Apple Computer Inc. has released an update for its Mac OS X 10.4 operating system that fixes two security flaws, including one that potentially opened the platform up to a denial-of-service attack.

Mac OS X Update 10.4.2 addresses an issue with the operating system’s TCP/IP stack, which allowed a specially formed TCP/IP packet to cause a kernel panic, requiring the system to be rebooted. Apple notes that systems with many forms of TCP/IP filtering would be unaffected by the issue, which only affects Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and Mac OS X Server 10.4.

The update also fixes a potential issue with Dashboard, in which third-party Widgets were allowed to replace Apple-supplied ones that are shipped with OS X 10.4. This could have meant that users were not aware that they were running third-party code, which, in turn, could have led to users trusting behaviour from the Widget that they would not otherwise accept. The update alerts users if a download is replacing an Apple-supplied Widget.

Source: eWeek

NASA has postponed the scheduled launch Wednesday of the space shuttle Discovery.

The Discovery space shuttle had been scheduled to launch at 3:51 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, which would have marked the first shuttle flight since the Columbia disaster of 2003 and NASA’s first concerted attempt to demonstrate that it has fixed the problems that caused the high-profile mishap.

In a telephone conversation, a NASA spokeswoman at the Kennedy Space Center confirmed that no launch would happen Wednesday. “It has been scrubbed,” the spokeswoman said.
Shuttle images

A press conference is scheduled for later in the afternoon, but a NASA Webcast said the cancellation was due to malfunctioning fuel tank sensors.

Source: News.com

Online retailer Amazon.com is once again set for a windfall thanks to teen wizard Harry Potter and the latest book by J.K. Rowling, which is set for release midnight Friday.

The e-tail giant is also gearing itself up for the logistical nightmare of ensuring all orders for “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” are met and delivered on time–a plan that has been six months in the making. In terms of the size of the task in hand, the company hasn’t seen anything like it since the last Harry Potter book was released in 2003.

The company has been taking orders for the book at more than one per minute since its release date was announced last December. In the United Kingdom, Amazon.co.uk has received 350,000 orders for the book.

Source: News.com

Internet media company Yahoo Inc. will provide live Web video streams of the return of the U.S. space agency’s shuttle, the first mission since the 2003 Columbia disaster, NASA said on Tuesday.

Yahoo will make official online video from the 12-day Discovery shuttle space mission available in Microsoft Corp. Windows Media format to millions of Internet users at http://www.nasa.gov/ and on Yahoo’s own site.

Video feed by Yahoo!

Source: Reuters

Yahoo updated Yahoo! Desktop Search. The new version introduces three new improvements:

1. Support for Mozilla Thunderbird email client: Indexes all email and attachments in Thunderbird.
2. Simplified UI and tabs.
3. Reduced download size: Most of you just need to search emails, MS Office docs, PDFs and other common filetypes. So Yahoo made the initial download much faster by splitting out support for the large number of less common filetypes into a separate expansion pack. You can download the free expansion pack at any time, or YDS will let you know when you’ve encountered a filetype that requires it.

(NOTE: if you had version 1.0 or 1.1 of YDS, you will still need to install the expansion pack even though the older versions included all the filetype support.