It’s all about security this week in the tech world. Google are under the spotlight concerning security in their upcoming Google Chrome OS and Norton 2010 is turning heads. Now, Mozilla Firefox is to receive an update (3.0.12) which will close several major security loop holes in their popular browser.
“We strongly recommend that all Firefox 3.0.x users upgrade to this latest release,” Mozilla said on its developer blog. “If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting ‘Check for Updates…’ from the Help menu.”
It is recommended that users download the update so that they remain secure online. Using credit cards and even just keeping your browsing habits safe is a difficult task these days so the last thing you want is a browser that lets unsavoury programs or people peer into your bank account.
However, this will be one of the last, if not the last update for the browser. As of January 2010, no more updates will be made available to users of the 3.0.’X’ series as Mozilla try to pedal their newest browser, Firefox 3.5 to users.
So 3G is what we’re all looking for in terms of surfing the web, checking e-mails and streaming video. It’s modern, cool and new – not to mention useful. It’s only starting to take off now since the release of the first touch screen smart-phones that give you HTML browsing – not like 2007 when all you could do was see mobile web slightly faster.
Now a Japanese company by the name of NTT DoCoMo (the company that first introduced 3G back in 2001, but the world failed to adopt it for years) now say that they will introduce 4G in 2010 and that they are confident that the world will get behind them this time.
“We went first and when we looked behind us there was nobody there.” Said the company’s president when asked about the 2001 launch of 3G.
However, even though the future certainly lies with 4G, I can’t see it catching on so quickly. 3G is at its height now and
basic business strategy is that you don’t stop selling until the product does. Then you move on. I admire DoCoMo’s enthusiasm but even though it’s been over eight years since they introduced 3G, it’s only been three or four for the rest of the world.
They are really starting to push what 4G can do in the hope of winning over big companies into adopting the service. They claim that it will be able to stream movies and live TV anywhere where there is a hint of service at speeds approaching 300Mbs. In summary, I would say it will be a few years until we start seeing 4G around these parts.
Have you ever downloaded a less than scrupulous piece of software only to discover the next day that you default browser has been changed and your homepage is some rubbish search engine based in North Korea? I have. So have thousands of others who were attracted by freeware never stopping to think of the scheming companies that lurked behind them. Such as Microsoft.
At the present, when users download IE8, the newest edition of Internet Explorer they will quite obviously have to install it. Now when you’re installing any piece of software you’re given a choice.
a) Quick Install
b) Custom install
In most cases the ‘Quick Install’ is already selected for you and most of us will go right on ahead and press ’Next’. Microsoft copped onto that so that when you install IE by choosing the quick install method your default browser and homepage are changed to please Bill Gates.
Microsoft recently came under fire about these practices you would expect from a smaller more desperate company. They responded by saying on their blog that they were making an update and that by August IE8 will ask your permission to become the default browser first.
“IE will never install, or become the default browser without your explicit consent. However, we heard a lot of feedback from a lot of different people and groups and decided to make the user choice of the default browser even more explicit,” Microsoft said.
IE8 has already been in the spotlight when they released the OMGIGP advertisement which Crenk covered here.
Its official, Facebook, the social network that started out as a noting based at Harvard has now grown to have over 250 million active worldwide members. Astonishing.
The momentous figure was officially announced on the official Facebook blog by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Just a few months ago they celebrated reaching the 200 million mark by launching the non-profit organization Facebook for Good. Now however, they are changing tactics for what should be a huge blowout party –they’re doing nothing except carrying on with their work.
Apparently, they are now trying to make the service more accessible on mobile devices as the growth of Facebook is now largely coming from international countries where people are more likely to access the social network on their mobile devices like the iPhone or Blackberry.
“Today as we celebrate our 250 millionth user, we are also continuing to develop Facebook to serve as many people in the world in the most effective way possible,” Zuckerberg wrote. “This means reaching out to everyone across the world and making products that serve all of you, wherever you are–whether through Facebook Connect, new mobile products and the other things that we are building.”
