Blog

At the latest PDC conference, only a very few mentions of Silverlight were observed. It seems that Microsoft is betting on HTML5 as the future for cross platform development. They even claim that Silverlight is now a Windows Phone development toolkit (read this article from ZDNet). So it is really safe to continue your developments on this platform ? The interest of Microsoft to buying Adobe is now more clear, as I think Adobe will be best positioned for generating HTML5 interfaces, mixing Flex and Dreamweaver experiences.

Avira TechBlog: Adobe warns of a new vulnerability in Flash Player and in Reader. The problem is within authplay.dll and the corresponding .lib in the Unix versions. It allows attackers to inject malicious code like Trojans with specially prepared documents or Flash objects. The company works on a patch which it plans to release on the 9th of November. Until then, deleting the authplay library helps to prevent a successful attack. Flash or Reader will crash then when a file requests the services from authplay, but this is clearly better than having an infected system.

Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin considered hiring Apple CEO Steve Jobs as the company’s first CEO, according to a new documentary. After interviewing a dozen unsuitable candidates during Google’s early years, Page and Brin went to meet Jobs, a personal “hero” of theirs. The pair then asked investor John Doerr, “Why can’t he be our CEO?” The anecdote comes from an episode on Page and Brin from the Bloomberg documentary series “Bloomberg Game Changers.” Earlier this month, the Bloomberg series, which looks at “today’s most influential leaders,” aired an episode on Jobs. ...

Adobe have published details of a critical vulnerability the following applications. Adobe Flash Player 10.1.85.3 and earlier versions Adobe Reader 9.4 and earlier 9.x versions Adobe Acrobat 9.4 and earlier 9.x versions The vulnerability could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against Reader and Acrobat 9.x. Adobe is not currently aware of attacks targeting Flash Player. ...

Gmail has just added a new “Labs” feature that should save you some time if you’re the type of person that tends to plow through your e-mail inbox in bunches. As the name implies, the new “Auto-advance” option (that can be enabled under “Settings” > “Labs”) lets you automatically move to the previous or next conversation after archiving, deleting or muting an individual e-mail message. While that might sound like expected behavior, up until today, Gmail simply took you back to your inbox after taking any of those actions, meaning you essentially needed to scroll back down to wherever you were in your attempt at e-mail triage. ...

Mashable: Facebook is rolling out a new breed of Pages called Friendship Pages that pull together the public wall posts, comments, photos (based on tags) and events that two friends have in common. The Friendship Pages feature was cooked up by Facebook software engineer Wayne Kao and then brought to life in an internal hackathon event. The Pages are designed to the tell the story of two friends on Facebook through their shared activity. ...

Mozilla Labs has been working hard on browser-based audio and video — not just for playback, but also for recording. Labs’ newest creation, called Rainbow, lets developers access your hardware’s video and audio recording capabilities with a few lines of JavaScript. The files created are all in open-source formats, including Theora, Vorbis and Ogg (support for WebM and other formats are planned in the product’s roadmap). Once media is captured, files can be accessed via the DOM with HTML5 File APIs. ...

Nepali mobile network operator Ncell has installed the first 3G base station at the summit of Mount Everest, giving visitors, climbers and people living in the Khumbu Valley the ability to make calls and wirelessly connect to the Internet. To test out the new facility, Ncell also made the world’s highest video call at 17,388 feet. So far, visitors of Mount Everest had to depend on satellite phones to make calls, but now they can do so through a standard GSM, 3G-enabled network. “The coverage of the network will reach up to the peak of the Everest,” Ncell Nepal chief Pasi Koistinen said to reporters in Kathmandu on Thursday. ...

Google search engine’s latest innovation technology that allows users to search for information in real time does not come without its own challenges. For example, how do you prevent children from seeing adult related content while conducting a live search? Howbeit controversial, the solution, it appears, is by restricting a group of search terms so that they do not function with the new instant search feature. Consequently, users will not be exposed to viewing pornographic, hate, violent or disturbing results when conducting searches. This means that inasmuch as Google Instant was designed to simplify search and make finding information quicker on Google, no one will see results deemed to be offensive in nature by the Google team, unless they want to. Users will therefore have to hit enter to confirm a search query once Instant search stops delivering new results due to these restrictions. ...

Software Magazine: Microsoft has launched the Apple version of its productivity suite, the Microsoft Office 2011. The package comes with a new version of Microsoft Outlook that has been specially built for Apple’s Mac. The suite supports those cloud based services Windows users have since the launch of Microsoft Office 2010 for this platform. The reason for launching Microsoft Office for a competitor’s operating system is simple: although the platform is completely different, there are lots of Mac users in this “Windows-centric” world that need to use Microsoft Office. There are also a lot of users who, although they use a Mac for every other task, they prefer to use Microsoft Office. ...