Trailrunner7 writes "A security researcher has submitted to Oracle a patch he said took him 30 minutes to produce that would repair a zero-day vulnerability currently exposed in Java SE. He hopes his actions will spur Oracle to issue an out-of-band patch for the sandbox-escape vulnerability, rather than wait for the February 2013 Critical Patch Update as Oracle earlier said it would. Adam Gowdiak of Polish security consultancy Security Explorations reported the vulnerability to Oracle on Sept. 25, as well as proof-of-concept exploit code his team produced. The vulnerability is present in Java versions 5, 6 and 7 and would allow an attacker to remotely control an infected machine once a user landed on a malicious website hosting the exploit. Gowdiak said his proof-of-concept exploit was successfully used against a fully patched Windows 7 machine using Firefox 15.0.1, Chrome 21, IE 9, Opera 12, and Safari 5.1.7."

Rexdude writes "Firefox continues to be criticized for their new versioning system and being a memory hog. People talk about Chrome, IE9, Opera as alternatives — but do Slashdotters ever use Seamonkey? I've never seen anyone mention it in any discussion on browsers. The successor to the original Mozilla Suite, it has a full-blown email/news/RSS client, Chatzilla, and an HTML editor. Also several other default features that would require separate extensions for Firefox. And they don't update their versions like crazy either; the current version is 2.13.1. I've been quite happy with it so far — it's snappier to use than Firefox. How many people on Slashdot use Seamonkey, and what has been your experience? (Note — I'm not affiliated with the project.)"

An anonymous reader writes "cHTeMeLe is a board game about writing HTML5 code. In cHTeMeLe, players endorse their favorite web browser (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, or IE) and then score points by correctly laying out HTML tags, while also trying to bug or crash their opponents' code. From the article: 'Despite cHTeMeLe's technical theme, its developers claim you don't need any web programming experience to play. The game takes web design standards and boils them down into game rules that even children can learn. To help less technical players keep everything straight, the tag cards use syntax highlighting that different parts of code have unique colors — just like an Integrated Developer Environment. No one is going to completely pick up HTML5 purely by playing cHTeMeLe, but it does have some educational value for understanding basic tags and how they fit together.'"

RocketAcademy writes "ABC News is reporting that Phantom of the Opera singer/actress Sarah Brightman outbid NASA for a seat on a Soyuz flight to the International Space Station. Brightman reportedly paid more than $51 million. If that story is true, there may be some interesting bidding wars in the future."

jcatcw writes "Just as Oracle is ramping up for the September 30 start of JavaOne 2012 in San Francisco, researchers from the Polish firm Security Explorations disclosed yet another critical Java vulnerability that might 'spoil the taste of Larry Ellison's morning ... Java.' According to Security Explorations researcher Adam Gowdiak, who sent the email to the Full Disclosure Seclist, this Java exploit affects one billion users of Oracle Java SE software, Java 5, 6 and 7. It could be exploited by apps on Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari. Wow, thanks a lot Oracle."

hypnosec writes "A student at the University of Oslo, Norway has claimed that Phishing attacks can be carried out through the use of URI and users of Firefox and Opera are vulnerable to such attacks. Malicious web pages can be stored into data URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) whereby an entire webpage's code can be stuffed into a string, which if clicked on will instruct the browser to unpack the payload and present it to the user in form of a page. This is where the whole thing gets a bit dangerous. In his paper, Phishing by data URI [PDF], Henning Klevjer has claimed that through his method he was able to successfully load the pages on Firefox and Opera. The method however failed on Google Chrome and Internet Explorer."

