| China Hack Was “Highly Sophisticated” |
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Wired reports that the intrusion of Google (and others) by Chinese hackers exploited a previously-undiscovered flaw in (what else?) Internet Explorer versions 6 through 8. Microsoft has issued an advisory; here’s their take on the matter: “At this time, we are aware of limited, active attacks attempting to use this vulnerability against Internet Explorer 6. We have not seen attacks against other affected versions of Internet Explorer. We will continue to monitor the threat environment and update this advisory if this situation changes. On completion of this investigation, Microsoft will take the appropriate action to protect our customers, which may include providing a solution through our monthly security update release process, or an out-of-cycle security update, depending on customer needs.” Or, as Wired puts it: “There is no existing patch for the memory-corruption flaw that causes the browser to internally misfire in a way that allows the hacker to inject malware onto the user’s computer.” I have a suggestion: drive a stake through Jason Voorhees’ heart and switch to Google Chrome. (Eight months later, my Chrome-only netbook is still virus-free.) Do it now. Seriously. Or use Firefox, if you prefer. Anything but IE. According to another Wired article, the hackers who exploited that there hole provided by Microsoft weren’t yer typical script kiddies: “According to [Dmitri] Alperovitch, [a researcher at McAfee anti-virus], the attackers used nearly a dozen pieces of malware and several levels of encryption to burrow deeply into the bowels of company networks and obscure their activity. ‘The encryption was highly successful in obfuscating the attack and avoiding common detection methods,’ he said. ‘We haven’t seen encryption at this level. It was highly sophisticated.’” |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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Comments (0)December 8, 2009
| Google Chrome Extensions Are Now Available (Without Any Smack-Talk) |
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Extensions for Google Chrome are now live for non-developer folks like me running Windows. I’ll probably go easy on them, just as I have with Firefox. (And there’s no point throwing down some smack about this at my wife because, unlike the Mac — which, according to some agreement I have no recollection of, is apparently “hers” — she could care less what I put on the netbook.) |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| Google Chrome for Mac (and Some Smack-Talk) |
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TechCrunch alerts me that a beta version of Google Chrome is available for the Mac. Note to wife: I downloaded the beta. It’s getting installed on the Mac. Oh, yes. You can’t stop me. Oh, no. You gotta sleep sometime. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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November 24, 2009
| I Am Soooooo Happy I Installed Flashblock |
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I may be a bit late to the dance with this one, but I’ve recently installed the Firefox extension Flashblock which, as the name implies, blocks Flash animations. No more ads about Philly single moms who discover the ultimate teeth whitening secret, or who come up with the one single tip for dropping 20 pounds of belly fat. And it even fixed the problem I was having at home with Firefox eating up 100% of my CPUs on my Linux laptop. Heaven. Flashblock is only the third Firefox extension that I actually use on a regular basis. The others are Tor and RECAP. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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November 13, 2009
| Upcoming Chrome Releases |
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TechCrunch reports that Google Chrome OS “will become available for download within a week”. It’s not for everyone, says Michael Arrington: “We expect Google will be careful with messaging around the launch, and endorse a small set of devices for installation. EEE PC netbooks, for example, may be one set of devices that Google will say are ready to use Chrome OS. There will likely be others as well, but don’t expect to be able to install it on whatever laptop or desktop machine you have from day one. Google has previously said they are working with Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba on the project.” Back in July I said I’d install Google Chrome OS on my Acer Aspire in a heartbeat. Now that everyone in my house covets the netbook, I may have to reconsider that. TechCrunch also assures us that a real, honest-to-goodness Google Chrome browser for the Mac “is just weeks away”. That’s a no-brainer for me — I’ll download it, no prob. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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November 9, 2009
| Firefox Turns Five |
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I’d be more willing to celebrate with them if it wasn’t sucking 100% of my CPU on my linux laptop at home. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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November 3, 2009
| Eight Months Later, the Guy in the Mask is Still Stumbling Around Scaring People |
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Back in February I blogged about how Internet Explorer 6 is the Jason Voorhees of browsers — never dying, still causing havoc. At the time, I said IE6’s market share was between 10-20%. Eight months later, CNET reports that “IE 6 still is the dominant version of Microsoft’s browser, with 23.3 percent usage … IE 7, at 18.2 percent, is on the brink of being surpassed by IE 8 at 18.1 percent.” Sigh. IE6 is like a rotary-dial phone. It works, but you can do a lot better. Soap box time is over. Here’s my rule-of-thumb for browser market share:
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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October 8, 2009
| Time for a Rant |
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There’s an article in the WSJ (sub required) about how Microsoft and the EU hope to settle their antitrust differences wrt IE and Windows soon. They’ve got a settlement proposal worked out. Here it is (I’m quoting verbatim): “The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said Wednesday that it will ‘market test’ the proposal, under which Windows users in Europe would get a ‘ballot screen’ allowing them to choose a browser other than Internet Explorer.” And one more quote: “[EU Competition Commissioner Neelie] Kroes said she is ‘very hopeful’ the new proposal will give ‘a choice between Internet Explorer and competing Web browsers.’ She added, ‘that’s what we were really looking for.’” It’s taken almost a decade and $2 billion in fines — that’s what the article says — to get to this point? Europeans have *always* had a choice. They simply had to visit the Mozilla Website and download Firefox. Or the Opera Website. Heck, when I use IE to go to Google, I even see a little ad in the upper right-hand-corner of the screen: “A faster way to browse the Web – install Google Chrome.” If the point the EU is making is that people don’t know enough to go to these sites and download the software, what makes them think that these same people will be able to figure out a browser ballot screen? Really what it comes down to is this: Europe gets to ding Microsoft for a few bil, treating them like an ATM machine. Regulators get to puff their chests out and point to their efforts to protect consumers. And users get no real benefit from any of this. What a waste of money and resources. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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September 24, 2009
| A New Twist On “Embrace, Extend and Extinguish” |
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Back in the Bad Old Days, Microsoft used a simple strategy to crush its rivals: Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. They’d move into a product area, add some proprietary standards that nobody else could support, then strangle their competitors. This worked real well, for example, against Netscape during the browser wars in the 1990s. Now Google’s turning the tables on Microsoft. They’ve released an Internet Explorer plug-in called Google Chrome Frame that replaces IE’s page rendering engine with the WebKit-based one used by Google Chrome. In effect, your IE browser looks the same on the surface, but under the hood it uses the GCF plug-in to display pages much faster. It’s like Google’s saying to Microsoft, “If you won’t update your browser and adopt HTML 5, we’ll do it for you.” I’ve downloaded and installed GCF in my version of IE8. Pages do seem to load quicker. But I haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid — I know most people won’t even know about/care about/use GCF. But that’s not the point. Google is serving notice to Microsoft that it can no longer rely on “Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish”. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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September 3, 2009
| A Year in the Life of Google Chrome |
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Lifehacker has a touching — oh, I can barely see the keyboard through my tears! — look back at the first year of Google’s baby, Chrome. Even though Chrome has less than 5% of the browser market, it’s grown a lot in just 1 year. Heck, pretty soon it’ll be all grown up into a full-fledged operating system. I like Chrome a lot. I don’t use it too much at work, but I’ve been Chrome-only on my netbook at home as an experiment. So far, so good. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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