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Worms

Worm Exploit Distributed by Advertising Network 478

Posted by michael from the you-thought-you-were-safe dept.
Zocalo writes "Given that a lot of Slashdot readers also check The Register, it's important to note that their Internet advertising provider, Falk AG, was compromised by the BOFRA exploit yesterday. The Falk AG service has been suspended by The Register and a statement from Falk AG is due on Monday. The upshot is that if you visited the Register yesterday morning and use IE as your browser, then you probably need to run a full virus scan with up to date data files. Of course, those of us running other browsers and something like AdBlock have nothing to worry about. Again." You're OK for now if you're running SP2. There's also a good security writeup about the problem.
Mozilla

Firefox News Roundup 513

Posted by michael from the yee-ha dept.
Spaceman40 sent in this ZDNet story. PeterPumpkin collects way too many links to Firefox stories: "According to SpreadFirefox.com , there were almost 3 million downloads of Firefox 1.0 in the 5 days since launch, which comes to over 500,000 downloads per day. There are news bites coming out about Firefox everywhere you could possibly imagine. According to a report on MozillaZine, Denmark's largest television channel, TV2, reported on the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0. PC-WELT, the German equivalent of PC-World, is distributing their own customised version of Firefox to customers." Thomas Hawk writes "Rather than go outside for the past 48 hours, Scott Granneman prefers to burrow in his den and come up with one of the first definitive lists of Firefox links. Good geeking Scott. And way to overcompensate."
Businesses

Opera Facing Losses While Firefox Usage Grows 760

Posted by timothy from the depends-what-you're-obsessed-with dept.
An anonymous reader submits "Opera, the sometimes forgotten #3 web browser, reported a third quarter loss that tripled that of last year's third quarter despite a seven-fold increase in revenue. Opera is blaming a weaker dollar for the losses, and say they're spending money on marketing and new ventures like teaming with IBM to use their ViaVoice technology. Opera's future seems uncertain as Firefox's growing popularity may hurt Opera by stealing potential customers. With Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari all free, is there room for a non-free browser in the market?"
Security

Big Day For Browser Vulnerabilities 429

Posted by timothy from the uh-oh dept.
An anonymous reader writes "All browsers have been reported vulnerable to different vulnerabilities today. Starting with: Internet Explorer on XP SP1/SP2, which suffers a new system compromise (of course) vulnerability. Continuing with: Opera, Mozilla / Mozilla Firefox / Camino, Safari, Netscape, Konqueror, Avant Browser and Maxthon, which all suffers some new spoofing vulnerabilitities. Demonstrations of the spoofing vulnerabilities are available here and here."
Internet Explorer

IE Shines On Broken Code 900

Posted by timothy from the crashing-is-unsafe dept.
mschaef writes "While reading Larry Osterman'a blog (He's a long time Microsoftie, having worked on products dating back to DOS 4.0), I ran across this BugTraq entry on web browser security. Basically, the story is that Michael Zalewski started feeding randomly malformed HTML into Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, Lynx, and Links and watching what happened. Bottom line: 'All browsers but Microsoft Internet Explorer kept crashing on a regular basis due to NULL pointer references, memory corruption, buffer overflows, sometimes memory exhaustion; taking several minutes on average to encounter a tag they couldn't parse.' If you want to try this at home, he's also provided the tools he used in the BugTraq entry."
Mozilla

Stopping ChatZilla Installs on FireFox Systems? 81

Posted by Cliff from the limiting-user-abuse dept.
TonalSpeller asks: "I'm in charge of a language learning computer lab in an Asian university. We have Windows XP on all machines, but I convinced my superior that I needed to hide Internet Explorer on all student machines (can't remove it entirely because some proprietary software might need access to it). I'm counting on security through obscurity -- I know that a minority of savvy people can still access IE via the command line. I am running the latest version of Opera and Firefox 1.0 PR on all machines, but now I am faced with a dilemma -- extending Firefox is so easy that sooner or later, someone will try to install Chatzilla. Is there any easy way to block Javascript while keeping Firefox's superb usability? I will be running TrustNoExe, but that won't catch Mozilla extensions. Any ideas or suggestions?"
Windows

Microsoft To Provide IE Patches for Windows XP Only 610

Posted by michael from the lucy-pulls-football-away-again-from-windows-users dept.
Fortunato_NC writes "Microsoft has decided that future IE updates, including those related to security, will only be available to customers using Windows XP. This news.com article has the complete scoop. A choice quote: 'Microsoft may be turning the lemons of its browser's security reputation into the lemonade of a powerful upgrade selling point.' This should provide a huge boost to Mozilla and other alternative browser backers."
Mozilla

Not Enough Ads? Install Adbar. 451

Posted by michael from the !tangled-web dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Jesse Ruderman brings the worst feature of Opera, Advertisements, to Firefox with his extension Adbar. According to the page, 'adbar displays Google ads related to pages you view. Because the ads are relevant, they are occasionally useful. When adbar isn't displaying ads from Google, it displays Firefox-related things such as silly Firefox slogans, ads for other Mozilla software, and requests for donations to the Mozilla Foundation.'"
Internet Explorer

MSIE 7 May Beat Longhorn Out The Gate 733

Posted by timothy from the sincerest-form dept.
Quantum Jim writes "InternetNews.com reports that a major upgrade for Microsoft Internet Explorer may be imminent. Apparently in response to the recent mass migration away from MSIE, top Microsoft developers have been soliciting for improvements in the old browser at a web log and at Channel 9, an aggregate journal previously discussed by /.. InternetNews.com speculates that improvements could possibly include support for tabbed browsing, better security, more PNG and CSS compliance, and RSS integration (which Firefox and Opera Mail already support). Go competition!"
It's funny. Laugh.