mikejuk writes "WebRTC is a way to allow browsers to get in touch with one another using audio or video data without the help of a server. Google has been something of a pioneer in this area, and submitted a suggested technology for the standard. Mozilla has gone along with it, making it all look good. Microsoft, on the other hand, just seemed to be standing on the sidelines, watching what was happening. However, Microsoft now has a product that needs something like WebRTC; namely, Skype. It has been working on a web-based version of Skype and this has focused the collective mind on the problems of browser-to-browser communication. It now agrees that a standard is needed, just not the one Google and Mozilla are behind. Microsoft has submitted its own proposals for CU-RTC-Web or Customizable, Ubiquitous Real Time Communication over the Web, to the W3C. It may well be that Microsoft's alternative has features that make it superior, but a single standard is preferable to a better non-standard. Given Microsoft's need to make Skype work in the browser, it seems likely that, should its proposal not be accepted as the standard, it will press on regardless, thus splitting the development environment. Both Google and Mozilla have already put a lot of work into WebRTC, and there are partial implementations in Firefox, Chrome and Opera."

Billly Gates writes "Microsoft has confirmed that Internet Explorer 10 will have Do-Not-Track settings enabled by default. IE 10 comes with Windows 8, and will go release candidate for Windows 7 very soon, according to Anne Kohn in a comment in IE's blog. During Windows 8 setup, users who choose the 'Express' option will have DNT on by default, while using the 'Custom' option will give them the chance to change the setting, if they want. IE 10 already has a score of 319 in html5test.com, while MS is trying to position IE as a great browser again. Will this pressure other browsers such as Firefox and Opera to do the same?" When Microsoft began talking about this in May, it touched off quite a debate at W3C about whether browsers should have DNT turned on by default or not.

Billly Gates writes "Tom's Hardware did another benchmark showdown, since several releases of both Firefox and Chrome came out since their last one. Did Mozilla clean up its act and listen to its users? The test results are listed here. Firefox 13.01 uses the least amount of RAM with 40 tabs opened, while Chrome uses the highest (surprisingly). Overall, Firefox scored medium for memory efficiency, which measures RAM released after tabs are closed. Also surprising: IE 9 is still king of the lowest RAM usage for just one tab. Bear in mind that these tests were benchmarked in Windows 7. Windows XP and Linux users will have different results, due to differences in memory management. It is too bad IE 10, which is almost finished, wasn't available to benchmark." Safari and Opera are also along for the fight.

First time accepted submitter Techy77 writes "Online retailer Kogan will impose a new tax on its customers that visit its website using Microsoft's outdated Internet Explorer 7 web browser, which means they will spend 6.8 percent more than customers on browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. From the article: 'Kogan said his company was able to keep prices low by using technology to make its business efficient and streamlined. however its web team was having to spend a lot of time making its new website look normal on IE7. "It’s not only costing us a huge amount, it’s affecting any business with an online presence, and costing the Internet economy millions,” Mr Kogan said. “As Internet citizens, we all have a responsibility to make the Internet a better place. By taking these measures, we are doing our bit.”'"

An anonymous reader writes with news of a presentation from CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci about follow-up experiments trying to repeat the faster-than-light neutrino results from last year. Quoting the press release: "The four [experiments], Borexino, ICARUS, LVD and OPERA all measure a neutrino time of flight consistent with the speed of light. This is at odds with a measurement that the OPERA collaboration put up for scrutiny last September, indicating that the original OPERA measurement can be attributed to a faulty element of the experiment's fibre optic timing system. 'Although this result isn't as exciting as some would have liked,' said Bertolucci, 'it is what we all expected deep down. The story captured the public imagination, and has given people the opportunity to see the scientific method in action – an unexpected result was put up for scrutiny, thoroughly investigated and resolved in part thanks to collaboration between normally competing experiments. That's how science moves forward.'"

New submitter x0d writes with this excerpt from the L.A. Times: "The Facebook spending spree may be continuing as a new report says the social networking giant might be looking to buy Norwegian company Opera Software. Now fully under the microscope of Wall Street as well as Main Street investors, Facebook is trying to solve its mobile monetizing problems and has been gobbling up various companies in recent months to increase its presence in the world of smartphones."

