TechBlog

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. ...

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Avira’s Anti-Virus Technology Used by ZeoBIT in New System Utility – MacKeeper Avira provides anti-malware scanning engine to MacKeeper App Tettnang / Silicon Valley, March 11, 2011 – IT security expert Avira announced today that it licensed its industry-leading antivirus product to Silicon Valley-based ZeoBIT to be used in ZeoBIT’s MacKeeper product. MacKeeper is an all-in-one app that includes 16+ unique features for security, cleaning, data control and optimization for Macintosh computers. ...

BetaNews wrote: Thursday, Microsoft announced two updates to its Software Assurance Desktop Optimization Pack for enterprise Windows deployments available immediately: App-V 4.6 SP1, and MED-V 2.0. Microsoft Application Virtualization, or App-V, is the solution which turns software applications into centrally managed, virtualized services that don’t have to be installed on client machines. With the SP1 update, Microsoft has introduced package accelerators in the new App-V Sequencer, which Microsoft has been discussing since mid-2010. Package Accelerators are files that admins can combine with install media to automatically convert applications into virtual packages. They are released 1:1 with the applications they work with, and the first accelerators will be available in early April, and will include Project, Adobe Reader, and Office 2010. ...

Google Chrome Security Team wrote: We’re always working hard to enhance the Chrome browser with bug fixes, new defenses and new features. The release of Chrome 10 is no different, and there are some items worth highlighting: Chrome 10: Flash sandboxing With Chrome 10, our first cut of the previously announced Flash sandboxing initiative is now enabled by default for the Windows platform on Vista and newer. Additionally, because we automatically update Flash to the latest and most secure version, this should provide useful defense in depth. ...

Google Chrome 10 is ready for primetime and it comes with a surprising number of new features. Here are some of them: The Options dialog is now a web page that opens in a new tab. Chrome has one less modal dialog and the new Options page is better suited for netbooks. Another advantage is that each section of the Options page has a permalink that can be bookmarked. Even if Chrome doesn’t have too many customizable settings, there’s a search box that lets you quickly find an option. Try searching for “cookies” and you’ll notice that Chrome finds settings that aren’t immediately obvious. ...