TechBulletin

Firefox hit its second major milestone Tuesday with the release of version 1.5, arriving just over a year after the alternative browser debuted at 1.0. The update sports Mozilla’s new Gecko 1.8 rendering engine to speed up Web surfing, along with a myriad of other fixes and improvements.

Notable changes in Firefox 1.5 include the ability to reorder tabs, faster back and forward buttons, a feature to clear personal data, improved accessibility and popup blocking, along with support for more Web standards such as SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6. Firefox 1.5 is available now for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

The lates Version of Firefox is out download it, be the 1st to use it!!!

These days contact from hijacking is on run…spammers are using weak contact forms to send spam emails and this makes a server black listed in many sites. The most of the AOL emails are targetted by the spammers.

I came across this when one of my client’s contact form was hijacked and my server IP got black listed. I figured out the problem with the help of Outblaze guys and fixed the issues with the form but that was not the fixed solution to this.

According to a media alert issued by the Mozilla foundation, Firefox 1.5 should be releasing anytime today.

From the Spread Firefox website,

It’s 5AM here in the UK and me any my small team of engineers are off home to bed after helping to get SFx ready for tomorrows big event:)In about twelve hours time “it is very likely” that Firefox 1.5 will be officially with us, and to mark this occasion Spread Firefox isgoing to be launching a very special campaign; That I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you about now… But I’d recommend you stay as close to the site as you can over the next 24 hours! (hint get some campaign buttons for your blogs & sites as they award points too!)

The Firefox 1.5 comes with comes with significant performance & usability upgrades over the 1.0x series, greater customization options and supports Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), JavaScript 1.6 and new versions of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

After issues with Sony rootkits in the CDs, pre-installed trojans have been found from hard drives of a Japanese hard drive manufacturer. The trojan was found in portable hard drives of 40GB to 120GB range. The trojan was identified as Backdoor.Win32.Tompai

Following is excerpt from the blog entry on f-secure blog

Here’s an interesting one. Peripherals manufacturer I-O Data has shipped a series of nice-looking portable hard drives in the 40GB to 120GB range - carrying the Backdoor.Win32.Tompai trojan on them.

This simple trojan isn’t particularly new - we added detection for it in September 2004. However, somehow it managed to find it’s way to the master image that was preinstalled to every new hard drive. The manufacturer is now replacing them under warranty.

Paint.NET v2.5 is out of beta and is available for download now. Started as a CS undergraduate design project at Washington State University, Paint.net is an image and photo manipulation software supporting layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

Paint.net Screenshot

Paint.net can be installed on computers that run Windows XP (SP1 or later), Windows 2000 (SP3 or later), Windows Server 2003, or Windows Vista and requires .NET Framework 1.1.installed.

Download:
Paint.net v2.5

VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

Download:

VLC Player 0.8.4 for Windows |
VLC Player 0.8.4 for Other OSes

Changelog ( 0.8.2 to 0.8.4)

Chris Lee and Goran Nagy of KeywordsAnalyzer have launched Adwords Dominator, a tool that helps you manage the famous Google Adwords right from your desktop. This desktop software uses Adwords API to interact with the Adwords back-end and shows all the characteristics ofyour Adwords campaigns in a single-screen interface. It works on a download, update and upload mode.

You can add new campaigns and ad groups, perform global search and replace across all campaigns - even find duplicate keywords in a flash. The global editing feature alone can be a huge time-saver. There is extensive charting included and itshows the key parameters of your campaign in a graphical way. Chris has also introduced a new term - Adwords Efficiency Indicator which takes into account the price per click, clickthrough rate and average position.

This nifty tool costs you $124 and there is a special discout currently!

Mozilla’s Vice-President Christopher Beard said that the next version of their new-gen, super browser Mozilla Firefox will most probably be released on November 29th, ie, the day after tomorrow. Some new features in this browser from the previous versions will include Faster and Better Browser Navigation, Better Popup Blocking, Supporting of Webstandards like Javascript and more support for Mac Users.

Mozilla is also planning a mig “Marketing Promo” for their browser, which will coincide with the release of the browser. This will include a community marketing campaign that will encourage Firefox fans to tell the world about their favorite browser by publishing home-made videos on a Mozilla Web site.

The topic title will sound very absurd to you. Well yes this a li’l post about Microsoft’s upcoming OS, Vista. So is it really Vista or OS X Tiger’s cub? Here are a few things I would like to point out.