Pieroxy writes "The W3C is proposing a set of new rules for CSS prefixing by browser vendors. This would greatly mitigate the problem caused today where vendor specific prefixing is seeing its way through production sites. The problem is so bad that some vendors are now tempted to support other browsers' prefixing. The article also has a link to an email from Mozilla's Henri Sivonen that does a nice job of addressing many potential issues and shortcomings of this new proposal." I was under the impression that browser prefixes existed to allow use of experimental CSS features before standardization; just ditching the vendor prefix seems like a step backward.

New submitter Big Hairy Ian writes with this news from the BBC: "The head of an experiment that appeared to show subatomic particles traveling faster than the speed of light has resigned from his post. Prof Antonio Ereditato oversaw results that appeared to challenge Einstein's theory that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. Reports said some members of his group, called OPERA, had wanted him to resign. Earlier in March, a repeat experiment found that the particles, known as neutrinos, did not exceed light speed."

ananyo writes "Neutrinos obey nature's speed limit, according to new results from an Italian experiment. The finding, posted to the preprint server arXiv.org, contradicts a rival claim from the OPERA experiment that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light. ICARUS, located just a few meters from OPERA, clocked neutrinos traveling at the speed of light, and no faster, after monitoring a beam of neutrinos sent from CERN in late October and early November of last year. The neutrinos were packed into pulses just four nanoseconds long. That meant the timing could be measured far more accurately than the original OPERA measurement, which used ten microsecond pulses. The new findings are yet another blow to OPERA's results. Researchers there had announced possible timing problems with their original measurements. For many, this will pretty much be case closed."

A few weeks back, you asked gaming-world academic and game designer Ian Bogost questions from the business, philosophical, and aesthetic sides of gaming; below, find his responses. Thanks, Ian!

First time accepted submitter iZarKe writes "Version 11.60 of Opera Browser for Desktop was released today. Significant changes: the inclusion of their new HTML5 rendering engine "Ragnarök", a revamped address bar, full ECMAScript 5.1 support, support for CSS3 Radial Gradients (finally), and a very revamped Mail panel. Originally, these features were set to be released with their next major version, 12.00. However, due to more work needed for the hardware acceleration feature also to be included in Opera 12, the 11.60 intermediary release came to be, as they didn't want to hold back the other new features for that long a time."

gbrumfiel writes "Earlier this year, the OPERA experiment made the extraordinary claim that they had seen neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. The experiment, located at Gran Sasso in Italy, saw neutrinos arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than expected from their starting point at CERN in Switzerland. Others have doubted OPERA's claim, but in a new paper, the group reaffirms its commitment to the measurement. 'It's slightly better than the previous result,' OPERA's physics coordinator Dario Autiero told Nature News. Most members of the collaboration who didn't sign the original paper out of skepticism have now come on board. But scientists outside the group still aren't sure. 'Independent checks are the way to go,' says Rob Plunkett, co-spokesman of a rival experiment called MINOS."

You asked Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer, questions on topics ranging from debunking superstition to extraterrestrial life to funding space exploration; read on below for his answers. Thanks for taking part, Phil!

Hugh Pickens writes "Betrayal, lust, secrecy, power: there's no shortage of dramatic intrigue in the story of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Perhaps that's why work has begun on an opera based on the life of Julian Assange in Melbourne. Opera Australia held – with Julian Assange's approval – a series of in-house workshops last month after its artistic director, Lyndon Terracini, came up with the idea and asked composer Jonathan Dreyfus to write the music. 'It's got everything that a dramatic musical work needs,' says Eddie Perfect, who played Assange in the initial process. 'It's got heroes and villains. In fact, it's got a hero and villain combined in one.' The company has not yet committed to a full production, but if the opera goes ahead it will be the second time the WikiLeaks story has been presented on stage in Assange's native Australia. Stainless Steel Rat played at the Seymour Center in Sydney last June."