As we have seen with Twitter, failure to keep the ball rolling can lead to growth rates dropping like a rock. Facebook seem to be doing a good job. The next six months will be a challenge because as a ball gets bigger, its harder to roll.
Finally after a lot of expectation and three release candidates (all were published within less that two weeks) Mozilla announced that the the final version for Firefox 3.5 will be available to the public on the morning of Tuesday, June 30.
Seems that development team is running against the clock, considering that on June 24 they’ve released the RC3 version for Firefox 3.5 and originally the announcement about the final version stated that “end of June” will be the date. Well they sure are keeping the promise, taking the last day of the month to release it.
Since RC1, the two other versions that were public basically focused in bug fixing, so if you installed were using any of these versions you shouldn’t expect greatest differences with the final one.
Upon the Death of Michael Jackson on Thursday just after midday, there wasn’t much media attention for over two hours. At first, media stories circulated while everyone tried to make sense of it all. When Jackson’s brother made a statement at 2.26 pm LA time, the news papers and TV broadcasters went into a frenzy thinking up headlines for the evening papers and the 6 o’ clock news – all the while the web was left to its own disorganised devices.
Wikipedia and Twitter came under attack with slanderous comments and hoax stories of what really happened. Numerous posts were made to Jackson’s Wikipedia page while many blogged about the singer’s life, and at that time ‘apparent’ death.
The first confirmed reports surfaced after 4pm just when the American nation were settling in from work. However, the Europeans were already tucked up in bed none the wiser.
Here I am in Ireland waking up on Friday morning with a text message from a friend in America. It was a joke about the singer’s death. I couldn’t make head or tails of it but when I powered up my laptop Yahoo! Headlines carried the story in full. I was shocked by the story while America was already fully informed.
Astonishingly, many ticket sales sites carried on selling tickets to fans unaware of the singer’s death until midday Friday. Other sites carried news stories of Jackson’s death while displaying advertisements for his upcoming concerts dubbed ‘The Final Curtain’.
In my mind, and the mind of many others, serious questions have been raised about the internet. I had always assumed that news stories travelled the world in hours, even minutes. With YouTube, Twitter, MySpace and even good old e-mail, everyone thought that if something happened in the States we’d all know about it in a few minutes – I guess we were wrong. The internet still has some serious cracks that need patching up.
Mandriva Linux, one of the most known distributions, it’s preparing the new version and already has an alpha (previous stage for a beta): Mandriva Linux 2010 Alpha 1.
Mandriva was originally called Mandrake Linux (started in 1998), but after a litigation about the name (related, of course, with Mandrake the Magician) was forced to change it; and at the same time MandrakeSoft acquired Conectiva Linux (my first Linux installation ever), so the combination of those two did all the rest, and Madriva was created.
Related to Mandriva 2010, here are some of the improvements related with previous versions:
Boot time improved.
Clean and complete grub and install menu (failsafe, init3 entry, recovery entry, check tool for istallation media)
Use of Plymouth and fallback on Splashy for non supported chipsets
Switch to Tomoyo as security framework, provide GUI for common setup, integrated also in msec tool
Guest account created on the fly when needed
Packaging of Moblin, use it as default environment if stable enough when light hardware configuration is detected
Manage end of life distribution through mdkonline applet
Autodetection of local urpmi repositories
Improved hybrid isos use
I know what you are thinking, Why I would even consider to install an Alpha Linux distribution? Well, there’s no direct and simple answer to that one. As I mentioned before in 40 years of Unix post, the history of Linux has a long way and it is responsible for several other projects like Mac OS X, BSD and Sun operating system. The spirit is what did all the work.
And that’s the idea, go ahead, download it, test it, give your feedback, contribute and improve the work; that’s the spirit.
Final version for Mandriva 2010 will be available in October 21st.
