TechBlog

Very soon, the first build of Opera 11 will be released, and with it will come the long-awaited support for browser extensions. Yesterday at Up North Web, Opera Software’s global press day in Oslo, Norway, it was confirmed that Opera 11 will support browser extensions, the plug-ins that users can incrementally add to their browser to customize the experience. All of Opera’s competitors: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and now Safari, each offer their own extension architecture already. ...

Microsoft and Facebook Wednesday unveiled some new search tools for Bing which integrate data from a user’s circle of friends into Bing’s search results. In the Bing blog on Wednesday, Microsoft Senior Vice President of online services Satya Nadella said 50% of users consider their friends’ opinions when making a decision online. Bing is trying to capitalize on this by incorporating the “likes” of a user’s friend list into search results. ...

Posted by Diana Phan, Gmail Support Team October is National Cyber Security Awareness month and a good time for a reminder about why hijackers do what they do and how you can protect your account. Check out the Online Security blog to learn about common hijacking techniques and security practices that will help you stay one step ahead of the bad guys. To help ensure your Gmail account is safe, take a minute to visit the Gmail help center and complete their new security checklist.

Gmail has a feature that lets you unsubscribe from a newsletter or a mailing list when you report one of the messages as spam. “You’ll see the unsubscribe tool when you mark a message from particular types of mailing lists as spam. If the particular message is a misuse of a mailing list you like to receive, you can Report spam as usual. But if you never want to receive another message or newsletter from that list again, click Unsubscribe instead. We’ll send a request to the sender that your email address be removed from the list.” ...

Firefox’s JavaScript engine, Spidermonkey (including the Tracemonkey and Jaegermonkey JITs) is now faster than Webkit’s JSCore on both Sunspider and V8. Great work, team! Also, on the Sunspider benchmark, Mozilla is only about 1/100th of a second behind Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine (about 3.5%). Oh, and there’s Kraken, where we’re still solidly in the lead.

Welcome to our first release of the new Mozilla about:support add-on. about:support was developed by Siddharth Agarwal with design input from Bryan Clark and testing by Roland Tanglao about:support is based on Firefox’s about:support code, hence the name. It has been modified for Thunderbird to include email account specific information along with the normal preferences and add-ons. You can access about:support from the Help Menu: Help -> Troubleshooting Information which opens a new tab containing all your troubleshooting information including the Thunderbird specific IMAP, POP, and SMTP settings. The account information is often difficult for users to gather and deliver during the Thunderbird troubleshooting process. With the about:support add-on, the troubleshooting information is presented to the user such that it can be copied to the clipboard and pasted into a Thunderbird support forum like Get Satisfaction or emailed directly to others. With your help, Mozilla is hoping to get this add-on built directly into future versions of Thunderbird so please try it out and leave your feedback. See the about:support project page for links concerning issues, feedback, and ideas. ...

Windows Phone 7 officially launched 11Oct at a press event in NYC Monday morning. You can check out more here – http://www.windowsphone7.com By the way, if you have any doubts about the platform or it’s responsiveness, you should really watch this video here – http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windowsphone/videoGallery.aspx?contentID=wp7_unveil03&WT.z_convert=Share Seriously, watch the video. The responsiveness of the device is just flat out amazing. No lag whatsoever. If you’ve been a Windows Mobile user, this is a VERY, VERY good thing to see. I currently have a HTC Touch Pro 2 and the delay is soooo irritating. It’s even faster than my ZuneHD. Wait until you see the Bing Maps responsiveness, or the Bing Search (using Voice) feature. ...

Do you have a family bulletin board? Leave notes on the refrigerator with to-do’s and reminders? CyberLink YouMemo lets you move all that on to your PC with a digitized pin board optimized for Windows Touch. YouMemo supports multi-touch allowing you to easily resize, rotate, or simply organize notes on your bulletin board. To create a note, simply tap on “Write a Memo” then flick to your preferred notepaper. YouMemo offers 27 different colored textures, 4 writing tools, and 11 different pen colors to choose from. There is also a library of 13 stamps for additional customization. ...

I received a recommendation to check out Club Cooee. It takes the internet chat room to the next level in 3D rooms. You can run Club Cooee like a regular application or keep it always on top so you can do other tasks and see friends chatting in rooms at the same time. You may also customize your room to your own taste and liking. Options include changing furniture, adding items or even adding your favorite videos, pictures, and music to play in the background. You can actually customize everything in the application, but it will require Cooee Points or Cooee Cash. Verifying your email allows you to earn $300, which covered everything I wanted to customize. ...

As predicted Adobe AIR for Android is now available in the Android Market. Go get it.

Accessing Facebook from a public computer or Internet cafe can now be done more securely. Moving to enhance online security, Facebook on Tuesday said that it will soon offer users the ability to receive one-time passwords on their mobile phones and that it has already enabled the ability to sign out of Facebook remotely. “We’re launching one-time passwords to make it safer to use public computers in places like hotels, cafes or airports,” said Facebook product manager Jake Brill in a blog post. “If you have any concerns about security of the computer you’re using while accessing Facebook, we can text you a one-time password to use instead of your regular password.” ...

W32.Stuxnet has been a subject of much discussion amongst security researchers and media, and we posted a series of blogs on the subject. As you may already be aware, Stuxnet is hot topic as the threat targets industrial control systems in order to take control of industrial facilities and systems, such as manufacturing assembly lines and even power plants. Because Stuxnet is such major news, the miscreants who like to spread malware are not wasting much time taking advantage of this for their malicious activities. In our investigations we have discovered that various forums are discussing a free Stuxnet removal tool but unfortunately the tool is actually a piece of malware. We successfully obtained a sample of this tool and our analysis supported our sense of danger: Bottom line is, do NOT run the tool. ...

Windows/Mac/Linux: Chrome has hit version 8 in its Dev builds, adding more solid graphics acceleration to the web using your video hardware, along with a few new Labs features that herald the coming of Chrome OS. If you’re using the Dev channel, open up a tab and type in about:labs. You’ll notice features there to turn off outdated plug-ins, enable “Remoting” support for Chrome, turn on the very useful Google Instant in the Chrome Omnibar, and enable a few other useful features, including GPU acceleration of the HTML5 Canvas feature. ...

Some domain names make you cringe, some make you smile… Such was the case this morning, with redpoo.com a domain name whose registrar is the Center of Ukrainian Internet Names, and registered to: Igor Nikenin ul. B. Pertrovskaya, dom 12, kv 74 Rostov na Donu, 344000 RUSSIAN FEDERATION The servers’ IP, 121.156.57.184, is located in the Republic of Korea. Other than the poor joke, the site serves various exploits which you can view in this Wepawet report. ...

As announced last Friday, Microsoft released 16 security bulletins on the October Patchday. They fix security vulnerabilities in various Windows operating systems and components like Internet Explorer, Windows Kernel, .Net frameworks, and Microsoft Office. Affected are all operating systems from Windows XP to Windows Server 2008 R2. Office needs to be updated from version XP to 2010 – also the Mac OS flavours. The patches fix critical rated vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 6 to 8. ...