Opera Software on Thursday shipped an updated version of its Opera for Windows Web browser to fix a trio of potentially serious security vulnerabilities.

The Norwegian company recommends that Windows users upgrade to Opera 8.0.2 to protect against malicious hacker attacks.

The most serious of the three flaws is due to an error in the handling of extended ASCII codes in the download dialog.

Security research outfit Secunia Inc., which discovered the flaw, has tagged it as “moderately critical” and warned that attackers could trick users into executing malicious files.

Source: eWeek

America Online debuted on Thursday a beta of My AOL personalized Web pages.

My AOL is designed to give people the ability to customize the AOL portal based on specific needs and interests, including the addition of news feeds via Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, the company said.

AOL is working with RSS search engine Feedster for the new service. Feedster has a searchable index of more than 11 million RSS feeds and millions of XML documents, AOL said.

The decision by 3Com Corp.’s TippingPoint division to pay for the rights to information on software vulnerabilities has triggered an immediate response from iDefense Inc., the company that previously held a monopoly on the flaw bounty business.

Effective immediately, iDefense is doubling its pricing structure for vulnerability submissions and hiking the value of the incentive and retention reward programs.

In addition, the VeriSign-owned company announced the launch of a new growth reward program that offers lump sum payments for hackers who continue to increase their level of participation in the controversial VCP (Vulnerability Contribution Program).

Neither company will say how much it pays for the flaw information, but Ziff Davis Internet News has learned that proof-of-concept exploit code for a code execution bug in a product like Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer browser could earn the flaw finder more than $6,000.

That price automatically doubles with iDefense’s latest move, which is likely to prod TippingPoint into matching.

Source: eWeek

After being in beta since February Yahoo! released its official 1.0 version of Firefox toolbar.

Some of the toolbar’s options are:

• Bookmarks that follow you to any computer
• New mail notification for Yahoo! Mail
• Customizable, one-click access to most of Yahoo!, or any web site you choose
• Easy access to Yahoo! Search with an integrated search history for quick re-use
• Addition of RSS feeds to your My Yahoo! page with one click
• A drag-n-drop resizable search box
• A right mouse click menu to open bookmarks and toolbar buttons in new windows or tabs
• A search history drop down that automatically expands to the length of the longest search query
• Yahoo! Anti-Spy button that you can hide
• Addition of RSS / Atom feeds to My Yahoo! via the Live Bookmarks icon
• Support for the latest Firefox developer releases and alpha/beta browsers

Download Yahoo! Firefox toolbar here

Brice Mellen is a whiz at video games such as “Mortal Kombat.” In that regard, the 17-year-old isn’t much different from so many others his age. Except for one thing: He’s blind.

And as he easily dispatched foes who took him on recently at a Lincoln gaming center, the affable and smiling Mellen remained humble.

“I can’t say that I’m a superpro,” he said, working the controller like an extension of his body. “I can be beat.”

Blind since birth when his optic nerve didn’t connect because of Leber’s disease, Mellen honed his video game skills over the years through patient and not-so-patient playing, memorizing key joystick operations and moves in certain games, asking lots of questions and paying particular attention to audio cues. He worked his way up from games such as “Space Invaders” and “Asteroid,” onto the modern combat games.

“I guess I don’t know how I do it, really,” Mellen said, as he continued playing while facing away from the screen. “It’s beyond me.”

Source: AP

The Mozilla Foundation has released a technology preview of a mobile-phone browser that uses the same code base as the popular desktop Firefox browser, which recently topped 75 million downloads, an official with the open-source group said Wednesday.

Minimo 0.007 is for mobile devices running Windows CE and offers many of the features in Firefox, such as tabbed browsing, support for plug-ins and has an interface written in XUL, which stands for extensible user interface language, Chris Hofmann, director of engineering at Mozilla, said.

No timetable for general availability of Minimo has been set.

Source: TechWeb

A Maryland man has been sentenced to four months behind bars for helping to organize a software and hardware piracy scheme out of a chain of video game stores.

