Criminals like to attack the biggest target because BIGGER generally provides a better Return On Investment (ROI). Windows is a good example. Mac is indeed safer than Windows but it isn’t necessarily because Mac is more secure. Windows has a larger market share and that equals more potential victims. How about search engines? What is the biggest search engine on the block? Google — and the bad guys know it. The result? ...
The Google Chrome dev channel has been updated to 5.0.322.2 for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms All [r38242] Don’t crash when a theme specifies a nonexistent image. (Issue: 31719) Mac [r38319] Honor modifiers for clicks on home button – cmd-clicking the home button now opens your home page in a new tab. (Issue: 34900) [r38204] Implemented writing direction context menu in text input fields. [r38504] Add local storage nodes to the cookie manager (Issue: 33068) Linux ...
Google launched the Mac version of its Chrome browser in Dec 2009. A new beta build is now available which offers new features like extensions, bookmark sync, and more. Now you’ll be able to install any of over 2,200 extensions currently available in Chrome’s extensions gallery. Extensions can add useful, informative,fun, or quirky functionality to your chrome browser. It also adds bookmark and cookie managers in a way that feels completely at home on the Mac ...
It has been barely two days since Google announced their new social integration and messaging tool called Google Buzz. Today we saw the first example of malware, W32/Zuggie-A, pretending to be Google Buzz. Analysis of W32/Zuggie-A gives the impression of a hastily assembled worm, really a modification of the W32/SillyFDC family of worms but with a twist. When W32/Zuggie-A is installed, it creates the following files: Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\extensions{9CE11043-9A15-4207-A565-0C94C42D590D}\chrome\content\timer.xul Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\extensions{9CE11043-9A15-4207-A565-0C94C42D590D}\chrome.manifest Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\extensions{9CE11043-9A15-4207-A565-0C94C42D590D}\install.rdf System\googlebuzz.exe – copy of W32/Zuggie-A System\GoogleUpte.exe – copy of W32/Zuggie-A W32/Zuggie-A modifies the registry to autostart GoogleUpte.exe and googlebuzz.exe. A quick search shows that the CLSID: 9CE11043-9A15-4207-A565-0C94C42D590D has previously been seen in multiple worms. This supports my theory that this is a hastily assembled worm built from recycled malware. I fired up a copy of Firefox on the infected machine and, as determined from analysis, found an installed Firefox extension called Firefox security 2.0 – Internal security options editor under the extensions tab of Firefox Add-ons. This “security extension” has added a JavaScript (timer.xul), which is triggered when the browser queries: yahoo.com, bing.com, google.com, aol.com/aol/search, ask.com and executes JavaScript hosted on: searchrequest1 . com / request . php ? aid = blackout which will silently click all Google or Yahoo Ads. displayed on the search results page (hey why not make a few bucks while infecting eh?). Google Buzz is new and is garnering quite a bit of interest and adoption among Internet users including myself. Clearly the malware authors view Google Buzz as the fresh big lucrative social fruit to exploit much like they have done with Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 and others. So in the coming weeks and months I predict we will see a host of new malware exploiting or attempting to exploit Google Buzz as the malware authors figure out its internals. This may have only been an exploratory attempt or a quick response to the latest craze – only time will tell. ...
🙂 (Mashable) — We’ve just confirmed with Google that the company has signed an agreement to acquire social search engine Aardvark. Google isn’t disclosing the terms, but news of the acquisition was first reported by TechCrunch, who put the figure at around $50 million. Google told us that it’s “signed an agreement to acquire Aardvark but don’t have any additional details to report at this time.” Aardvark is a relatively new startup from former Googlers that uses social distribution channels to get immediate answers to your questions. ...
The Google Chrome stable channel has been updated to 4.0.249.89 for Windows. Security Fixes and rewards: Please see the Chromium security page for more detail. Note that the referenced bugs may be kept private until a majority of our users are up to date with the fix. Congratulations to Timothy D. Morgan on receiving a Chromium Security Reward for bug 32718. Note that Timothy elected to donate the reward to the Haiti relief effort, so Google raised the donation to $1337. ...
