Many Updates: Flash Player, Mac OS X, Firefox

Avira TechBlog: Today is a busy day for those who want to keep their computers secure: Many updates are available, from Adobes Flash Player over Apples Mac OS X operating system to the Firefox web browser. There is a security vulnerability in Flash player which became public as a zero day vulnerability a week ago. It has been attacked in a limited fashion. Now Adobe released this security update which users can download from the website of the company. As this security vulnerability already gets actively exploited, users and administrators should apply the update immediately. ...

March 22, 2011 · 2 min · 354 words · Omid Farhang

Firefox 4.0 final is released

Over the past week or two, we have been keeping track of the various releases of Firefox 4 including RC1 and RC2, counting down to the official release tomorrow, the 22nd of March. Though it is officially being released tomorrow, it has been made available for download today at the Mozilla FTP servers. This is the third release of a browser version after Chrome 10 stable and Internet Explorer 9 RTM in recent weeks. ...

March 21, 2011 · 1 min · 144 words · Omid Farhang

PWN2OWN – Apple v. Google v. Microsoft v. Mozilla v. BlackBerry!

Sophos Labs Blog: If you’re interested in computer security, you’ve probably heard of PWN2OWN. It’s a competition which has become an annual fixture at the annual CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. The competition gets its name because, as the CanSecWest organizers explain, “If you can execute arbitrary code (PWN) on these [laptops or mobile phones] through a previously undisclosed browser (Firefox, IE, Safari) exploit, you can go home with one (OWN).” ...

March 14, 2011 · 3 min · 590 words · Omid Farhang

Firefox 4 RC Available for Download

labnol.org wrote: If you are a fan of Firefox, you may want to get this one. The first RC (Release Candidate) of Firefox web browser is now available for download at ftp.mozilla.org. If you have trouble accessing the above link, use this direct link to download the Firefox 4 RC1 installer for Windows. The Mac version of Firefox 4 RC1 is here while the Linux version is here. ...

March 8, 2011 · 1 min · 115 words · Omid Farhang

Firefox and Thunderbird updates are available, security and performance improvement

Firefox Firefox 3.6.13 and Firefox 3.5.16 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.13. Firefox 3.6.13: http://firefox.com Firefox 3.5.16: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html ...

December 10, 2010 · 2 min · 321 words · Omid Farhang

Popular sites (including YouPorn) caught sniffing user browser history

The Register: YouPorn nabbed in real-world privacy sting Boffins from Southern California have caught YouPorn.com and 45 other sites pilfering visitors’ surfing habits in what is believed to be the first study to measure in-the-wild exploits of a decade-old browser vulnerability. YouPorn, which fancies itself the YouTube of smut, uses JavaScript to detect whether visitors have recently browsed to PornHub.com, tube8.com and 21 other sites, according to the study. It tracked the 50,000 most popular websites and found a total of 46 other offenders, including news sites charter.net and newsmax.com, finance site morningstar.com and sports site espnf1.com. ...

December 7, 2010 · 3 min · 436 words · Omid Farhang

Rainbow 0.2 is here!

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. ...

November 25, 2010 · 1 min · 171 words · Omid Farhang

Mozilla releases beta 7 of Firefox 4, claims 3-5x performance boost

BetaNews: Mozilla Wednesday released a significant update to the beta of its Firefox 4 browser. The update adds a new JavaScript JIT compiler, going by the name of JägerMonkey, and improves the browser’s support for hardware acceleration, OpenType fonts, and WebGL 3D graphics (the technology used to create an HTML5 version of Quake II back in April.) Additionally, the latest beta includes a stable add-ons API, so developers can finally update their add-ons to Firefox 4. ...

November 12, 2010 · 2 min · 248 words · Omid Farhang

Firesheep author takes backhanded pot-shot at free speech

Sophos Labs: Two weeks ago, an automatic session-hijacking plugin was released for Firefox. It was named Firesheep, and it’s been downloaded over 600,000 times so far. The decision to release Firesheep publicly is a controversial one. On the good side, it’s reminded people that some of their common web surfing habits are dangerously insecure. Many websites use HTTPS (secure HTTP) for login, which protects your password. But they revert to insecure HTTP for the rest of the session. After you have logged in, security relies on the browser sending a session cookie – a secret authentication token – in every request. ...

November 7, 2010 · 3 min · 569 words · Omid Farhang

Find Words Smarter with Word Suggestions

Mozilla Labs: In our first Prospector experiment, Speak Words, we helped Firefox learn what words you might want to type into the Awesome Bar. We have taken that idea to help you find words in your open tab in our latest experiment. Finding a word in Firefox has always been easy because Firefox will move you to the new word formed by your last keystroke. This means you do not need to type out a word then click a search button to try finding a word that you might have misspelled. Firefox will let you know immediately if the new letter you pressed does not form a word that is on the page. ...

November 6, 2010 · 2 min · 373 words · Omid Farhang