The main differences are related in bugs fixing about the previous version. Here are some of them:
Translation of role names fixed
wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title
Upload error messages are now correctly reported
Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed
Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed
SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
Switched back to curl as the default transport
Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload
To see all tickets that were fixed from Beta 1, check this link. I really enjoy watching this kind of transparency in projects, where you can give your feedback, insert about a bug and see the evolution about it: owner, priority, state.
Google keeps up with his strategy to amaze ourselves constantly. Google Voice is a very interesting project that will allow you to receive all of your calls and messages in one number, and apply special rules whenever you receive these phone calls or messages.
Not convinced yet? There is more:
Integration with Gmail contacts and phones.
Recording conversations.
Manage and listen your voice mails. Including forwarding voice mails to other users.
Forward calls or messages to other six phones.
Text and phone calls within the US completely free.
Conference calls up to four members per conference.
You can set up rules to route each call to a specific number. For example, customers call -> automatically routed to my business phone; daughters call -> rings every phone; wife calling -> blocked
Google Voice can even transcript voice mail via e-mail. Yeap, that is right, you dont have time to listen your voice mails? Google Voice can send it that message as an e-mail with 90% accuracy in the transcript.
Service cost? Completely Free.
Availability? Currently available only for GrandCentral customers. But it is expected an official Google statement about general availability of this service.
Even though we dont have any confirmation about the release of this new feature, get ready because I am sure it is going to change the way you communicate.
We’ve announced earlier the release for Firefox 3.5 RC1, but the Mozilla development team already prepared a new build: Firefox 3.5 RC2. This new version has no bigger differences with the RC1, mostly fixing some bugs before making it the final version.
Company’s strategy it is quite interesting actually, releasing two RC versions in one week. They sure are very confident about the beta and RC stability, I can’t imagine Microsoft releasing release candidates versions of the same product in such short period of time.
He is quite sure that the real value from the web platform resides in multiple websites and applications across the Internet, and Facebook it’s not going to try to centralize all that; even better, Facebook will represent the entire platform that any user will need as for identification, business, relationship, etc. etc.
Here’s the interview with the whole concept that Mark gave it to Robert Scoble:
Arvind Bhatia, analyst from Sterne Agee, has an stunning prediction for Play Station 3: it is expected a considerable price drop by $100.
Hard to believe? Here’s his opinion: “Industry sources indicate Sony is planning a $100 price cut on the PS3 in mid-August, just prior the launch of Madden (8/18) and the start of the back to school shopping season. This will naturally be a positive for the industry.”
I’m sure that, if this is happening, will make a very important hit in the market, considering previous reports about Blu-Ray high insertion level among users making this a “here to stay” media format. Adding to the mix, the leaked photos that appeared that, could be, the new slim model for PS3:
How are other consoles going to compete with that? Xbox it’s ready to make a similar price cut and maintain the price difference with PS3?
It’s all about security this week in the tech world. Google are under the spotlight concerning security in their upcoming Google Chrome OS and Norton 2010 is turning heads. Now, Mozilla Firefox is to receive an update (3.0.12) which will close several major security loop holes in their popular browser.
Its official, 
Finally after a lot of expectation and three release candidates (all were published within less that two weeks) Mozilla announced that the the final version for 
Upon the Death of Michael Jackson on Thursday just after midday, there wasn’t much media attention for over two hours. At first, media stories circulated while everyone tried to make sense of it all. When Jackson’s brother made a statement at 2.26 pm LA time, the news papers and TV broadcasters went into a frenzy thinking up headlines for the evening papers and the 6 o’ clock news – all the while the web was left to its own disorganised devices.
Mandriva Linux, one of the most known distributions, it’s preparing the new version and already has an alpha (previous stage for a beta): 
As we’ve announced earlier 
We’ve announced earlier the release for 
Who said it? Mark Zuckeberg, Facebook’s CEO.
Arvind Bhatia, analyst from 