Hitesh Patel, one of a group of employees and managers from the three-store Pandora’s Cube chain in Maryland, pled guilty and was sentenced to four months in prison, said Rick Hirsch, senior vice president for intellectual property enforcement at the Entertainment Software Association. According to the ESA, Patel was charged with conspiracy to commit felony copyright infringement and for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Hirsch said that Patel and several colleagues, including Pandora’s Cube owner Biren Amin, had been selling modified Xboxes that let players use pirated console games. Hirsch said Pandora’s Cube was also selling modified Xboxes preloaded with pirated games.

Source: News.com

People who illegally share music files online are also big spenders on legal music downloads, research suggests.

Digital music research firm The Leading Question found that they spent four and a half times more on paid-for music downloads than average fans.

Rather than taking legal action against downloaders, the music industry needs to entice them to use legal alternatives, the report said.

Source: BBC

Japanese scientists have unveiled the most human-looking robot yet devised - a “female” android called Repliee Q1.

She has flexible silicone for skin rather than hard plastic, and a number of sensors and motors to allow her to turn and react in a human-like manner.

She can flutter her eyelids and move her hands like a human. She even appears to breathe.

Professor Hiroshi Ishiguru of Osaka University says one day robots could fool us into believing they are human.

Repliee Q1 is not like any robot you will have seen before, at least outside of science-fiction movies.

She is designed to look human and although she can only sit at present, she has 31 actuators in her upper body, powered by a nearby air compressor, programmed to allow her to move like a human.

Source: BBC

The long-awaited first beta for the Windows Vista client release, which was formerly known as Longhorn, officially goes live Wednesday, hitting some 20,000 technical beta testers.

Microsoft also Wednesday released the first beta of the as-yet un-renamed Windows “Longhorn” Server to a limited number of participants in the technical beta program, including hardware manufacturers, OEMs, independent hardware vendors, system builders, independent software vendors and developers.

The Redmond, Wash., software giant also made Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 for Windows XP available to IT administrators, developers and enthusiasts for testing and evaluation through the technical beta program and MSDN.

With the beta releases the company also announced official names for the operating system’s presentation and communication subsystems, formerly known by the code names “Avalon” and “Indigo,” respectively.

According to sources, Microsoft will officially name Avalon the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Indigo the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

Source: eWeek

Altova, creator of XMLSpy®, MapForce®, introduced AltovaXML™, an XML standards processor that includes the same XSLT 1.0, XSLT 2.0, XQuery, and XML validation engines that drive its own XML development tools.

Software developers can download AltovaXML from the Altova Web site at no cost and use it within their own custom applications royalty-free.

XML-based applications often require the use of an XSLT engine for performing transformations, an XQuery engine for executing queries, and/or an XML validating parser for well-formedness checking and validation. AltovaXML provides developers with an XSLT 1.0 engine, XSLT 2.0 engine, XQuery 1.0 engine, and XML validating parser together with COM, Java, and .NET interfaces so that it can be used from a variety of applications. Developers can also call its functionality from the command line.

AltovaXML™ is an entirely free download that includes the Altova: XML validating parser, XSLT 1.0 engine, XSLT 2.0 engine (schema-aware), XQuery 1.0 engine.

AltovaXML™ includes COM, Java, and .NET interfaces so that it can be used from a variety of different applications. You can also call its functionality from the command line. There is no license keycode required to activate AltovaXML™, and you may use it in your applications royalty-free.

AltovaXML™ features include: Well-formedness checking, Validation based on DTD or XML Schema, XML transformations via XSLT 1.0, Schema-aware XML transformations via XSLT 2.0, XML queries and transformations via XQuery, Command line operations, COM interface, Java interface, .NET interface

Computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq:SUNW - news) on Tuesday said quarterly net income fell 85 percent from a year ago in which results were boosted by its legal settlement with Microsoft Corp., but results were better-than-expected and it set plans to cut its work force by 3 percent.

Shares of Sun rose 3.6 percent in after-hours trade on the earnings news and the move to slash 1,000 jobs which will result in a charge of about $100 million over the next four quarters.

Source: Reuters