Sal Wise, Philly eBay Scammer Strikes Back! 367

Posted by CmdrTaco from the it-just-keeps-going dept.
Warlock7 followed up last week's bizarre story of eBay Fraud by noting "The news in Phlly ran with the story and put Sal's picture online with video. Now Sal has decided to direct all blame on his old business partner. He's put up his own site now trying to divert responsibilty away from himself and uses his kids pictures to try and garner support." It's hysterical to read the original log about how everything was his father's fault, but now get to learn about a more powerful evil named 'Vince'. It's like a soap opera that won't let me blink until the commercial.
PC Games (Games)

Ex-LucasArts Developers Try Vampyre Graphical Adventure 31

Posted by simoniker from the pointy-teeth dept.
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to an AdventureGamers interview with ex-LucasArts developers Autumn Moon Entertainment regarding its early-in-development graphical adventure A Vampyre Story. They explain: "With the drop in sales for [the traditional graphical adventure] genre, it became harder to get assigned to new adventure game projects at [LucasArts]. It seemed like the only logical way to be a part of that kind of project again was to create something independently." The late-2005 due project is still seeking a publisher, but is further profiled in the June 2004 Inventory PDF magazine, and the interview also explains the plot ("A young French opera star becomes the object of obsession for a deranged vampire... She must escape his castle and return to Paris"), and possible game duration ("The game will be shorter than Curse of Monkey Island and longer than Full Throttle.")
Programming

How Do You Test Your Web Pages? 226

Posted by Cliff from the html-quality-assurance dept.
Pieroxy asks: "As a web developer, both professionally and personally, I try to always make sure what I write works in every browser at my disposal. When the choice came for me to choose a platform for my PC, I went the Windows route, because I cannot afford not to test IE on all those websites/applications. But now I am facing a problem with all browsers that don't have a native Windows port, such as IE5/Mac, Safari/Konqueror. kde-cygwin helped very little because the version of Konqueror shipped doesn't display most JPEG, making any testing worthless. IE5 for Mac should die soon, but is still widely used as being the default browser for so long. How do you test your web pages? Have you noticed discrepancies on how a specific engine (Gecko, Opera, KHTML) renders content on different Platforms? Do I need a Mac and a Linux machine to make sure it is working on these platforms?"
Mozilla

PC Magazine Reviews Firefox, Opera 700

Posted by simoniker from the alt-webber dept.
prostoalex writes "PC Magazine reviews Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1 and Opera 7.51, noting: 'Security concerns aren't the only reason to seek an alternative [to Internet Explorer]. IE's slow rendering engine and dearth of privacy features may plant the thought in some iconoclastic minds that it may not be the best browser for everyone.' 4 stars for Firefox and 3.5 for Opera, so looks like a Firefox win, although the editors do point out FF's troubles with DHTML as well as Opera issues with JavaScript."
Editorial

Time to Try a Linux Desktop? 848

Posted by michael from the first-hit-is-free dept.
bigbadwlf writes "EWeek has an opinion column, posted yesterday titled, Isn't Now the Time to Try a Linux Desktop? Quote: 'The crackers currently have the whip hand over Windows, and Microsoft's assertion that Internet Explorer is now part of the operating system shows its flawed reasoning. Worried sick about the latest rash of Internet Explorer security problems? I have the perfect solution for you, one that's even better than switching to Mozilla, Firefox or Opera. Switch operating systems: Go to Linux.'"
The Internet

Browser Wars 2004 313

Posted by michael from the soapbox dept.
J. Hobbs writes "Recent posts on David Hyatt's site describing the new technology he's working on for Dashboard, coupled with recent announcements from the newly formed WHAT-WG alliance (Apple, Mozilla, and Opera) could add up to a potentially new kind of application development and deployment that I explore in this highly speculative essay. See if you don't agree..."
Mozilla

New Alliance Hopes To Standardize Web Plug-Ins 365

Posted by timothy from the chatzilla-everywhere dept.
mksolutions writes "As reported on heise online and mozilla.org 'Apple, Macromedia, Opera and Sun Microsystems join in push to modernize plugins and create a richer web experience.' They are to develop a common, cross-platform plug-in interface which will be used in Mozilla products as well as Opera and Safari and will be released under an open source license."
Mozilla

CERT Recommends Mozilla, Firefox 529

Posted by CmdrTaco from the so-do-i dept.
EvilStein writes "According to this article, "CERT recommends that Explorer users consider other browsers that are not affected by the attack, such as Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape and Opera." Quite a statement from CERT - this is related to a fairly recent IIS or IE exploit that has already affected some high traffic web sites, such as the Kelley Blue Book website."
Mozilla

Nokia Invested In Mozilla? 193

Posted by CowboyNeal from the dial-m-for-money dept.
Pine UK writes "The Register, is reporting that Nokia has invested in the Mozilla Foundation. This news should come as a shock to Opera, who in recent times have had a very large market share in the area of portable device browsers. Opera has also been the browser choice for Nokia, who ship it with all their Symbian 'smartphones.' Nokia have not yet confirmed nor denied their investment in Mozilla."
Linux Business

Xandros Releases Open Circulation Edition 193

Posted by timothy from the free-as-in-beer-nuts dept.
jasonp writes "Xandros has just announced the release of an Open Circulation Edition of its famous Desktop OS. The Open Circulation Edition includes the Xandros File Manager, Opera for web browsing and email, and access to Xandros Networks. To accompany this exciting release, DesktopOS.com has published an exclusive interview (mirror) with a number of key Xandros executives." The license is a little off-putting, at least if you want to use the OS at work, but Xandros hopes people will find the OS attractive enough to pay for.

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