(CNET) — Who could resist the months of hype that paved the way for Apple’s iPad debut last week? Apparently not Google, which has shown its interest in tablet computing with its browser-based Chrome OS. On Monday, Glen Murphy, a user interface designer for Google’s Chrome browser and the Chrome operating system based on it, pointed to image and video concepts of a Chrome OS-based tablet that went live two days before the iPad launch. Apparently nobody noticed initially, because only now did Murphy tweet, “Apparently our tablet mocks have been unearthed.” The site also shows the array of devices Google envisions for Chrome OS. “While its primary focus is Netbooks, Chrome OS could eventually scale to a wide variety of devices. Each would have vastly different input methods, available screen space, and processing power,” according to the Chromium form factors site. Chromium is the name of the open-source developer project that underlies the branded Chrome product. It’s possible that Chrome OS could be an easier sell on tablets than on Netbooks, the class of device on which Google said it plans to launch Chrome OS. Netbooks often are used as general-purpose PCs, so the browser-based philosophy of Chrome OS is a more jarring transition. Today’s tablets, in contrast, tend to focus more on a collection of specialized uses such as reading books, surfing the Net, and chores that only require light typing. With that approach, Chrome OS’ break from the PC world could be less jarring. The tablet market isn’t as big as the Netbook market, though. The ideas are only mock-ups, but Google has established itself as a real if not dominant force in the computing industry. Its Android mobile-phone operating system is increasingly influential, and its Chrome browser continues to steadily grow in usage. The tablet mock-ups show a variety of Chrome OS tablet ideas, including a virtual keyboard taking up the bottom half of the screen or detached and floating as a separate window. Also included are a slideshow mode, an application launcher, sidebar-mounted browser tabs, and a pop-up contextual menu. The video mock-up shows a much larger tablet, with hands resizing and moving windows through the multitouch interface, scrolling through text, and typing a search query. It’s all very rough at this stage, but none of it is too remote from a multitouch-enabled version of the Chrome OS. Google plans to debut Chrome OS in Netbooks later this year, and development of the open-source operating system is well under way. In a statement, Google didn’t share any specifics about its plans: “Google Chrome OS is still in development, and we are constantly experimenting with various user interfaces to determine what designs would produce the best user experience. As we’ve said all along, the UI is still under development and will continue to evolve as we determine which designs work best for our users.” Computing companies have been trying to make tablets for years, with little success. Apple hopes its design will change that with its iPad selling from $499 to $829. It’s more of an iPhone with a large screen than a MacBook with no keyboard. Google is taking a different approach with Chrome OS. Instead of programs running straight on the computer’s hardware and its underlying Linux operating system, Chrome OS applications run directly in the browser. What’s similar to the iPad, though, is that both have somewhat of an applications head start compared with a computing platform that’s starting from scratch: the iPad can run existing iPhone apps, and Chrome OS can run existing Web applications such as Google Docs. One thing that’s changed since early tablet years is the arrival of e-book readers as a real phenomenon. Amazon’s Kindle is the most notable example, but there are others, and Apple touted book reading with the iPad. Google, it should be noted, has a conduit to millions of books via its Google Books service. Given that Apple chose to use a variation of its iPhone OS for the iPad, it’s interesting but not terribly surprising that Google chose to use Chrome OS rather than its phone operating system, Android. In the big picture, Google clearly hopes the browser will be the foundation for applications, letting them run more easily on a multitude of devices. Android uses a variation of Oracle’s Java technology as a program foundation. Perhaps ironically, Java was launched with the motto for programmers of “write once, run anywhere,” and it is that vision Google is trying to realize with Web applications. ...
Last week I revealed troubling transmissions by the Google Toolbar: Even when a user specifically “disable[s]” the Google Toolbar, and even when the Toolbar disappears from view, the Toolbar continues tracking users online behavior—including specific web pages visited and specific searches run on other search engines. To Google’s credit, after I posted my article Google promptly fixed these nonconsensual transmissions—but big questions remain. How did this bug slip through Google’s internal testing? What happens to the data Google collected without user consent? And why was Google collecting this data in the first place? ...
Google has confirmed that it’s future operating system Chrome OS will have an integrated media player that will offer basic codec support , so that users can directly play audio or video files from Gmail or from USB drives or other media devices. In an interview with Ars Technica, Matthew Papakipos, the lead engineering director for the Chrome OS project, shared that Chrome OS will have a complete media player that approximates the functionality of Windows Media Player. ...
With the latest release of their browser, v.4.0, Google has published a long expected feature: Browser Extensions. Now Chrome features what other browsers like Firefox, IE, Opera and so on offer for a long time already. But, being able to compete with the others better doesn’t mean that they have solved all problems. Actually, their problems just start to appear – because adding extensions in the browser is just the same as opening Pandora’s box. ...