn his bully in was give the name of the person who bothered him to a trusted adult. Today, it is not that easy. Bullying doesn’t end at the school bell. It follows students from the blacktop to their cell phones to their computer screens. Many times, these “cyber bullies” create fake online profiles which allow them to bully anonymously. Kids in turn learn to fear school instead of perceiving it as a place of safety. Consider these staggering statistics- One third of middle school and high school students report being bullied during the school year. Almost 3 million students have said they were pushed, shoved, tripped and even spit on. Those are only the reported incidents of bullying. It does not include the day to day bullying that goes unreported. Bullying has also shown to lead to absences and poor performance in the classroom. ...

TheNextWeb wrote: We’ve received a solid report from a reliable and proven source that Yahoo has sold social bookmarking site Delicious for $5m+. The service was placed on the market in December after a meeting to discuss Yahoo’s future direction. After a heated bidding process, the site has reportedly been sold to a rival bookmarking service – who exactly we’re unsure of but we’ll update once we have confirmation. We do know its been sold to an existing competitor with “strong user base.” ...

Twitter has issued a statement to its mailing list encouraging third-party developers to cease creating applications that use the Twitter API solely to duplicate the functionality offered by Twitter’s own official clients. Citing an effort to improve consistency of the Twitter user experience, the social networking behemoth is exercising more control over how its service is utilized. Developers who already have an established audience, such as those who create such popular clients as TweetDeck and Seesmic, may continue developing their applications and supporting their user bases. However, developers are encouraged to cease creating new applications that duplicate existing functionality. With 750,000 applications in existence that already use the Twitter API, it is quite clear why Twitter wants to stop the tide of new apps and grab the reins of its users’ experience: it wants to own the user experience. ...

Safari just got served. At this year’s Pwn2Own conference, security firms and enthusiasts are doing their very best to discover and deploy exploits to some of the world’s most popular browsers. Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, they’re all on the menu for conference attendees and some have definitely faired better than others. Google issued a challenge, promising $20,000 to any person or team that could crack Chrome on the conferences opening day, but the two teams scheduled to take a swing backed down. Firefox is, for the time being, still standing, and, per usual, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was taken down without much fuss. But which browser faired the worst? That would be Apple’s Safari. A French security research firm named Vulpen managed to break into Safari running on a MacBook Air in a cool five seconds. The company noted that the Safari update issued by Apple yesterday — version 5.0.4 — fixes some of the vulnerabilities, but not all. The takedown of Safari 5.0.3 used exploits that are still available in the updated code base. Go ahead Apple detractors, have a little fun in the comments section. ...

TechSpot wrote: Microsoft this week reportedly signed off the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) build of Internet Explorer 9. The RTM build is 9.00.8112.16421.110308-0330, meaning it was compiled on March 8, 2011 at 3:30 AM, according to Windows 8 Beta. A user by the name of sp3ciali5t has managed to post an image of the IE9 about screen for this build on Twitter. It’s in Turkish, but you can still the build number: ...

Google Operation System: While most Chrome users have been upgraded to Chrome 10, Google is fixing the bugs from Chrome 11 and working on Chrome 12. A recent Chromium build made a significant change: Gears is no longer included in Google Chrome. Gears is a browser plugin released by Google back in 2007, The initial goal was to add support for offline web apps, but the plugin added many other HTML5 features at a time when HTML5 wasn’t a priority for most browsers. Google discontinued Gears last year to focus on “bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5” and to implement them in Google Chrome. Features like geolocation, notifications, web workers, application caches are already available in Google Chrome, so it’s probably the right time to stop bundling the Gears plugin. ...