TechBlog

Google Chrome has always supported multiple profiles, but you had to use a command-line flag (–user-data-dir=”c:\path\to\the\profile”) to associate a profile with a folder where the browser will save its state. At some point, Google added an option that allowed you to open a new window and use a separate profile, but it was quickly removed. According to a design document from Chromium’s site, this feature be available again. “The multiple profiles feature will allow the user to associate a profile with a specific set of browser windows, rather than with an entire running instance of Chrome. Allowing different windows to run as different Chrome identities means that a user can have different open windows associated with different Google accounts, and correspondingly different sets of preferences, apps, bookmarks, and so on — all those elements which are bound to a specific user’s identity.” ...

For those who missed this update on Nov 18: In the spirit of releasing early and releasing often – Mozilla bring you version 0.2 of Rainbow – an experimental Firefox add-on from Mozilla Labs that exposes audio and video recording capabilities to web pages. What’s new in this release? It now support both audio and video recording on Windows, and audio recording on Linux. They added preliminary support for writing multiplexed media frames to a websocket. JS callers are now able to specify custom video resolutions, encoding quality, audio sampling rates and channels. Numerous bug fixes, such as behaving correctly on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), and generating correctly encoded OGG files (the audio tracks of which were previously unplayable by Firefox). For a full list of changes, check out their commit logs – or even better – contribute on Github! Also, don’t forget to read the README for additional information. ...

Mozilla announced Miramar Alpha 1, an early version of their next Thunderbird. Miramar Alpha 1, available here for download, is for testers, extension developers, and other friends who are curious to follow the development of the next release of Thunderbird. Miramar Alpha 1 is built on top of the next generation of Mozilla’s layout engine, Gecko 2.0 and includes a new Addon Manager and over 190 platform fixes to improve performance and stability. We expect to release further interim releases as we work towards a major new release of Thunderbird. ...

That’s possibly the most unlikely headline I’ve ever had to write in my computer security career, but never mind.. My guess is that regular readers of the Naked Security site might not be ardent fans of Justin Bieber – but chances are that some of you have young daughters or nieces who can’t get enough of the pint-sized pop hamster. If that’s the case then they might be intrigued by a message that is spreading virally across the Facebook social network claiming to be footage of… and how can I put this delicately? I don’t think I can.. Justin Bieber with an erection. ...

Miley Cyrus is eighteen years old since yesterday. I don’t know if her father, legendary “Achy Breaky Heart” singer Billy Ray Cyrus, will be joining in her birthday celebrations, but I imagine he’ll be quietly wiping away a tear as his daughter finally becomes officially an adult (at least as far as the age of consent in her home state of Tennessee is concerned). The pop singer and Hannah Montana star has had her fair share of encounters with the world of cybercrime during her short life. ...

Thousands of Facebook users are warning each other about a Christmas Tree virus said to be spreading in the form of a rogue application on the social network. The only problem with this warning? It’s utterly bogus. Here’s a typical message being shared widely on Facebook: WARNING!!!!!!…..DO NOT USE THE Christmas tree app. on Facebookplease be advised it will crash your computer. Geek squad says its oneof the WORST trojan-viruses there is and it is spreading quickly.Re-post and let your friends know. THANKS PLEASE REPOST! ...

Yesterday, Apple pushed out the much anticipated update to its mobile operating system – iOS 4.2. Although most of the headlines have focused on new functionality Apple has introduced, such as bringing folders and multi-tasking to the iPad, there’s a much more important reason why you should be considering updating your Apple iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. Security. According to an Apple knowledgebase article, iOS 4.2 includes more than 40 security fixes designed to better protect iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users. ...

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined two organizations for serious breaches of the Data Protection Act – the first to be issued under new tougher guidelines in the UK. The security breach at Sheffield-based firm A4e happened in June 2010, after the company issued an unencrypted laptop to an employee in order to do work from home. The laptop was subsequently stolen from the employee’s house. That wouldn’t have mattered too much, of course, if the laptop hadn’t contained sensitive information. Unfortunately it carried personal data relating to 24,000 people who had used community legal advice centers in Hull and Leicester. ...

Avira TechBlog: Thanksgiving and according holidays are very close – a time in which many people have the time to do (online) shopping. The cyber criminals are eager for their share, so it’s time to remember some safety measures. We are expecting to see spam and phishing campaigns luring the recipients to visit malicious web sites. These web sites usually look quite legal and official. As precaution, don’t follow links from emails to online stores and online payment systems, but use bookmarks or type in the addresses directly into the browser’s address bar. And of course just visit shops which you already know. Some scams can be identified by very low prices – if they look too good to be true, they usually are! ...

For those who missed this update on Nov 18: 7-Zip 9.20 was released. 7-Zip for 32-bit Windows: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sevenzip/7z920.exe Mirror: http://www.filehippo.com/download_7zip_32/ 7-Zip for 64-bit Windows x64: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sevenzip/7z920-x64.msi Mirror: http://www.filehippo.com/download_7-zip_64/ What’s new after 7-Zip 4.65 (2009-02-03): 7-Zip now supports LZMA2 compression method. 7-Zip now can update solid .7z archives. 7-Zip now supports XZ archives. 7-Zip now supports PPMd compression in ZIP archives. 7-Zip now can unpack NTFS, FAT, VHD, MBR, APM, SquashFS, CramFS, MSLZ archives. 7-Zip now can unpack GZip, BZip2, LZMA, XZ and TAR archives from stdin. 7-Zip now can unpack some TAR and ISO archives with incorrect headers. 7-Zip now supports files that are larger than 8 GB in TAR archives. NSIS and WIM support was improved. Partial parsing for EXE resources, SWF and FLV. The support for archives in installers was improved. 7-Zip now stores NTFS file timestamps to ZIP archives. Speed optimizations in PPMd codec. Speed optimizations in AES code for Intel’s 32nm CPUs. Speed optimizations in CRC calculation code for Intel’s Atom CPUs. New -scc{WIN|DOS|UTF-8} switch to specify charset for console input/output (default = DOS). New -scrc switch to calculate total CRC-32 during extracting / testing. New additional “Open archive >” item in context menu allows to select archive type for some files. It’s possible to specify Diff program in options (7-Zip File Manager). 7-Zip now can open/copy/compress disk images (like \.\c:) from \.\ folder. 7-Zip File Manager now doesn’t use temp files to open nested archives stored without compression. The console version now doesn’t show entered password. New small SFX module for installers (in Extra package). Disk fragmentation problem for ZIP archives created by 7-Zip was fixed. Some bugs were fixed. New localizations: Hindi, Gujarati, Sanskrit, Tatar, Uyghur, Kazakh.