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Solar-Powered Bra: Charge Your Cellphone With Your Bra

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Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser has a security problem today as reports surface of vulnerabilities.

The popular browser is still open to a threat it detailed in a blog six days ago, and the solution is yet to be released. Since the disclosure last week, the problem has spread across the globe, affecting at least 2 million computers.

Unlike other computer viruses, this one does not require users to click on fishy links or download mysterious software: it plagues computers that simply open an infected Web page.

Microsoft’s ubiquitous Internet browser is currently used by 69 percent of Web surfers, commanding a lion’s share of the browser market. Different versions of Internet Explorer are also affected, making users with older browsers installed on their computer vulnerable as well.

Security experts say malicious code can affect the system by hiding inside the data binding function of the browser and causing IE to close unexpectedly and reopen vulnerable to prying eyes.

So far most of the attacks have been geographically centered on China and have been used for the purposes of stealing computer game passwords. But with a flaw of this proportion, the possibilities of nefarious action could include the massive theft of personal information such as administrative computer passwords and financial data. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently Google posted a handbook for Web developers that highlights the key security features and quirks of major Web browsers.

The Browser Security Handbook as it is dubbed, has three parts that tackle the security features in browsers and browser-specific issues that could lead to security weaknesses.

Michal Zalewski, a developer at Google, stated in the introduction to the handbook. “Insufficient understanding of these often poorly-documented characteristics is a major contributing factor to the prevalence of several classes of security vulnerabilities, although all browsers implement roughly the same set of baseline features, there is relatively little standardization — or conformance to standards — when it comes to many of the less apparent implementation details.”

The handbook covers features of Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Mozilla Firefox 2 and 3, Apple Safari, the Opera browser and Google’s Chrome and Android browsers. Read the rest of this entry »

The browser wars are heating up– again. Chrome made its debut as a beta on September 2nd; for Google, a beta period of only a few months is a surprisingly short one.

Google’s applications are a likely vehicle for distributing Chrome, with Apple having paved the way for more aggressive bundling by tethering distribution of Safari to iTunes. There is also plenty of potential for high-profile promotion of Chrome at Google’s wildly popular Web properties, and the company has several hardware partners that could pre-load the browser on PCs.

Chrome is the bedrock for Google’s whole Web application platform. Its pillars are speed and stability: Chrome’s zippy JavaScript engine is at the top of the class, and its use of separate processes for browser tabs and windows can make browsing more reliable.

The arrival of Chrome has also pressured other browser makers such as Firefox to accelerate the performance of their JavaScript engines–making Google’s applications perform better across the board.

The more Google can blur the lines between client applications and Web applications, the more competitive it will be against entrenched software. CPU intensive software will no longer have to run on the desktop. The concept of what type of application a Web application can be would be drastically changed. Read the rest of this entry »

Google is taking Chrome out of Beta barely months after the its initial release and prior to completing the plugin architecture. Is Chrome ready for prime time or is Google giving it a nudge to grab a share of new computer search queries?

The official release has come just over three months after the initial test release, a record pace for a Google product.

As an example, Gmail has been in Beta since April of 2004 when the first invites started trickling out to the public. Over four years later the Google email service shows no signs of being made official.

And why should Google make its services other than search official? The company is constantly tinkering with new experimental features that users are happy to tinker with whether they’re official or not.

Unfortunately for fans of the company whose motto is, “Don’t be evil,” the only clear motivation for the move seems to be greed. Specifically, Google wants to own the search bar in the browsers of laptops and PCs that are set to be released in 2009.

OEMs cannot distribute Beta software along with their shiny new computing hardware as one of the reasons for the move and the millions of dollars in search query revenue that Google will make from having Chrome installed on forthcoming desktops. Read the rest of this entry »

Google this afternoon unveiled a new project called Native Client that promises to let Web-based programs access far more computational power on PCs and other computers than they do today. The company cautions that the project is still in the early stages, and it’s asking for help from developers and security researchers to address some core challenges.

I’m still sifting through the accompanying documentation. But at a basic level, the project seems to raise again an issue that has repeatedly dogged Microsoft Windows in the Internet age: As Web-based programs become more powerful — making the browser a more functional platform for applications — a person’s choice of operating system becomes less and less relevant.