Firstly, I’d like to mention that the Vista Build 5259 screenshots are sourced from Activewin.com

Now let’s get down to the point.

For starters, have a look at this so-called “refreshing new” control panel interface of Vista.

Looks really good, doesn’t it? But look at this screenshot.

I am not talking about the GUI rip. That isn’t my point. My point is, why try to ape a menu style which is 5 years old? I mean even a layman will say that both the menus look damn similar. Except that one is 5 yrs old

Another thing I don’t appreciate is Microsoft’s adoption of “Metro” in “Avalon” their so-called answer to Adobe’s PDF but when more significantly put, Apple’s PDF-based Aqua.

My question is why.. why introduce another document format and create more confusion in the already saturated market? Why couldn’t Microsoft stay put with PDF. When they can take help of Adobe for developing their TrueType fonts.. why not adopt their PDF format?

The next thing I’d want to ask is, why are the system requirements so high for Vista? I know you’ll say that Vista hasn’t even released, but Microsoft has already acknowledged that Vista will require a DX-9 capable card(read a card worth lotsa cash).

Now people who spend a lot on hardware will say that such graphic cards are NOT that expensive. But, think of a consumer with limited budget. Why doesn’t Microsoft try to keep the system requirements for its operating systems down? Why do we always need to upgrade our systems to run their new OS(Win 95->98->XP->Vista?)

Now compare this to Tiger. Tiger is Apple’s OS which can be compared to Vista in features except that it is already in market since April 2005 and Vista will be around one and a half years late atleast. Tiger runs on a G3. Why can’t vista run on a P3 with on-board graphics?

You’ll point out that in such a case people shouldn’t upgrade to Vista and should continue to use XP. But Microsoft has ensured that there will be no WMP 11 for XP or there’ll be no DirectX 10. They didn’t even include “ClearType” technology for Windows 2000 just to get people to upgrade to Win 2003! To add to it, Windows 98/Me users were left in the lurch when WMP support was discontinued for them. Why does Microsoft just abandon the users of their previous OS just like that? Why can’t they offer atleast the basic security and technology updates?

I don’t want to ask anything else as it doesn’t matter much to the average user. What matters has already been mentioned here.

And did I mention that Leapord will be ready to roar when Vista launches?

New build (Build 5259) of Windows Vista is made available to the testers. The build includes many visual enhancements like new start menu, new start menu button and few other enhancements. New features include addition of Windows Media Player 11, Internet Explorer 7, new feature called Instant off and integration of Microsoft Antispyware.

The screenshots of the new build can be checked on Win-vista.net and Active Win

According to the report on ZDNet, Chinese hackers have managed to steal US military secrets including aviation specifications and flight-planning software. Security experts claim that, the hackers are believed to be from Chinese province of Guangdong and are working for the Chinese government.

“From the Redstone Arsenal, home to the Army Aviation and Missile Command, the attackers grabbed specs for the aviation mission-planning system for Army helicopters, as well as Falconview 3.2, the flight-planning software used by the Army and Air Force,” said Alan Paller, director of the SANS Institute, on Tuesday.

The team is thought to consist of 20 hackers. Paller claimed that the Chinese government was the most likely recipient of the information they intercepted.

“Of course it’s the government. Governments will pay anything for control of other governments’ computers. All governments will pay anything. It’s so much better than tapping a phone,” Paller told an event at the Department of Trade and Industry on Tuesday.

The attacks, which are ongoing, were particularly effective on the night of 1 November, 2004, said Paller, who outlined how the hackers first scanned then broke into US government computers.

At 2223 Pacific Standard Time, the Titan Rain hackers exploited vulnerabilities at the US Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

At 0119 they exploited the same hole in computers at the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington, Virginia.

At 0325 they hit the Naval Ocean Systems Center, a Defense Department installation in San Diego, California.

At 0446, they struck the United States Army Space and Strategic Defense installation in Huntsville, Alabama.

Read more about it here

Analyst firm NPD Group recently announced that it had done a good amount of reasearch on Selling of Music and found that iTunes had comprehensively beaten most of the famous traditional Music stores like Tower Records or Borders. iTunes has grown tremendously in the past 3 months and entered US’s Music Bestselling Store Charts before 3 months. Currently iTunes holds more than 70% of Digital Music Sales and this will surely increase over the next few months.

However, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Amazon.com, FYE and Circuit City all scored higher than iTunes, NPD said. Apple has been having a field year this time around with their revolutionary products iPod and Mac selling more than ever coupled with enormous amounts of profits from iTunes. Downloading Songs from iTunes are cheaper than buying a real copy of the CD which will also be Copy-Protective.

Google Base, google’s new service which is the center for Free Classified Information and many other information about stuff on and off the net was released two weeks ago, and was found to have a serious error/glitch. Google Base does allow Adult content but it has a filter to block out Pornographic Pictures and Websites.

However, there seemed to have been a problem with the filter which allowed people to upload many pornographic stuff especially pictures. This happened for about 3-5 days before Google immediately discovered this and fixed it up. Such Sites and Pictures cannot be submitted anymore and Google has removed most of “XTRA”-Adult Content on it’s site.

µTorrent is an efficient and feature rich BitTorrent client for Windows sporting a very small footprint. It was designed to use as little CPU, memory and space as possible while offering all the functionality expected from advanced clients.

Feature list:

* Multiple simultaneous downloads
* Smart bandwidth usage
* File level priorities
* Configurable bandwidth scheduling
* Global and per-torrent speed limiting
* Quickly resumes interrupted transfers
* UPnP support (WinXP only)
* Supports popular protocol extensions
* Typical memory usage less than 4 MB
* Incredibly small: 108 KB

Download: µTorrent 1.2.1 (108 KB)

Screenshot:
Click me

One reason the worm spread so rapidly was it cloned a number of tried and true malware methods, according to Sam Curry, vice president for product management at Etrust Security Managment in Islandia, N.Y. “I find it ironic that the same worm can spoof the FBI and CIA on the one hand and use the old ‘do you want to see pictures of …’ trick on the other,” he said.

One in every 74 e-mail messages on the Internet yesterday carried a new strain of the Sober virus, estimates one security analyst.

“At the moment, this virus is accounting for 65 percent of all virus reports to us,” Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant for anti-virus software maker Sophos told TechNewsWorld. “That means, including legitimate mail, spam and everything else, one in 74 messages presently contain the Sober worm.”

After great Xbox 360 expose by Anandtech, now it’s time for one more interesting (5 minute) xbox exposure..yup, no kidding…experiment done by Seth Fogie shows how Xbox 360 can be ripped apart in 5 minutes…and the funny part is, the same console still works for him.

The Xbox exposure is broken down into 7 parts, each part exploring various factors of Xbox, it explains everything from exploring Xbox console to a look inside wireless controller…

You can read the whole review here on informit.

You can also download the 5 minute video

Thanks to Seth Fogie for the email.

Comments published in a CNN article yesterday purporting to be from Sony CEO Howard Stringer regarding the planned pricing for PlayStation 3 have been removed after it emerged that he had not said anything on the question.

The article, which is attributed to FORTUNE senior editor Peter Lewis and was published on the CNN Money website, referenced a new interview with Stringer which has been published in Fortune magazine.

However, in the original version of the article, Lewis cited Stringer as saying that the PS3 would be priced between $300 and $400, and would launch in the middle of next year in Japan, followed by a US launch a couple of months later.

It transpires that no such information was discussed in the original FORTUNE interview - and CNN Money has now pulled the quotes, placing an addendum on the article which says that “Stringer has not commented publicly on how much the PS3 is expected to cost, or how soon it will appear in the US after the Japanese launch in spring 2006.”

Read more on it here

According to report on Business week, Microsoft is selling their new xbox 360 at loss of $126 on each console.

An up-close look at the components and other materials used in the high-end version of the Xbox 360, which contains a hard drive, found that the materials inside the unit cost Microsoft $470 before assembly. The console sells at retail for $399, meaning a loss of $71 per unit — and that is just the start.

Other items packaged with the console — including the power supply, cables, and controllers — add another $55 to Microsoft’s cost, pushing the loss per unit to $126. These estimates include assumptions that Microsoft is getting a discount on many components.

Read more about it here

Opera fixed security hole in the earlier versions of the browser by releasing new updated version (8.5.1).

According to Secunia Research the vulnerability remains in Macromedia Flash player version included in opera. The vulnerability is marked as Highly Critical by Secunia and affects Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris users.

Users are requested to update Opera as soon as possible. Opera can be downloaded from here.