TechBlog

Washington Post: The CIA has launched a task force to assess the impact of the exposure of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and military files by WikiLeaks. Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it’s mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: W.T.F. The irreverence is perhaps understandable for an agency that has been relatively unscathed by WikiLeaks. Only a handful of CIA files have surfaced on the WikiLeaks Web site, and records from other agencies posted online reveal remarkably little about CIA employees or operations. ...

MSDN Blog: On Tuesday, December 14, we released an update (KB2412171) for Microsoft Outlook 2007. We have discovered several issues with the update and want to inform you about problems you might encounter and what corrective steps we recommend. As of December 16, this Outlook 2007 update has been removed from Microsoft Update. This Outlook 2007 update was distributed via Microsoft Update. Many of you receive updates automatically and if you installed the update between Tuesday, December 14, and Thursday, December 16, it is likely that you are affected. ...

Thousands of Facebook users have been hit by a scam which claims to give them early access to a facebook.com email address. Messages, appearing in the news feed of users who have fallen for the scam, read: Just got my own email @facebook.com! Quickly get one before someone takes your name [LINK] However, clicking on the links leads you to a webpage which tricks you into giving a third party application permission to post to your Facebook wall. ...

Today we’ve added a new notification to our search results that helps people know when a site may have been hacked. We’ve provided notices for malware for years, which also involve a separate warning page. Now we’re expanding the search results notifications to help people avoid sites that may have been compromised and altered by a third party, typically for spam. When a user visits a site, we want her to be confident the information on that site comes from the original publisher. Here’s what the notification looks like: ...

Newest Opera browser features tab stacking, extensions, visual mouse gestures Oslo, Norway — December 16, 2010 Opera Software debuted the newest version of its award-winning browser today. Opera 11 combines elegant design, smart updates to some of our most popular features and new ways to customize Opera to your preferences. Download it today for Windows, Mac and Linux computers from http://www.opera.com/. What’s new Tab stacking Tab stacking is a better way to organize your open tabs. Simply drag one tab on top of another to create a stack. Here is a short video to introduce tab stacking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hqSGGk1YTI ...

Earlier this year I received a Facebook invite in my Yahoo! Mail account from none other than Angelina Jolie herself. I kid you not. While it’s true that we live in the Digital Age where communicating with anyone is a mere tap of a finger away—whether it’s via email, IM, Facebook, Twitter, etc.—the chances that Ms. Jolie would randomly reach out to a regular Joe, such as myself, is still pretty darn improbable. So, the following questions raced through my mind: ...

As announced Friday last week, Microsoft delivers 17 security updates on the December 2010 Patchday. The Updates close 2 highly critical security holes which allow for remote code execution and several privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow attackers to gain administrative rights on Windows PCs. Overall, the 17 Updates deal with 40 vulnerabilities. Affected are the Windows operating Systems, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, SharePoint and Exchange. Users and administrators should apply the patches as soon as possible!

Are you one of the many people who is using a dangerously easy-to-guess password? Maybe now’s the time to fix that before it’s too late. Twitter, LinkedIn, World of Warcraft and Yahoo are amongst the popular websites which are advising users to change their passwords in light of the recent security breach at the Gawker Media family of sites. The issue is that many people (33% in our research) use the same password on every single website. That means that if your password gets stolen in one place (like Gawker’s Gizmodo or Lifehacker websites), it can be used to unlock access to other sites too. ...

In our efforts to bring you expanded, go-anywhere access to your data, we’re happy to announce that LastPass recently acquired Xmarks! Xmarks is a popular browser add-on that syncs bookmarks across all of your computers and smartphones. Just like LastPass, Xmarks can be installed for free on your browsers to give you easy access to your bookmarked sites. Xmarks now also offers a Premium version with bookmark support on your iPhone and Android, as well as advanced features and priority support. Sign up now to take advantage of the special discount with a dual-Premium subscription. ...

Avira TechBlog: Next Tuesday is going to be tough for administrators: The Redmond company announces 17 security bulletins which are supposed to fix 40 security vulnerabilities. Only two of the bulletins deal with “high”ly critical rated security holes within Windows and the Internet Explorer. The rest of the updates fixes the Windows operating systems, Microsoft’s Office, SharePoint and Exchange.