Here’s the example cited in the Google blog post …

For example, imagine that you run a photo-sharing website and want to let your users touch up their photos without leaving your site. Today, you could provide this feature using a combination of JavaScript and server side processing. This approach, however, would cause huge amounts of image data to be transferred between browser and the server, leading to an experience that would probably be painfully slow for users who just want to make a few simple changes. With the ability to seamlessly run native code on the user’s machine, you could instead perform the actual image processing on the desktop CPU, resulting in a much more responsive application by minimizing data transfer and latency. Read the rest of this entry »

Google is continuing its rapid development of its Chrome browser with the dev-channel release of Chrome version 0.4.154.33. Again this is mostly a bug fix, though two of the bugs are really interesting.

Bug #6482 fixes an issue with composing mail and switching folders in Hotmail. The really interesting part is that Google admits that Hotmail does not yet properly recognize the Chrome browser so users need to trick Hotmail into thinking that Chrome is actually Apple Safari (which is supported by Hotmail).

Here’s the workaround from Google to make Chrome appear to be Safari for Hotmail use:

Add the following to the shortcut you use to launch Google Chrome: –user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Safari/525.19″ Right-click the Google Chrome shortcut, click Properties, and paste the line above to the end of the Target field.

Another interesting bug is #6418 which lets Google Desktop call Google Chrome as a default browser.

Seems straight forward enough - though it sure does seem odd that Google Desktop wouldn’t have fully supported Chrome from day one.

How did Internet Explorer become the number one browser in the world? Simple - it came with every new computer you purchased, pre-installed and ready to go. Now it seems Google is contemplating doing the same with their browser, Google Chrome. According to Google VP, Product Management, Sundar Pichai, the browser’s beta period will end in January and then they “will probably do distribution deals,” he says.

In an article that ran in yesterday’s The Times, Pichai revealed details on what he called Google’s plans to make Chrome the browser of choice for the everyday user. A big part of that plan includes distribution deals with computer manufacturers.

“We could work with an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) and have them ship computers with Chrome pre-installed,” he was quoted as saying. Thanks to the anti-trust rulings that came out of the IE / Netscape battle back in the 1990’s, there’s nothing to prevent Google from doing deals of their own with computer makers, if they desire.

Once Google has a glitch-free version of Chrome sometime early next year, “we will throw our weight behind it,” said Pinchai. “We’ve been conservative because its still in beta, but once we get it out of beta we will work hard at getting the word out, promoting to users, and marketing will be a part of that.” (A link on Google’s homepage might help with those marketing efforts, but not as much as we previously thought). Read the rest of this entry »

And I thought Woodpecker was another introduction in the Browser world.

But mind you, it’s a pretty impressive name for a browser after Firefox of course.

What do you say guys? A name does matter, right? Let’s talk, your turn now…

Consumer Watchdog warned Tuesday that Google Web browsing and e-mail services may not be private and secure. If fact, the consumer group says national security could be at risk.

All e-mail services, not just Google, can have security issues if the user doesn’t take the proper precautions. But Tuesday, Consumer Watchdog pointed out some specific issues with Google.

Consumer Watchdog is a consumer advocacy group that believes Google’s e-mail service, called Gmail, is not private or secure. And Consumer Watchdog says the security problem is not only with Gmail users, but also with those who may not have Gmail but correspond with Gmail users.

Consumer Watchdog said Tuesday that members of Congress have been solicited by Google to use their Gmail service and Google’s browser, called Chrome, but that could put the nation’s security at risk.

But in talking to Google, the company said it is comfortable with its security but it is willing to make some changes. Here is a statement from a Google spokesperson:

“We build strong privacy and security protections into all Google products, and users can control their privacy settings, such as turning on encryption in Gmail or going ‘off the record’ in Google Talk, or even using some services anonymously. Our team has spoken with Consumer Watchdog, and we welcome feedback from users and consumer advocates on potential new features and privacy controls.”

According to Google, users can add security to their Gmail accounts by simply going into “settings” and turning on the “secure sockets layer,” also known as SSL. And when using their browser called Chrome, users can open the Incognito window to hide their activity on the Internet.