In a story just dripping with irony, Amazon Kindle owners awoke this morning to discover that 1984 and Animal Farm had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for, and thought they owned. Apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by George Orwell from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price. Amazon customer service may or may not have responded to queries by stating, ‘We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”
Tracy Jones-Harris Internet 1984, Amazon, Animal Farm, e-Book, George Orwell, Kindle
Mozilla has confirmed the first security vulnerability in Firefox 3.5, saying that the bug could be used to hijack a machine running the company’s newest browser. A noted Firefox contributor called the situation ’self-inflicted’ and said it was likely that the hacker who posted public exploit code Monday became aware of the flaw by rooting through Bugzilla, Mozilla’s bug- and change-tracking database. The vulnerability is in the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that debuted with Firefox 3.5, said Mozilla. ‘[It] can be exploited by an attacker who tricks a victim into viewing a malicious Web page containing the exploit code,’ Mozilla’s security blog reported.
Tracy Jones-Harris Internet, computers Bugzilla, Firefox, Firefox 3.5, Mozilla, Vulnerability
ITNews reports that Australia’s ever-unpopular Minister for Communications, Senator Stephen Conroy, has foreshadowed new action by the Australian Government to crack down on illegal file sharing under the guise of promoting the digital economy.
Options apparently being considered include the controversial and previously reported French three-strikes approach and an approach which sounds suspiciously like New Zealand’s even more dubious guilty upon accusation approach to filesharing. Needless to say, although the Government is consulting with ‘representatives of both copyright owners and the Internet industry in an effort to reach an industry-led consensus on an effective solution,’ arguably the most significant group — ordinary Internet users — are not being consulted.
Senator Conroy is the man behind the crusade to ‘protect’ Australians from the horrors of the Internet with a mandatory, government run blacklist, an effort which recently earned him the title of Internet Villain of the Year for 2009.
Tracy Jones-Harris Internet, computers Censorship, File Sharing, Government, P2P, Senator Conroy, Stephen Conroy
In a fresh interview with derStandard.at, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth talks about GNOME 3.0 — its strengths, but also about what he thinks is missing. He also mentions ongoing talks for a common meta-release-cycle with Debian which could delay the next LTS
Tracy Jones-Harris Internet, computers Debian, GNOME 3.0, linux, Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu
Two years ago computer security expert Bill Anderson read about scientific research on how the human eye moves as it reads and processes text and images. ‘This obscure characteristic… suddenly struck me as (a solution to) a security problem,’ says Anderson. With the help of a couple of software developers, Anderson developed a software program called Chameleon that tracks a viewer’s gaze patterns and only allows an authorised user to read text on the screen, while everyone else sees gibberish. Chameleon uses gaze-tracking software and camera equipment to track an authorized reader’s eyes to show only that one person the correct text. After a 15-second calibration period in which the software learns the viewer’s gaze patterns, anyone looking over that user’s shoulder sees dummy text that randomly and constantly changes. To tap the broader consumer market, Anderson built a more consumer-friendly version called PrivateEye, which can work with a simple Webcam to blur a user’s monitor when he or she turns away. It also detects other faces in the background, and a small video screen pops up to alert the user that someone is looking at the screen. ‘There have been inventions in the space of gaze-tracking. There have been inventions in the space of security,’ says Anderson. ‘But nobody has put the two ideas together, as far as we know.’”
Tracy Jones-Harris Internet, Science & Design, computers books, eyestrain, IT, privacy, Security, Software, story, Windows
The program, called “Browser for the Better,” is connected to those wacky Dean Cain IE8 commercials that launched earlier this month.
And while the Dean Cain marketing effort will likely last forever thanks to the glorious wonder of the Internet, the charity portion of Browser for the Better only runs from June 10 to August 8. As for the images accompanying the announcement. Apparently, for the meals to become viable, Microsoft had to truck in a bunch of artists so they could stack them into shapes resembling the Empire State Building and Golden Gate Bridge.
Tracy Jones-Harris Internet Browser, Browser for the better, IE8, Internet Explorer, Microsoft
Likely being mindful of the ever-watchful eye of the European Union, Microsoft’s announced its Euro version of Windows 7, affectionately and officially dubbed Windows 7 E, will not come packaged with Internet Explorer, or any other browser for that matter.
Of course that’s not the whole story, as OEMs will be provided free copies of IE8 to bundle themselves alongside / instead of other browser options, and consumers can pick up their own copies via CD, FTP, or retail channels. This is undoubtedly in response to the antitrust cases the EU keeps throwing Microsoft’s way, and while we wouldn’t be surprised to see it end up on almost every European computer sold, we do wonder if this will at all speed up IE’s already rapidly diminishing share in the war of web browsers.
Tracy Jones-Harris Internet Browser, IE8, Internet Explorer, Microsoft, OEM, windows 7, Windows 7E
Steve Ballmer just confirmed at the D Conference rumours that Microsoft’s new search engine, previously called Kumo, has been christened with the wonderfully onomatopoeic, possibly stupid name, “Bing”. And it’s coming next week
See the full interview here
Tracy Jones-Harris Internet, computers
Back in March Google released a faster beta version of Chrome that boasted a 25-35% speed boosts on benchmarking tests, and now those improvements—along with a few new features—are now officially available in the stable release of Chrome.
They’re calling this release Google Chrome 2, but according to the post on the Chrome blog, “that’s mainly a metric to help us keep track of changes internally. We don’t give too much weight to version numbers and will continue to roll out useful updates as often as possible.” Fair enough. Google Chrome is a free download, Windows only.
Tracy Jones-Harris Internet, computers Chrome, Chrome 2, Google